leness of mortals; but even he may not know whether to laugh or
to cry at what he sees. Those collisions and contrasts out of which the
stuff of tragedy is woven, such as the clash between the higher and
lower nature of a man, between his past and his present, between one's
duties to himself and to his family or the state, between, in a word,
his character and his situation, are all illustrated in comedy as
completely as in tragedy. The countryman in the city, the city man in
the country, is in a comic situation. Here is a coward named Falstaff,
and Shakespeare puts him into battle. Here is a vain person, and
Malvolio is imprisoned and twitted by a clown. Here is an ignoramus,
and Dogberry is placed on the judge's bench. These contrasts might,
indeed, be tragic enough, but they are actually comic. Such characters
are not ruled by fate but by a sportive chance. The gods connive at
them. They are ruled, like tragic characters, by necessity and
blindness; but the blindness, instead of leading to tragic ruin, leads
only to being caught as in some harmless game of blind-man's-buff.
There is retribution, but Falstaff is only pinched by the fairies.
Comedy of intrigue and comedy of character lead to no real catastrophe.
The end of it on the stage is not death but matrimony; and "home well
pleased we go."

A thousand definitions of humor lay stress upon this element of
incongruity. Hazlitt begins his illuminating lectures on the Comic
Writers by declaring, "Man is the only animal that laughs or weeps; for
he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what
things are and what they ought to be." James Russell Lowell took the
same ground. "Humor," he said once, "lies in the contrast of two ideas.
It is the universal disenchanter. It is the sense of comic
contradiction which arises from the perpetual comment which the
understanding makes upon the impressions received through the
imagination." If that sentence seems too abstract, all we need do is to
think of Sancho Panza, the man of understanding, talking about Don
Quixote, the man of imagination.

We must not multiply quotations, but it is impossible not to remember
the distinction made by Carlyle in writing about Richter. "True humor,"
says Carlyle, "springs not more from the head than from the heart. It
is not contempt; its essence is love." In other words, not merely the
great humorists of the world's literature--Cervantes, Rabelais,
Fielding, Thackeray, Di