n? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it
not also have something of its own to tell us about art and life?

At the outset we shall put forward three observations which we look
upon as fundamental. They have less bearing on the actually comic than
on the field within which it must be sought.

I

The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic
does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A landscape
may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it
will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because
you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may
laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not
the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,--the
human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so
important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a
greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined man
as "an animal which laughs." They might equally well have defined him
as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some
lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some
resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the
ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as
though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it
fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and
unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no
greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a
person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection,
but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of
court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure
intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps
there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune
and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally
prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.
Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is being
said and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with
those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as
though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of
objects