tent--accept the idea of a
Switzerland choke-full of machinery like the basement of the opera, and
run by a company which maintains a series of waterfalls, glaciers and
artificial crevasses. The same theme reappears, though transposed in
quite another key, in the Novel Notes of the English humorist, Jerome
K. Jerome. An elderly Lady Bountiful, who does not want her deeds of
charity to take up too much of her time, provides homes within easy
hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been
specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest
folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of
their failing, etc. There are comic phrases in which this theme is
audible, like a distant echo, coupled with an ingenuousness, whether
sincere or affected, which acts as accompaniment. Take, as an instance,
the remark made by a lady whom Cassini, the astronomer, had invited to
see an eclipse of the moon. Arriving too late, she said, "M. de
Cassini, I know, will have the goodness to begin it all over again, to
please me." Or, take again the exclamation of one of Gondiinet's
characters on arriving in a town and learning that there is an extinct
volcano in the neighbourhood, "They had a volcano, and they have let it
go out!"

Let us go on to society. As we are both in and of it, we cannot help
treating it as a living being. Any image, then, suggestive of the
notion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, so to
speak, will be laughable. Now, such a notion is formed when we perceive
anything inert or stereotyped, or simply ready-made, on the surface of
living society. There we have rigidity over again, clashing with the
inner suppleness of life. The ceremonial side of social life must,
therefore, always include a latent comic element, which is only waiting
for an opportunity to burst into full view. It might be said that
ceremonies are to the social body what clothing is to the individual
body: they owe their seriousness to the fact that they are identified,
in our minds, with the serious object with which custom associates
them, and when we isolate them in imagination, they forthwith lose
their seriousness. For any ceremony, then, to become comic, it is
enough that our attention be fixed on the ceremonial element in it, and
that we neglect its matter, as philosophers say, and think only of its
form. Every one knows how easily the comic spirit exercises its
ingenuity