nt in the over-romantic, Utopian bent of mind! And yet,
if you reintroduce the idea of absentmindedness, which acts as a
go-between, you will see this profound comic element uniting with the
most superficial type. Yes, indeed, these whimsical wild enthusiasts,
these madmen who are yet so strangely reasonable, excite us to laughter
by playing on the same chords within ourselves, by setting in motion
the same inner mechanism, as does the victim of a practical joke or the
passer-by who slips down in the street. They, too, are runners who fall
and simple souls who are being hoaxed--runners after the ideal who
stumble over realities, child-like dreamers for whom life delights to
lie in wait. But, above all, they are past-masters in absentmindedness,
with this superiority over their fellows that their absentmindedness is
systematic and organised around one central idea, and that their
mishaps are also quite coherent, thanks to the inexorable logic which
reality applies to the correction of dreams, so that they kindle in
those around them, by a series of cumulative effects, a hilarity
capable of unlimited expansion.

Now, let us go a little further. Might not certain vices have the same
relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea has to
intellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the
will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature of the soul.
Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with all
its pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with it into
a moving circle of reincarnations. Those are tragic vices. But the vice
capable of making us comic is, on the contrary, that which is brought
from without, like a ready-made frame into which we are to step. It
lends us its own rigidity instead of borrowing from us our flexibility.
We do not render it more complicated; on the contrary, it simplifies
us. Here, as we shall see later on in the concluding section of this
study, lies the essential difference between comedy and drama. A drama,
even when portraying passions or vices that bear a name, so completely
incorporates them in the person that their names are forgotten, their
general characteristics effaced, and we no longer think of them at all,
but rather of the person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the title
of a drama can seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the other
hand, many comedies have a common noun as their title: l'Avare, le
Joueur, etc.