orine does with the infatuation of Orgon. The old man's avarice is no
sooner repressed than up it springs again automatically, and it is this
automatism that Moliere tries to indicate by the mechanical repetition
of a sentence expressing regret at the money that would have to be
forthcoming: "What the deuce did he want in that galley?" The same
criticism is applicable to the scene in which Valere points out to
Harpagon the wrong he would be doing in marrying his daughter to a man
she did not love. "No dowry wanted!" interrupts the miserly Harpagon
every few moments. Behind this exclamation, which recurs automatically,
we faintly discern a complete repeating-machine set going by a fixed
idea.

At times this mechanism is less easy to detect, and here we encounter a
fresh difficulty in the theory of the comic. Sometimes the whole
interest of a scene lies in one character playing a double part, the
intervening speaker acting as a mere prism, so to speak, through which
the dual personality is developed. We run the risk, then, of going
astray if we look for the secret of the effect in what we see and
hear,--in the external scene played by the characters,--and not in the
altogether inner comedy of which this scene is no more than the outer
refraction. For instance, when Alceste stubbornly repeats the words, "I
don't say that!" on Oronte asking him if he thinks his poetry bad, the
repetition is laughable, though evidently Oronte is not now playing
with Alceste at the game we have just described. We must be careful,
however, for, in reality, we have two men in Alceste: on the one hand,
the "misanthropist" who has vowed henceforth to call a spade a spade,
and on the other the gentleman who cannot unlearn, in a trice, the
usual forms of politeness, or even, it may be, just the honest fellow
who, when called upon to put his words into practice, shrinks from
wounding another's self-esteem or hurting his feelings. Accordingly,
the real scene is not between Alceste and Oronte, it is between Alceste
and himself. The one Alceste would fain blurt out the truth, and the
other stops his mouth just as he is on the point of telling everything.
Each "I don't say that!" reveals a growing effort to repress something
that strives and struggles to get out. And so the tone in which the
phrase is uttered gets more and more violent, Alceste becoming more and
more angry--not with Oronte, as he thinks--but with himself. The
tension of the spring is co