ime the comic
will take up its abode in the person himself; it is the person who will
supply it with everything--matter and form, cause and opportunity. Is
it then surprising that the absent-minded individual--for this is the
character we have just been describing--has usually fired the
imagination of comic authors? When La Bruyere came across this
particular type, he realised, on analysing it, that he had got hold of
a recipe for the wholesale manufacture of comic effects. As a matter of
fact he overdid it, and gave us far too lengthy and detailed a
description of Menalque, coming back to his subject, dwelling and
expatiating on it beyond all bounds. The very facility of the subject
fascinated him. Absentmindedness, indeed, is not perhaps the actual
fountain-head of the comic, but surely it is contiguous to a certain
stream of facts and fancies which flows straight from the
fountain-head. It is situated, so to say, on one of the great natural
watersheds of laughter.

Now, the effect of absentmindedness may gather strength in its turn.
There is a general law, the first example of which we have just
encountered, and which we will formulate in the following terms: when a
certain comic effect has its origin in a certain cause, the more
natural we regard the cause to be, the more comic shall we find the
effect. Even now we laugh at absentmindedness when presented to us as a
simple fact. Still more laughable will be the absentmindedness we have
seen springing up and growing before our very eyes, with whose origin
we are acquainted and whose life-history we can reconstruct. To choose
a definite example: suppose a man has taken to reading nothing but
romances of love and chivalry. Attracted and fascinated by his heroes,
his thoughts and intentions gradually turn more and more towards them,
till one fine day we find him walking among us like a somnambulist. His
actions are distractions. But then his distractions can be traced back
to a definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of ABSENCE of
mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the PRESENCE of
the individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings.
Doubtless a fall is always a fall, but it is one thing to tumble into a
well because you were looking anywhere but in front of you, it is quite
another thing to fall into it because you were intent upon a star. It
was certainly a star at which Don Quixote was gazing. How profound is
the comic eleme