hat enables us to recognise it. The greater the work and the
more profound the dimly apprehended truth, the longer may the effect be
in coming, but, on the other hand, the more universal will that effect
tend to become. So the universality here lies in the effect produced,
and not in the cause.

Altogether different is the object of comedy. Here it is in the work
itself that the generality lies. Comedy depicts characters we have
already come across and shall meet with again. It takes note of
similarities. It aims at placing types before our eyes. It even creates
new types, if necessary. In this respect it forms a contrast to all the
other arts.

The very titles of certain classical comedies are significant in
themselves. Le Misanthrope, l'Avare, le Joueur, le Distrait, etc., are
names of whole classes of people; and even when a character comedy has
a proper noun as its title, this proper noun is speedily swept away, by
the very weight of its contents, into the stream of common nouns. We
say "a Tartuffe," but we should never say "a Phedre" or "a Polyeucte."

Above all, a tragic poet will never think of grouping around the chief
character in his play secondary characters to serve as simplified
copies, so to speak, of the former. The hero of a tragedy represents an
individuality unique of its kind. It may be possible to imitate him,
but then we shall be passing, whether consciously or not, from the
tragic to the comic. No one is like him, because he is like no one. But
a remarkable instinct, on the contrary, impels the comic poet, once he
has elaborated his central character, to cause other characters,
displaying the same general traits, to revolve as satellites round him.
Many comedies have either a plural noun or some collective term as
their title. "Les Femmes savantes," "Les Precieuses ridicules," "Le
Monde ou l'on s'ennuie," etc., represent so many rallying points on the
stage adopted by different groups of characters, all belonging to one
identical type. It would be interesting to analyse this tendency in
comedy. Maybe dramatists have caught a glimpse of a fact recently
brought forward by mental pathology, viz. that cranks of the same kind
are drawn, by a secret attraction, to seek each other's company.
Without precisely coming within the province of medicine, the comic
individual, as we have shown, is in some way absentminded, and the
transition from absent-mindedness to crankiness is continuous. But
there is als