assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now
step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama
will turn into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the
sound of music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at
once to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similar
test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay,
on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To produce
the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a
momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure
and simple.

This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other
intelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should be
drawn. You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself
isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo,
Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined
sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating
from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in
successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this
reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a
circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one.
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. It may, perchance, have
happened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table d'hote,
to hear travellers relating to one another stories which must have been
comic to them, for they laughed heartily. Had you been one of their
company, you would have laughed like them; but, as you were not, you
had no desire whatever to do so. A man who was once asked why he did
not weep at a sermon, when everybody else was shedding tears, replied:
"I don't belong to the parish!" What that man thought of tears would be
still more true of laughter. However spontaneous it seems, laughter
always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with
other laughers, real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the
fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience!
On the other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic
effects are incapable of translation from one language to another,
because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social
group! It is through not understanding the importance of this double
fact that the comic has