l, if we find on the stage not
merely two characters, as in the example from Pascal, but several, nay,
as great a number as possible, the image of one another, who come and
go, dance and gesticulate together, simultaneously striking the same
attitudes and tossing their arms about in the same manner. This time,
we distinctly think of marionettes. Invisible threads seem to us to be
joining arms to arms, legs to legs, each muscle in one face to its
fellow-muscle in the other: by reason of the absolute uniformity which
prevails, the very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen as we gaze,
and the actors themselves seem transformed into automata. Such, at
least, appears to be the artifice underlying this somewhat obvious form
of amusement. I daresay the performers have never read Pascal, but what
they do is merely to realise to the full the suggestions contained in
Pascal's words. If, as is undoubtedly the case, laughter is caused in
the second instance by the hallucination of a mechanical effect, it
must already have been so, though in more subtle fashion, in the first.

Continuing along this path, we dimly perceive the increasingly
important and far-reaching consequences of the law we have just stated.
We faintly catch still more fugitive glimpses of mechanical effects,
glimpses suggested by man's complex actions, no longer merely by his
gestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices of comedy, the
periodical repetition of a word or a scene, the systematic inversion of
the parts, the geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding,
and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force from
the same source,--the art of the playwright probably consisting in
setting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events,
while carefully preserving an outward aspect of probability and thereby
retaining something of the suppleness of life. But we must not
forestall results which will be duly disclosed in the course of our
analysis.

V

Before going further, let us halt a moment and glance around. As we
hinted at the outset of this study, it would be idle to attempt to
derive every comic effect from one simple formula. The formula exists
well enough in a certain sense, but its development does not follow a
straightforward course. What I mean is that the process of deduction
ought from time to time to stop and study certain culminating effects,
and that these effects each appear as models round