is a moralist disguised as a scientist,
something like an anatomist who practises dissection with the sole
object of filling us with disgust; so that humour, in the restricted
sense in which we are here regarding the word, is really a
transposition from the moral to the scientific.

By still further curtailing the interval between the terms transposed,
we may now obtain more and more specialised types of comic
transpositions. Thus, certain professions have a technical vocabulary:
what a wealth of laughable results have been obtained by transposing
the ideas of everyday life into this professional jargon! Equally comic
is the extension of business phraseology to the social relations of
life,--for instance, the phrase of one of Labiche's characters in
allusion to an invitation he has received, "Your kindness of the third
ult.," thus transposing the commercial formula, "Your favour of the
third instant." This class of the comic, moreover, may attain a special
profundity of its own when it discloses not merely a professional
practice, but a fault in character. Recall to mind the scenes in the
Faux Bonshommes and the Famille Benoiton, where marriage is dealt with
as a business affair, and matters of sentiment are set down in strictly
commercial language.

Here, however, we reach the point at which peculiarities of language
really express peculiarities of character, a closer investigation of
which we must hold over to the next chapter. Thus, as might have been
expected and may be seen from the foregoing, the comic in words follows
closely on the comic in situation and is finally merged, along with the
latter, in the comic in character. Language only attains laughable
results because it is a human product, modelled as exactly as possible
on the forms of the human mind. We feel it contains some living element
of our own life; and if this life of language were complete and
perfect, if there were nothing stereotype in it, if, in short, language
were an absolutely unified organism incapable of being split up into
independent organisms, it would evade the comic as would a soul whose
life was one harmonious whole, unruffled as the calm surface of a
peaceful lake. There is no pool, however, which has not some dead
leaves floating on its surface, no human soul upon which there do not
settle habits that make it rigid against itself by making it rigid
against others, no language, in short, so subtle and instinct with
life, so fully a