y it is not sufficient.

But, then, how will the comic poet set to work to prevent our feelings
being moved? The question is an embarrassing one. To clear it up
thoroughly, we should have to enter upon a rather novel line of
investigation, to analyse the artificial sympathy which we bring with
us to the theatre, and determine upon the circumstances in which we
accept and those in which we refuse to share imaginary joys and
sorrows. There is an art of lulling sensibility to sleep and providing
it with dreams, as happens in the case of a mesmerised person. And
there is also an art of throwing a wet blanket upon sympathy at the
very moment it might arise, the result being that the situation, though
a serious one, is not taken seriously. This latter art would appear to
be governed by two methods, which are applied more or less
unconsciously by the comic poet. The first consists in ISOLATING,
within the soul of the character, the feeling attributed to him, and
making it a parasitic organism, so to speak, endowed with an
independent existence. As a general rule, an intense feeling
successively encroaches upon all other mental states and colours them
with its own peculiar hue; if, then, we are made to witness this
gradual impregnation, we finally become impregnated ourselves with a
corresponding emotion. To employ a different image, an emotion may be
said to be dramatic and contagious when all the harmonics in it are
heard along with the fundamental note. It is because the actor thus
thrills throughout his whole being that the spectators themselves feel
the thrill. On the contrary, in the case of emotion that leaves us
indifferent and that is about to become comic, there is always present
a certain rigidity which prevents it from establishing a connection
with the rest of the soul in which it has taken up its abode. This
rigidity may be manifested, when the time comes, by puppet-like
movements, and then it will provoke laughter; but, before that, it had
already alienated our sympathy: how can we put ourselves in tune with a
soul which is not in tune with itself? In Moliere's L'Avare we have a
scene bordering upon drama. It is the one in which the borrower and the
usurer, who have never seen each other, meet face to face and find that
they are son and father. Here we should be in the thick of a drama, if
only greed and fatherly affection, conflicting with each other in the
soul of Harpagon, had effected a more or less original