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tead of accommodating itself to things. And so the play upon words always betrays a momentary LAPSE OF ATTENTION in language, and it is precisely on that account that it is amusing. INVERSION and RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE, after all, are only a certain playfulness of the mind which ends at playing upon words. The comic in TRANSPOSITION is much more far-reaching. Indeed, transposition is to ordinary language what repetition is to comedy. We said that repetition is the favourite method of classic comedy. It consists in so arranging events that a scene is reproduced either between the same characters under fresh circumstances or between fresh characters under the same circumstances. Thus we have, repeated by lackeys in less dignified language, a scene already played by their masters. Now, imagine ideas expressed in suitable style and thus placed in the setting of their natural environment. If you think of some arrangement whereby they are transferred to fresh surroundings, while maintaining their mutual relations, or, in other words, if you can induce them to express themselves in an altogether different style and to transpose themselves into another key, you will have language itself playing a comedy--language itself made comic. There will be no need, moreover, actually to set before us both expressions of the same ideas, the transposed expression and the natural one. For we are acquainted with the natural one--the one which we should have chosen instinctively. So it will be enough if the effort of comic invention bears on the other, and on the other alone. No sooner is the second set before us than we spontaneously supply the first. Hence the following general rule: A COMIC EFFECT IS ALWAYS OBTAINABLE BY TRANSPOSING THE NATURE EXPRESSION OF AN IDEA INTO ANOTHER KEY. The means of transposition are so many and varied, language affords so rich a continuity of themes and the comic is here capable of passing through so great a number of stages, from the most insipid buffoonery up to the loftiest forms of humour and irony, that we shall forego the attempt to make out a complete list. Having stated the rule, we will simply, here and there, verify its main applications. In the first place, we may distinguish two keys at the extreme ends of the scale, the solemn and the familiar. The most obvious effects are obtained by merely transposing the one into the other, which thus provides us with two opposite currents of comic fanc
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