ntinually being renewed and reinforced until
it at last goes off with a bang. Here, as elsewhere, we have the same
identical mechanism of repetition.

For a man to make a resolution never henceforth to say what he does not
think, even though he "openly defy the whole human race," is not
necessarily laughable; it is only a phase of life at its highest and
best. For another man, through amiability, selfishness, or disdain, to
prefer to flatter people is only another phase of life; there is
nothing in it to make us laugh. You may even combine these two men into
one, and arrange that the individual waver between offensive frankness
and delusive politeness, this duel between two opposing feelings will
not even then be comic, rather it will appear the essence of
seriousness if these two feelings through their very distinctness
complete each other, develop side by side, and make up between them a
composite mental condition, adopting, in short, a modus vivendi which
merely gives us the complex impression of life. But imagine these two
feelings as INELASTIC and unvarying elements in a really living man,
make him oscillate from one to the other; above all, arrange that this
oscillation becomes entirely mechanical by adopting the well-known form
of some habitual, simple, childish contrivance: then you will get the
image we have so far found in all laughable objects, SOMETHING
MECHANICAL IN SOMETHING LIVING; in fact, something comic.

We have dwelt on this first image, the Jack-in-the-box, sufficiently to
show how comic fancy gradually converts a material mechanism into a
moral one. Now we will consider one or two other games, confining
ourselves to their most striking aspects.

2. THE DANCING-JACK.--There are innumerable comedies in which one of
the characters thinks he is speaking and acting freely, and,
consequently, retains all the essentials of life, whereas, viewed from
a certain standpoint, he appears as a mere toy in the hands of another
who is playing with him. The transition is easily made, from the
dancing-jack which a child works with a string, to Geronte and Argante
manipulated by Scapin. Listen to Scapin himself: "The MACHINE is all
there"; and again: "Providence has brought them into my net," etc.
Instinctively, and because one would rather be a cheat than be cheated,
in imagination at all events, the spectator sides with the knaves; and
for the rest of the time, like a child who has persuaded his playmate
to lend