y also to the fact that the author incidentally
discusses questions of still greater interest and importance. Thus, one
of the best known and most frequently quoted passages of the book is
that portion of the last chapter in which the author outlines a general
theory of art.

C. B. F. R.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE COMIC IN GENERAL--THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS AND
MOVEMENTS--EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC

CHAPTER II

THE COMIC ELEMENT IN SITUATIONS AND THE COMIC ELEMENT IN WORDS

CHAPTER III

THE COMIC IN CHARACTER

CHAPTER I

THE COMIC IN GENERAL--THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS AND
MOVEMENTS--EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC.

What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable?
What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a
play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene of
high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us invariably the
same essence from which so many different products borrow either their
obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers,
from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem, which has a
knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to
bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation. Our
excuse for attacking the problem in our turn must lie in the fact that
we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition.
We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be,
we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine
ourselves to watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible
gradations from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the
strangest metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe
we may gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that,
something more flexible than an abstract definition,--a practical,
intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship. And
maybe we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made an
acquaintance that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its
own, even in its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its
madness. It dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions
that are at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social
group. Can it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human
imagination works, and more particularly social, collective, and
popular imaginatio