be extended to the point of making us
believe that no change takes place in the prefect when he changes his
name, and that the function gets carried on independently of the
functionary.

We have now reached a point very far from the original cause of
laughter. Many a comic form, that cannot be explained by itself, can
indeed only be understood from its resemblance to another, which only
makes us laugh by reason of its relationship with a third, and so on
indefinitely, so that psychological analysis, however luminous and
searching, will go astray unless it holds the thread along which the
comic impression has travelled from one end of the series to the other.
Where does this progressive continuity come from? What can be the
driving force, the strange impulse which causes the comic to glide thus
from image to image, farther and farther away from the starting-point,
until it is broken up and lost in infinitely remote analogies? But what
is that force which divides and subdivides the branches of a tree into
smaller boughs and its roots into radicles? An inexorable law dooms
every living energy, during the brief interval allotted to it in time,
to cover the widest possible extent in space. Now, comic fancy is
indeed a living energy, a strange plant that has nourished on the stony
portions of the social soil, until such time as culture should allow it
to vie with the most refined products of art. True, we are far from
great art in the examples of the comic we have just been reviewing. But
we shall draw nearer to it, though without attaining to it completely,
in the following chapter. Below art, we find artifice, and it is this
zone of artifice, midway between nature and art, that we are now about
to enter. We are going to deal with the comic playwright and the wit.

CHAPTER II

THE COMIC ELEMENT IN SITUATIONS AND THE COMIC ELEMENT IN WORDS

I

We have studied the comic element in forms, in attitudes, and in
movements generally; now let us look for it in actions and in
situations. We encounter, indeed, this kind of comic readily enough in
everyday life. It is not here, however, that it best lends itself to
analysis. Assuming that the stage is both a magnified and a simplified
view of life, we shall find that comedy is capable of furnishing us
with more information than real life on this particular part of our
subject. Perhaps we ought even to carry simplification still farther,
and, going back to our earliest re