THE COMIC IN CHARACTER
I
We have followed the comic along many of its winding channels in an
endeavour to discover how it percolates into a form, an attitude, or a
gesture; a situation, an action, or an expression. The analysis of
comic CHARACTERS has now brought us to the most important part of our
task. It would also be the most difficult, had we yielded to the
temptation of defining the laughable by a few striking--and
consequently obvious--examples; for then, in proportion as we advanced
towards the loftiest manifestations of the comic, we should have found
the facts slipping between the over-wide meshes of the definition
intended to retain them. But, as a matter of fact, we have followed the
opposite plan, by throwing light on the subject from above. Convinced
that laughter has a social meaning and import, that the comic
expresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society,
and that, in short, there is nothing comic apart from man, we have made
man and character generally our main objective. Our chief difficulty,
therefore, has lain in explaining how we come to laugh at anything else
than character, and by what subtle processes of fertilisation,
combination or amalgamation, the comic can worm its way into a mere
movement, an impersonal situation, or an independent phrase. This is
what we have done so far. We started with the pure metal, and all our
endeavours have been directed solely towards reconstructing the ore. It
is the metal itself we are now about to study. Nothing could be easier,
for this time we have a simple element to deal with. Let us examine it
closely and see how it reacts upon everything else.
There are moods, we said, which move us as soon us as soon as we
perceive them, joys and sorrows with which we sympathise, passions and
vices which call forth painful astonishment, terror or pity, in the
beholder; in short, sentiments that are prolonged in sentimental
overtones from mind to mind. All this concerns the essentials of life.
All this is serious, at times even tragic. Comedy can only begin at the
point where our neighbour's personality ceases to affect us. It begins,
in fact, with what might be called a growing callousness to social
life. Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way
without troubling himself about getting into touch with the rest of his
fellow-beings. It is the part of laughter to reprove his
absentmindedness and wake him out of his dream. If it is permissible to
compare important things with trivial ones, we would call to mind what
happens when a youth enters one of our military academies. After
getting through the dreaded ordeal of the examination, he finds the has
other ordeals to face, which his seniors have arranged with the object
of fitting him for the new life he is entering upon, or, as they say,
of "breaking him into harness." Every small society that forms within
the larger is thus impelled, by a vague kind of instinct, to devise
some method of discipline or "breaking in," so as to deal with the
rigidity of habits that have been formed elsewhere and have now to
undergo a partial modification. Society, properly so-called, proceeds
in exactly the same way. Each member must be ever attentive to his
social surroundings; he must model himself on his environment; in
short, he must avoid shutting himself up in his own peculiar character
as a philosopher in his ivory tower. Therefore society holds suspended
over each individual member, if not the threat of correction, at all
events the prospect of a snubbing, which, although it is slight, is
none the less dreaded. Such must be the function of laughter. Always
rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughter
is, really and truly, a kind of social "ragging."
Hence the equivocal nature of the comic. It belongs neither altogether
to art nor altogether to life. On the one hand, characters in real life
would never make us laugh were we not capable of watching their
vagaries in the same way as we look down at a play from our seat in a
box; they are only comic in our eyes because they perform a kind of
comedy before us. But, on the other hand, the pleasure caused by
laughter, even on the stage, is not an unadulterated enjoyment; it is
not a pleasure that is exclusively esthetic or altogether
disinterested. It always implies a secret or unconscious intent, if not
of each one of us, at all events of society as a whole. In laughter we
always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to
correct our neighbour, if not in his will, at least in his deed. This
is the reason a comedy is far more like real life than a drama is. The
more sublime the drama, the more profound the analysis to which the
poet has had to subject the raw materials of daily life in order to
obtain the tragic element in its unadulterated form. On the contrary,
it is only in its lower aspects, in light comedy and farce, that comedy
is in striking contrast to reality: the higher it rises, the more it
approximates to life; in fact, there are scenes in real life so closely
bordering on high-class comedy that the stage might adopt them without
changing a single word.
Hence it follows that the elements of comic character on the stage and
in actual life will be the same. What are these elements? We shall find
no difficulty in deducing them. It has often been said that it is the
TRIFLING faults of our fellow-men that make us laugh.
Evidently there is a considerable amount of truth in this opinion;
still, it cannot be regarded as altogether correct. First, as regards
faults, it is no easy matter to draw the line between the trifling and
the serious; maybe it is not because a fault is trifling that it makes
us laugh, but rather because it makes us laugh that we regard it as
trifling, for there is nothing disarms us like laughter. But we may go
even farther, and maintain that there are faults at which we laugh,
even though fully aware that they are serious,--Harpagon's avarice, for
instance. And then, we may as well confess--though somewhat
reluctantly--that we laugh not only at the faults of our fellow-men,
but also, at times, at their good qualities. We laugh at Alceste. The
objection may be urged that it is not the earnestness of Alceste that
is ludicrous, but rather the special aspect which earnestness assumes
in his case, and, in short, a certain eccentricity that mars it in our
eyes. Agreed; but it is none the less true that this eccentricity in
Alceste, at which we laugh, MAKES HIS EARNESTNESS LAUGHABLE, and that
is the main point. So we may conclude that the ludicrous is not always
an indication of a fault, in the moral meaning of the word, and if
critics insist on seeing a fault, even though a trifling one, in the
ludicrous, they must point out what it is here that exactly
distinguishes the trifling from the serious.
The truth is, the comic character may, strictly speaking, be quite in
accord with stern morality. All it has to do is to bring itself into
accord with society. The character of Alceste is that of a thoroughly
honest man. But then he is unsociable, and, on that very account,
ludicrous. A flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule as a rigid
virtue. It is rigidity that society eyes with suspicion. Consequently,
it is the rigidity of Alceste that makes us laugh, though here rigidity
stands for honesty. The man who withdraws into himself is liable to
ridicule, because the comic is largely made up of this very withdrawal.
This accounts for the comic being so frequently dependent on the
manners or ideas, or, to put it bluntly, on the prejudices, of a
society.
It must be acknowledged, however, to the credit of mankind, that there
is no essential difference between the social ideal and the rule, that
it is the faults of others that make us laugh, provided we add that
they make us laugh by reason of their UNSOCIABILITY rather than of
their IMMORALITY. What, then, are the faults capable of becoming
ludicrous, and in what circumstances do we regard them as being too
serious to be laughed at?
We have already given an implicit answer to this question. The comic,
we said, appeals to the intelligence, pure and simple; laughter is
incompatible with emotion. Depict some fault, however trifling, in such
a way as to arouse sympathy, fear, or pity; the mischief is done, it is
impossible for us to laugh. On the other hand, take a downright
vice,--even one that is, generally speaking, of an odious nature,--you
may make it ludicrous if, by some suitable contrivance, you arrange so
that it leaves our emotions unaffected. Not that the vice must then be
ludicrous, but it MAY, from that time forth, become so. IT MUST NOT
AROUSE OUR FEELINGS; that is the sole condition really necessary,
though assuredly 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 combination. But
such is not the case. No sooner has the interview come to an end than
the father forgets everything. On meeting his son again he barely
alludes to the scene, serious though it has been: "You, my son, whom I
am good enough to forgive your recent escapade, etc." Greed has thus
passed close to all other feelings ABSENTMINDEDLY, without either
touching them or being touched. Although it has taken up its abode in
the soul and become master of the house, none the less it remains a
stranger. Far different would be avarice of a tragic sort. We should
find it attracting and absorbing, transforming and assimilating the
divers energies of the man: feelings and affections, likes and
dislikes, vices and virtues, would all become something into which
avarice would breathe a new kind of life. Such seems to be the first
essential difference between high-class comedy and drama.
There is a second, which is far more obvious and arises out of the
first. When a mental state is depicted to us with the object of making
it dramatic, or even merely of inducing us to take it seriously, it
gradually crystallises into ACTIONS which provide the real measure of
its greatness. Thus, the miser orders his whole life with a view to
acquiring wealth, and the pious hypocrite, though pretending to have
his eyes fixed upon heaven, steers most skilfully his course here
below. Most certainly, comedy does not shut out calculations of this
kind; we need only take as an example the very machinations of
Tartuffe. But that is what comedy has in common with drama; and in
order to keep distinct from it, to prevent our taking a serious action
seriously, in short, in order to prepare us for laughter, comedy
utilises a method, the formula of which may be given as follows:
INSTEAD OF CONCENTRATING OUR ATTENTION ON ACTIONS, COMEDY DIRECTS IT
RATHER TO GESTURES. By GESTURES we here mean the attitudes, the
movements and even the language by which a mental state expresses
itself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no other cause than a
kind of inner itching. Gesture, thus defined, is profoundly different
from action. Action is intentional or, at any rate, conscious; gesture
slips out unawares, it is automatic. In action, the entire person is
engaged; in gesture, an isolated part of the person is expressed,
unknown to, or at least apart from, the whole of the personality.
Lastly--and here is the essential point--action is in exact proportion
to the feeling that inspires it: the one gradually passes into the
other, so that we may allow our sympathy or our aversion to glide along
the line running from feeling to action and become increasingly
interested. About gesture, however, there is something explosive, which
awakes our sensibility when on the point of being lulled to sleep and,
by thus rousing us up, prevents our taking matters seriously. Thus, as
soon as our attention is fixed on gesture and not on action, we are in
the realm of comedy. Did we merely take his actions into account,
Tartuffe would belong to drama: it is only when we take his gestures
into consideration that we find him comic. You may remember how he
comes on to the stage with the words: "Laurent, lock up my hair-shirt
and my scourge." He knows Dorine is listening to him, but doubtless he
would say the same if she were not there. He enters so thoroughly into
the role of a hypocrite that he plays it almost sincerely. In this way,
and this way only, can he become comic. Were it not for this material
sincerity, were it not for the language and attitudes that his
long-standing experience as a hypocrite has transformed into natural
gestures, Tartuffe would be simply odious, because we should only think
of what is meant and willed in his conduct. And so we see why action is
essential in drama, but only accessory in comedy. In a comedy, we feel
any other situation might equally well have been chosen for the purpose
of introducing the character; he would still have been the same man
though the situation were different. But we do not get this impression
in a drama. Here characters and situations are welded together, or
rather, events form part and parcel with the persons, so that were the
drama to tell us a different story, even though the actors kept the
same names, we should in reality be dealing with other persons.
To sum up, whether a character is good or bad is of little moment:
granted he is unsociable, he is capable of becoming comic. We now see
that the seriousness of the case is of no importance either: whether
serious or trifling, it is still capable of making us laugh, provided
that care be taken not to arouse our emotions. Unsociability in the
performer and insensibility in the spectator--such, in a word, are the
two essential conditions. There is a third, implicit in the other two,
which so far it has been the aim of our analysis to bring out.
This third condition is automatism. We have pointed it out from the
outset of this work, continually drawing attention to the following
point: what is essentially laughable is what is done automatically. In
a vice, even in a virtue, the comic is that element by which the person
unwittingly betrays himself--the involuntary gesture or the unconscious
remark. Absentmindedness is always comical. Indeed, the deeper the
absentmindedness the higher the comedy. Systematic absentmindedness,
like that of Don Quixote, is the most comical thing imaginable: it is
the comic itself, drawn as nearly as possible from its very source.
Take any other comic character: however unconscious he may be of what
he says or does, he cannot be comical unless there be some aspect of
his person of which he is unaware, one side of his nature which he
overlooks; on that account alone does he make us laugh. [Footnote: When
the humorist laughs at himself, he is really acting a double part; the
self who laughs is indeed conscious, but not the self who is laughed
at.] Profoundly comic sayings are those artless ones in which some vice
reveals itself in all its nakedness: how could it thus expose itself
were it capable of seeing itself as it is? It is not uncommon for a
comic character to condemn in general terms a certain line of conduct
and immediately afterwards afford an example of it himself: for
instance, M. Jourdain's teacher of philosophy flying into a passion
after inveighing against anger; Vadius taking a poem from his pocket
after heaping ridicule on readers of poetry, etc. What is the object of
such contradictions except to help us to put our finger on the
obliviousness of the characters to their own actions? Inattention to
self, and consequently to others, is what we invariably find. And if we
look at the matter closely, we see that inattention is here equivalent
to what we have called unsociability. The chief cause of rigidity is
the neglect to look around--and more especially within oneself: how can
a man fashion his personality after that of another if he does not
first study others as well as himself? Rigidity, automatism,
absent-mindedness and unsociability are all inextricably entwined; and
all serve as ingredients to the making up of the comic in character.
In a word, if we leave on one side, when dealing with human
personality, that portion which interests our sensibility or appeals to
our feeling, all the rest is capable of becoming comic, and the comic
will be proportioned to the rigidity. We formulated this idea at the
outset of this work. We have verified it in its main results, and have
just applied it to the definition of comedy. Now we must get to closer
quarters, and show how it enables us to delimitate the exact position
comedy occupies among all the other arts. In one sense it might be said
that all character is comic, provided we mean by character the
ready-made element in our personality, that mechanical element which
resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once for all and capable of
working automatically. It is, if you will, that which causes us to
imitate ourselves. And it is also, for that very reason, that which
enables others to imitate us. Every comic character is a type.
Inversely, every resemblance to a type has something comic in it.
Though we may long have associated with an individual without
discovering anything about him to laugh at, still, if advantage is t
taken of some accidental analogy to dub him with the name of a famous
hero of romance or drama, he will in our eyes border upon the
ridiculous, if only for a moment. And yet this hero of romance may not
be a comic character at all. But then it is comic to be like him. It is
comic to wander out of one's own self. It is comic to fall into a
ready-made category. And what is most comic of all is to become a
category oneself into which others will fall, as into a ready-made
frame; it is to crystallise into a stock character.
Thus, to depict characters, that is to say, general types, is the
object of high-class comedy. This has often been said. But it is as
well to repeat it, since there could be no better definition of comedy.
Not only are we entitled to say that comedy gives us general types, but
we might add that it is the ONLY one of all the arts that aims at the
general; so that once this objective has been attributed to it, we have
said all that it is and all that the rest cannot be. To prove that such
is really the essence of comedy, and that it is in this respect opposed
to tragedy, drama and the other forms of art, we should begin by
defining art in its higher forms: then, gradually coming down to comic
poetry, we should find that this latter is situated on the border-line
between art and life, and that, by the generality of its
subject-matter, it contrasts with the rest of the arts. We cannot here
plunge into so vast a subject of investigation; but we needs must
sketch its main outlines, lest we overlook what, to our mind, is
essential on the comic stage.
What is the object of art? Could reality come into direct contact with
sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with
things and with ourselves, probably art would be useless, or rather we
should all be artists, for then our soul would continually vibrate in
perfect accord with nature. Our eyes, aided by memory, would carve out
in space and fix in time the most inimitable of pictures. Hewn in the
living marble of the human form, fragments of statues, beautiful as the
relics of antique statuary, would strike the passing glance. Deep in
our souls we should hear the strains of our inner life's unbroken
melody,--a music that is ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintive
and always original. All this is around and within us, and yet no whit
of it do we distinctly perceive. Between nature and ourselves, nay,
between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a
veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,--thin, almost
transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil?
Was it done in malice or in friendliness? We had to live, and life
demands that we grasp things in their relations to our own needs. Life
is action. Life implies the acceptance only of the UTILITARIAN side of
things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions: all other
impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred. I look
and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine myself and I
think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But what I see and hear
of the outer world is purely and simply a selection made by my senses
to serve as a light to my conduct; what I know of myself is what comes
to the surface, what participates in my actions. My senses and my
consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a practical
simplification of reality. In the vision they furnish me of myself and
of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, the
resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised; ways are traced out
for me in advance, along which my activity is to travel. These ways are
the ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things have been
classified with a view to the use I can derive from them. And it is
this classification I perceive, far more clearly than the colour and
the shape of things. Doubtless man is vastly superior to the lower
animals in this respect. It is not very likely that the eye of a wolf
makes any distinction between a kid and a lamb; both appear t o the
wolf as the same identical quarry, alike easy to pounce upon, alike
good to devour. We, for our part, make a distinction between a goat and
a sheep; but can we tell one goat from another, one sheep from another?
The INDIVIDUALITY of things or of beings escapes us, unless it is
materially to our advantage to perceive it. Even when we do take note
of it--as when we distinguish one man from another--it is not the
individuality itself that the eye grasps, i.e., an entirely original
harmony of forms and colours, but only one or two features that will
make practical recognition easier.
In short, we do not see the actual things themselves; in most cases we
confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them. This tendency,
the result of need, has become even more pronounced under the influence
of speech; for words--with the exception of proper nouns--all denote
genera. The word, which only takes note of the most ordinary function
and commonplace aspect of the thing, intervenes between it and
ourselves, and would conceal its form from our eyes, were that form not
already masked beneath the necessities that brought the word into
existence. Not only external objects, but even our own mental states,
are screened from us in their inmost, their personal aspect, in the
original life they possess. When we feel love or hatred, when we are
gay or sad, is it really the feeling itself that reaches our
consciousness with those innumerable fleeting shades of meaning and
deep resounding echoes that make it something altogether our own? We
should all, were it so, be novelists or poets or musicians. Mostly,
however, we perceive nothing but the outward display of our mental
state. We catch only the impersonal aspect of our feelings, that aspect
which speech has set down once for all because it is almost the same,
in the same conditions, for all men. Thus, even in our own individual,
individuality escapes our ken. We move amidst generalities and symbols,
as within a tilt-yard in which our force is effectively pitted against
other forces; and fascinated by action, tempted by it, for our own
good, on to the field it has selected, we live in a zone midway between
things and ourselves, externally to things, externally also to
ourselves. From time to time, however, in a fit of absentmindedness,
nature raises up souls that are more detached from life. Not with that
intentional, logical, systematical detachment--the result of reflection
and philosophy--but rather with natural detachment, one innate in the
structure of sense or consciousness, which at once reveals itself by a
virginal manner, so to speak, of seeing, hearing or thinking. Were this
detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of
its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world
has never yet seen. It would excel alike in every art at the same time;
or rather, it would fuse them all into one. It would perceive all
things in their native purity: the forms, colours, sounds of the
physical world as well as the subtlest movements of the inner life. But
this is asking too much of nature. Even for such of us as she has made
artists, it is by accident, and on one side only, that she has lifted
the veil. In one direction only has she forgotten to rivet the
perception to the need. And since each direction corresponds to what we
call a SENSE--through one of his senses, and through that sense alone,
is the artist usually wedded to art. Hence, originally, the diversity
of arts. Hence also the speciality of predispositions. This one applies
himself to colours and forms, and since he loves colour for colour and
form for form, since he perceives them for their sake and not for his
own, it is the inner life of things that he sees appearing through
their forms and colours. Little by little he insinuates it into our own
perception, baffled though we may be at the outset. For a few moments
at least, he diverts us from the prejudices of form and colour that
come between ourselves and reality. And thus he realises the loftiest
ambition of art, which here consists in revealing to us nature. Others,
again, retire within themselves. Beneath the thousand rudimentary
actions which are the outward and visible signs of an emotion, behind
the commonplace, conventional expression that both reveals and conceals
an individual mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood, to
which they attain in its undefiled essence. And then, to induce us to
make the same effort ourselves, they contrive to make us see something
of what they have seen: by rhythmical arrangement of words, which thus
become organised and animated with a life of their own, they tell
us--or rather suggest--things that speech was not calculated to
express. Others delve yet deeper still. Beneath these joys and sorrows
which can, at a pinch, be translated into language, they grasp
something that has nothing in common with language, certain rhythms of
life and breath that. are closer to man than his inmost feelings, being
the living law--varying with each individual--of his enthusiasm and
despair, his hopes and regrets. By setting free and emphasising this
music, they force it upon our attention; they compel us, willy-nilly,
to fall in with it, like passers-by who join in a dance. And thus they
impel us to set in motion, in the depths of our being, some secret
chord which was only waiting to thrill. So art, whether it be painting
or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside
the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted
generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order
to bring us face to face with reality itself. It is from a
misunderstanding on this point that the dispute between realism and
idealism in art has arisen. Art is certainly only a more direct vision
of reality. But this purity of perception implies a break with
utilitarian convention, an innate and specially localised
disinterestedness of sense or consciousness, in short, a certain
immateriality of life, which is what has always been called idealism.
So that we might say, without in any way playing upon the meaning of
the words, that realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul,
and that it is only through ideality that we can resume contact with
reality.
Dramatic art forms no exception to this law. What drama goes forth to
discover and brings to light, is a deep-seated reality that is veiled
from us, often in our own interests, by the necessities of life. What
is this reality? What are these necessities? Poetry always expresses
inward states. But amongst these states some arise mainly from contact
with our fellow-men. They are the most intense as well as the most
violent. As contrary electricities attract each other and accumulate
between the two plates of the condenser from which the spark will
presently flash, so, by simply bringing people together, strong
attractions and repulsions take place, followed by an utter loss of
balance, in a word, by that electrification of the soul known as
passion. Were man to give way to the impulse of his natural feelings,
were there neither social nor moral law, these outbursts of violent
feeling would be the ordinary rule in life. But utility demands that
these outbursts should be foreseen and averted. Man must live in
society, and consequently submit to rules. And what interest advises,
reason commands: duty calls, and we have to obey the summons. Under
this dual influence has perforce been formed an outward layer of
feelings and ideas which make for permanence, aim at becoming common to
all men, and cover, when they are not strong enough to extinguish it,
the inner fire of individual passions. The slow progress of mankind in
the direction of an increasingly peaceful social life has gradually
consolidated this layer, just as the life of our planet itself has been
one long effort to cover over with a cool and solid crust the fiery
mass of seething metals. But volcanic eruptions occur. And if the earth
were a living being, as mythology has feigned, most likely when in
repose it would take delight in dreaming of these sudden explosions,
whereby it suddenly resumes possession of its innermost nature. Such is
just the kind of pleasure that is provided for us by drama. Beneath the
quiet humdrum life that reason and society have fashioned for us, it
stirs something within us which luckily does not explode, but which it
makes us feel in its inner tension. It offers nature her revenge upon
society. Sometimes it makes straight for the goal, summoning up to the
surface, from the depths below, passions that produce a general
upheaval. Sometimes it effects a flank movement, as is often the case
in contemporary drama; with a skill that is frequently sophistical, it
shows up the inconsistencies of society; it exaggerates the shams and
shibboleths of the social law; and so indirectly, by merely dissolving
or corroding the outer crust, it again brings us back to the inner
core. But, in both cases, whether it weakens society or strengthens
nature, it has the same end in view: that of laying bare a secret
portion of ourselves,--what might be called the tragic element in our
character.
This is indeed the impression we get after seeing a stirring drama.
What has just interested us is not so much what we have been told about
others as the glimpse we have caught of ourselves--a whole host of
ghostly feelings, emotions and events that would fain have come into
real existence, but, fortunately for us, did not. It also seems as if
an appeal had been made within us to certain ancestral memories
belonging to a far-away past--memories so deep-seated and so foreign to
our present life that this latter, for a moment, seems something unreal
and conventional, for which we shall have to serve a fresh
apprenticeship. So it is indeed a deeper reality that drama draws up
from beneath our superficial and utilitarian attainments, and this art
has the same end in view as all the others.
Hence it follows that art always aims at what is INDIVIDUAL. What the
artist fixes on his canvas is something he has seen at a certain spot,
on a certain day, at a certain hour, with a colouring that will never
be seen again. What the poet sings of is a certain mood which was his,
and his alone, and which will never return. What the dramatist unfolds
before us is the life-history of a soul, a living tissue of feelings
and events--something, in short, which has once happened and can never
be repeated. We may, indeed, give general names to these feelings, but
they cannot be the same thing in another soul. They are INDIVIDUALISED.
Thereby, and thereby only, do they belong to art; for generalities,
symbols or even types, form the current coin of our daily perception.
How, then, does a misunderstanding on this point arise?
The reason lies in the fact that two very different things have been
mistaken for each other: the generality of things and that of the
opinions we come to regarding them. Because a feeling is generally
recognised as true, it does not follow that it is a general feeling.
Nothing could be more unique than the character of Hamlet. Though he
may resemble other men in some respects, it is clearly not on that
account that he interests us most. But he is universally accepted and
regarded as a living character. In this sense only is he universally
true. The same holds good of all the other products of art. Each of
them is unique, and yet, if it bear the stamp of genius, it will come
to be accepted by everybody. Why will it be accepted? And if it is
unique of its kind, by what sign do we know it to be genuine?
Evidently, by the very effort it forces us to make against our
predispositions in order to see sincerely. Sincerity is contagious.
What the artist has seen we shall probably never see again, or at least
never see in exactly the same way; but if he has actually seen it, the
attempt he has made to lift the veil compels our imitation. His work is
an example which we take as a lesson. And the efficacy of the lesson is
the exact standard of the genuineness of the work. Consequently, truth
bears within itself a power of conviction, nay, of conversion, which is
the sign that 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 also another reason. If the comic poet's object is to offer us
types, that is to say, characters capable of self-repetition, how can
he set about it better than by showing us, in each instance, several
different copies of the same model? That is just what the naturalist
does in order to define a species. He enumerates and describes its main
varieties.
This essential difference between tragedy and comedy, the former being
concerned with individuals and the latter with classes, is revealed in
yet another way. It appears in the first draft of the work. From the
outset it is manifested by two radically different methods of
observation.
Though the assertion may seem paradoxical, a study of other men is
probably not necessary to the tragic poet. We find some of the great
poets have lived a retiring, homely sort of life, without having a
chance of witnessing around them an outburst of the passions they have
so faithfully depicted. But, supposing even they had witnessed such a
spectacle, it is doubtful whether they would have found it of much use.
For what interests us in the work of the poet is the glimpse we get of
certain profound moods or inner struggles. Now, this glimpse cannot be
obtained from without. Our souls are impenetrable to one another.
Certain signs of passion are all that we ever apperceive externally.
These we interpret--though always, by the way, defectively--only by
analogy with what we have ourselves experienced. So what we experience
is the main point, and we cannot become thoroughly acquainted with
anything but our own heart--supposing we ever get so far. Does this
mean that the poet has experienced what he depicts, that he has gone
through the various situations he makes his characters traverse, and
lived the whole of their inner life? Here, too, the biographies of
poets would contradict such a supposition. How, indeed, could the same
man have been Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and many others? But
then a distinction should perhaps here be made between the personality
WE HAVE and all those we might have had. Our character is the result of
a choice that is continually being renewed. There are points--at all
events there seem to be--all along the way, where we may branch off,
and we perceive many possible directions though we are unable to take
more than one. To retrace one's steps, and follow to the end the
faintly distinguishable directions, appears to be the essential element
in poetic imagination. Of course, Shakespeare was neither Macbeth, nor
Hamlet, nor Othello; still, he MIGHT HAVE BEEN these several characters
if the circumstances of the case on the one hand, and the consent of
his will on the other, had caused to break out into explosive action
what was nothing more than an inner prompting. We are strangely
mistaken as to the part played by poetic imagination, if we think it
pieces together its heroes out of fragments filched from right and
left, as though it were patching together a harlequin's motley. Nothing
living would result from that. Life cannot be recomposed; it can only
be looked at and reproduced. Poetic imagination is but a fuller view of
reality. If the characters created by a poet give us the impression of
life, it is only because they are the poet himself,--multiplication or
division of the poet,--the poet plumbing the depths of his own nature
in so powerful an effort of inner observation that he lays hold of the
potential in the real, and takes up what nature has left as a mere
outline or sketch in his soul in order to make of it a finished work of
art.
Altogether different is the kind of observation from which comedy
springs. It is directed outwards. However interested a dramatist may be
in the comic features of human nature, he will hardly go, I imagine, to
the extent of trying to discover his own. Besides, he would not find
them, for we are never ridiculous except in some point that remains
hidden from our own consciousness. It is on others, then, that such
observation must perforce be practised. But it; will, for this very
reason, assume a character of generality that it cannot have when we
apply it to ourselves. Settling on the surface, it will not be more
than skin-deep, dealing with persons at the point at which they come
into contact and become capable of resembling one another. It will go
no farther. Even if it could, it would not desire to do so, for it
would have nothing to gain in the process.
To penetrate too far into the personality, to couple the outer effect
with causes that are too deep-seated, would mean to endanger and in the
end to sacrifice all that was laughable in the effect. In order that we
may be tempted to laugh at it, we must localise its cause in some
intermediate region of the soul. Consequently, the effect must appear
to us as an average effect, as expressing an average of mankind. And,
like all averages, this one is obtained by bringing together scattered
data, by comparing analogous cases and extracting their essence, in
short by a process of abstraction and generalisation similar to that
which the physicist brings to bear upon facts with the object of
grouping them under laws. In a word, method and object are here of the
same nature as in the inductive sciences, in that observation is always
external and the result always general.
And so we come back, by a roundabout way, to the double conclusion we
reached in the course of our investigations. On the one hand, a person
is never ridiculous except through some mental attribute resembling
absent-mindedness, through something that lives upon him without
forming part of his organism, after the fashion of a parasite; that is
the reason this state of mind is observable from without and capable of
being corrected. But, on the other hand, just because laughter aims at
correcting, it is expedient that the correction should reach as great a
number of persons as possible. This is the reason comic observation
instinctively proceeds to what is general. It chooses such
peculiarities as admit of being reproduced and consequently are not
indissolubly bound up with the individuality of a single person,--a
possibly common sort of uncommonness, so to say,--peculiarities that
are held in common. By transferring them to the stage, it creates works
which doubtless belong to art in that their only visible aim is to
please, but which will be found to contrast with other works of art by
reason of their generality and also of their scarcely confessed or
scarcely conscious intention to correct and instruct. So we were
probably right in saying that comedy lies midway between art and life.
It is not disinterested as genuine art is. By organising laughter,
comedy accepts social life as a natural environment, it even obeys an
impulse of social life. And in this respect it turns its back upon art,
which is a breaking away from society and a return to pure nature.
II
Now let us see, in the light of what has gone before, the line to take
for creating an ideally comic type of character, comic in itself, in
its origin, and in all its manifestations. It must be deep-rooted, so
as to supply comedy with inexhaustible matter, and yet superficial, in
order that it may remain within the scope of comedy; invisible to its
actual owner, for the comic ever partakes of the unconscious, but
visible to everybody else, so that it may call forth general laughter,
extremely considerate to its own self, so that it may be displayed
without scruple, but troublesome to others, so that they may repress it
without pity; immediately repressible, so that our laughter may not
have been wasted, but sure of reappearing under fresh aspects, so that
laughter may always find something to do; inseparable from social life,
although insufferable to society; capable--in order that it may assume
the greatest imaginable variety of forms--of being tacked on to all the
vices and even to a good many virtues. Truly a goodly number of
elements to fuse together! But a chemist of the soul, entrusted with
this elaborate preparation, would be somewhat disappointed when pouring
out the contents of his retort. He would find he had taken a vast deal
of trouble to compound a mixture which may be found ready-made and free
of expense, for it is as widespread throughout mankind as air
throughout nature.
This mixture is vanity. Probably there is not a single failing that is
more superficial or more deep-rooted. The wounds it receives are never
very serious, and yet they are seldom healed. The services rendered to
it are the most unreal of all services, and yet they are the very ones
that meet with lasting gratitude. It is scarcely a vice, and yet all
the vices are drawn into its orbit and, in proportion as they become
more refined and artificial, tend to be nothing more than a means of
satisfying it. The outcome of social life, since it is an admiration of
ourselves based on the admiration we think we are inspiring in others,
it is even more natural, more universally innate than egoism; for
egoism may be conquered by nature, whereas only by reflection do we get
the better of vanity. It does not seem, indeed, as if men were ever
born modest, unless we dub with the name of modesty a sort of purely
physical bashfulness, which is nearer to pride than is generally
supposed. True modesty can be nothing but a meditation on vanity. It
springs from the sight of others' mistakes and the dread of being
similarly deceived. It is a sort of scientific cautiousness with
respect to what we shall say and think of ourselves. It is made up of
improvements and after-touches. In short, it is an acquired virtue.
It is no easy matter to define the point at which the anxiety to become
modest may be distinguished from the dread of becoming ridiculous. But
surely, at the outset, this dread and this anxiety are one and the same
thing. A complete investigation into the illusions of vanity, and into
the ridicule that clings to them, would cast a strange light upon the
whole theory of laughter. We should find laughter performing, with
mathematical regularity, one of its main functions--that of bringing
back to complete self-consciousness a certain self-admiration which is
almost automatic, and thus obtaining the greatest possible sociability
of characters. We should see that vanity, though it is a natural
product of social life, is an inconvenience to society, just as certain
slight poisons, continually secreted by the human organism, would
destroy it in the long run, if they were not neutralised by other
secretions. Laughter is unceasingly doing work of this kind. In this
respect, it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is
laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughable is
vanity.
While dealing with the comic in form and movement, we showed how any
simple image, laughable in itself, is capable of worming its way into
other images of a more complex nature and instilling into them
something of its comic essence; thus, the highest forms of the comic
can sometimes be explained by the lowest. The inverse process, however,
is perhaps even more common, and many coarse comic effects are the
direct result of a drop from some very subtle comic element. For
instance, vanity, that higher form of the comic, is an element we are
prone to look for, minutely though unconsciously, in every
manifestation of human activity. We look for it if only to laugh at it.
Indeed, our imagination often locates it where it has no business to
be. Perhaps we must attribute to this source the altogether coarse
comic element in certain effects which psychologists have very
inadequately explained by contrast: a short man bowing his head to pass
beneath a large door; two individuals, one very tall the other a mere
dwarf, gravely walking along arm-in-arm, etc. By scanning narrowly this
latter image, we shall probably find that the shorter of the two
persons seems as though he were trying TO RAISE HIMSELF to the height
of the taller, like the frog that wanted to make itself as large as the
ox.
III
It would be quite impossible to go through all the peculiarities of
character that either coalesce or compete with vanity in order to force
themselves upon the attention of the comic poet. We have shown that all
failings may become laughable, and even, occasionally, many a good
quality. Even though a list of all the peculiarities that have ever
been found ridiculous were drawn up, comedy would manage to add to
them, not indeed by creating artificial ones, but by discovering lines
of comic development that had hitherto gone unnoticed; thus does
imagination isolate ever fresh figures in the intricate design of one
and the same piece of tapestry. The essential condition, as we know, is
that the peculiarity observed should straightway appear as a kind of
CATEGORY into which a number of individuals can step.
Now, there are ready-made categories established by society itself, and
necessary to it because it is based on the division of labour. We mean
the various trades, public services and professions. Each particular
profession impresses on its corporate members certain habits of mind
and peculiarities of character in which they resemble each other and
also distinguish themselves from the rest. Small societies are thus
formed within the bosom of Society at large. Doubtless they arise from
the very organisation of Society as a whole. And yet, if they held too
much aloof, there would be a risk of their proving harmful to
sociability.
Now, it is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency.
Its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the
individual to the whole, in short, to round off the corners wherever
they are met with. Accordingly, we here find a species of the comic
whose varieties might be calculated beforehand. This we shall call the
PROFESSIONAL COMIC.
Instead of taking up these varieties in detail, we prefer to lay stress
upon what they have in common. In the forefront we find professional
vanity. Each one of M. Jourdain's teachers exalts his own art above all
the rest. In a play of Labiche there is a character who cannot
understand how it is possible to be anything else than a timber
merchant. Naturally he is a timber merchant himself. Note that vanity
here tends to merge into SOLEMNITY, in proportion to the degree of
quackery there is in the profession under consideration. For it is a
remarkable fact that the more questionable an art, science or
occupation is, the more those who practise it are inclined to regard
themselves as invested with a kind of priesthood and to claim that all
should bow before its mysteries. Useful professions are clearly meant
for the public, but those whose utility is more dubious can only
justify their existence by assuming that the public is meant for them:
now, this is just the illusion that lies at the root of solemnity.
Almost everything comic in Moliere's doctors comes from this source.
They treat the patient as though he had been made for the doctors, and
nature herself as an appendage to medicine.
Another form of this comic rigidity is what may be called PROFESSIONAL
CALLOUSNESS. The comic character is so tightly jammed into the rigid
frame of his functions that he has no room to move or to be moved like
other men. Only call to mind the answer Isabelle receives from Perrin
Dandin, the judge, when she asks him how he can bear to look on when
the poor wretches are being tortured: Bah! cela fait toujours passer
une heure ou deux.
[Footnote: Bah! it always helps to while away an hour or two.]
Does not Tartuffe also manifest a sort of professional callousness when
he says--it is true, by the mouth of Orgon: Et je verrais mourir frere,
enfants, mere et femme, Que je m'en soucierais autant que de cela!
[Footnote: Let brother, children, mother and wife all die, what should
I care!]
The device most in use, however, for making a profession ludicrous is
to confine it, so to say, within the four corners of its own particular
jargon. Judge, doctor and soldier are made to apply the language of
law, medicine and strategy to the everyday affairs of life, as though
they had became incapable of talking like ordinary people. As a rule,
this kind of the ludicrous is rather coarse. It becomes more refined,
however, as we have already said, if it reveals some peculiarity of
character in addition to a professional habit. We will instance only
Regnard's Joueur, who expresses himself with the utmost originality in
terms borrowed from gambling, giving his valet the name of Hector, and
calling his betrothed Pallas, du nom connu de la Dame de Pique;
[Footnote: Pallas, from the well-known name of the Queen of Spades.] or
Moliere's Femmes savantes, where the comic element evidently consists
largely in the translation of ideas of a scientific nature into terms
of feminine sensibility: "Epicure me plait..." (Epicurus is charming),
"J'aime les tourbillons" (I dote on vortices), etc. You have only to
read the third act to find that Armande, Philaminte and Belise almost
invariably express themselves in this style.
Proceeding further in the same direction, we discover that there is
also such a thing as a professional logic, i.e. certain ways of
reasoning that are customary in certain circles, which are valid for
these circles, but untrue for the rest of the public. Now, the contrast
between these two kinds of logic--one particular, the other
universal--produces comic effects of a special nature, on which we may
advantageously dwell at greater length. Here we touch upon a point of
some consequence in the theory of laughter. We propose, therefore, to
give the question a wider scope and consider it in its most general
aspect.
IV
Eager as we have been to discover the deep-seated cause of the comic,
we have so far had to neglect one of its most striking phenomena. We
refer to the logic peculiar to the comic character and the comic group,
a strange kind of logic, which, in some cases, may include a good deal
of absurdity.
Theophile Gautier said that the comic in its extreme form was the logic
of the absurd. More than one philosophy of laughter revolves round a
like idea. Every comic effect, it is said, implies contradiction in
some of its aspects. What makes us laugh is alleged to be the absurd
realised in concrete shape, a "palpable absurdity";--or, again, an
apparent absurdity, which we swallow for the moment only to rectify it
immediately afterwards;--or, better still, something absurd from one
point of view though capable of a natural explanation from another,
etc. All these theories may contain some portion of the truth; but, in
the first place, they apply only to certain rather obvious comic
effects, and then, even where they do apply, they evidently take no
account of the characteristic element of the laughable, that is, the
PARTICULAR KIND of absurdity the comic contains when it does contain
something absurd. Is an immediate proof of this desired? You have only
to choose one of these definitions and make up effects in accordance
with the formula: twice out of every three times there will be nothing
laughable in the effect obtained. So we see that absurdity, when met
with in the comic, is not absurdity IN GENERAL. It is an absurdity of a
definite kind. It does not create the comic; rather, we might say that
the comic infuses into it its own particular essence. It is not a
cause, but an effect--an effect of a very special kind, which reflects
the special nature of its cause. Now, this cause is known to us;
consequently we shall have no trouble in understanding the nature of
the effect.
Assume, when out for a country walk, that you notice on the top of a
hill something that bears a faint resemblance to a large motionless
body with revolving arms. So far you do not know what it is, but you
begin to search amongst your IDEAS--that is to say, in the present
instance, amongst the recollections at your disposal--for that
recollection which will best fit in with what you see. Almost
immediately the image of a windmill comes into your mind: the object
before you is a windmill. No matter if, before leaving the house, you
have just been reading fairy-tales telling of giants with enormous
arms; for although common sense consists mainly in being able to
remember, it consists even more in being able to forget. Common sense
represents the endeavour of a mind continually adapting itself anew and
changing ideas when it changes objects. It is the mobility of the
intelligence conforming exactly to the mobility of things. It is the
moving continuity of our attention to life. But now, let us take Don
Quixote setting out for the wars. The romances he has been reading all
tell of knights encountering, on the way, giant adversaries. He
therefore must needs encounter a giant. This idea of a giant is a
privileged recollection which has taken its abode in his mind and lies
there in wait, motionless, watching for an opportunity to sally forth
and become embodied in a thing. It IS BENT on entering the material
world, and so the very first object he sees bearing the faintest
resemblance to a giant is invested with the form of one. Thus Don
Quixote sees giants where we see windmills. This is comical; it is also
absurd. But is it a mere absurdity,--an absurdity of an indefinite kind?
It is a very special inversion of common sense. It consists in seeking
to mould things on an idea of one's own, instead of moulding one's
ideas on things,--in seeing before us what we are thinking of, instead
of thinking of what we see. Good sense would have us leave all our
memories in their proper rank and file; then the appropriate memory
will every time answer the summons of the situation of the moment and
serve only to interpret it. But in Don Quixote, on the contrary, there
is one group of memories in command of all the rest and dominating the
character itself: thus it is reality that now has to bow to
imagination, its only function being to supply fancy with a body. Once
the illusion has been created, Don Quixote develops it logically enough
in all its consequences; he proceeds with the certainty and precision
of a somnambulist who is acting his dream. Such, then, is the origin of
his delusions, and such the particular logic which controls this
particular absurdity. Now, is this logic peculiar to Don Quixote?
We have shown that the comic character always errs through obstinacy of
mind or of disposition, through absentmindedness, in short, through
automatism. At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which
compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight
along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen. In Moliere's plays how
many comic scenes can be reduced to this simple type: A CHARACTER
FOLLOWING UP HIS ONE IDEA, and continually recurring to it in spite of
incessant interruptions! The transition seems to take place
imperceptibly from the man who will listen to nothing to the one who
will see nothing, and from this latter to the one who sees only what he
wants to see. A stubborn spirit ends by adjusting things to its own way
of thinking, instead of accommodating its thoughts to the things. So
every comic character is on the highroad to the above-mentioned
illusion, and Don Quixote furnishes us with the general type of comic
absurdity.
Is there a name for this inversion of common sense? Doubtless it may be
found, in either an acute or a chronic form, in certain types of
insanity. In many of its aspects it resembles a fixed idea. But neither
insanity in general, nor fixed ideas in particular, are provocative of
laughter: they are diseases, and arouse our pity.
Laughter, as we have seen, is incompatible with emotion. If there
exists a madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible with
the general health of the mind,--a sane type of madness, one might say.
Now, there is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in every
respect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do in
lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea. This state is that
of dreams. So either our analysis is incorrect, or it must be capable
of being stated in the following theorem: Comic absurdity is of the
same nature as that of dreams.
The behaviour of the intellect in a dream is exactly what we have just
been describing. The mind, enamoured of itself, now seeks in the outer
world nothing more than a pretext for realising its imaginations. A
confused murmur of sounds still reaches the ear, colours enter the
field of vision, the senses are not completely shut in. But the
dreamer, instead of appealing to the whole of his recollections for the
interpretation of what his senses perceive, makes use of what he
perceives to give substance to the particular recollection he favours:
thus, according to the mood of the dreamer and the idea that fills his
imagination at the time, a gust of wind blowing down the chimney
becomes the howl of a wild beast or a tuneful melody. Such is the
ordinary mechanism of illusion in dreams.
Now, if comic illusion is similar to dream illusion, if the logic of
the comic is the logic of dreams, we may expect to discover in the
logic of the laughable all the peculiarities of dream logic. Here,
again, we shall find an illustration of the law with which we are well
acquainted: given one form of the laughable, other forms that are
lacking in the same comic essence become laughable from their outward
resemblance to the first. Indeed, it is not difficult to see that any
PLAY OF IDEAS may afford us amusement if only it bring back to mind,
more or less distinctly, the play of dreamland.
We shall first call attention to a certain general relaxation of the
rules of reasoning. The reasonings at which we laugh are those we know
to be false, but which we might accept as true were we to hear them in
a dream. They counterfeit true reasoning just sufficiently to deceive a
mind dropping off to sleep. There is still an element of logic in them,
if you will, but it is a logic lacking in tension and, for that very
reason, affording us relief from intellectual effort. Many "witticisms"
are reasonings of this kind, considerably abridged reasonings, of which
we are given only the beginning and the end. Such play upon ideas
evolves in the direction of a play upon words in proportion as the
relations set up between the ideas become more superficial: gradually
we come to take no account of the meaning of the words we hear, but
only of their sound. It might be instructive to compare with dreams
certain comic scenes in which one of the characters systematically
repeats in a nonsensical fashion what another character whispers in his
ear. If you fall asleep with people talking round you, you sometimes
find that what they say gradually becomes devoid of meaning, that the
sounds get distorted, as it were, and recombine in a haphazard fashion
to form in your mind the strangest of meanings, and that you are
reproducing between yourself and the different speakers the scene
between Petit-Jean and The Prompter. [Footnote: Les Plaideurs (Racine).]
There are also COMIC OBSESSIONS that seem to bear a great resemblance
to dream obsessions. Who has not had the experience of seeing the same
image appear in several successive dreams, assuming a plausible meaning
in each of them, whereas these dreams had no other point in common.
Effects of repetition sometimes present this special form on the stage
or in fiction: some of them, in fact, sound as though they belonged to
a dream. It may be the same with the burden of many a song: it
persistently recurs, always unchanged, at the end of every verse, each
time with a different meaning.
Not infrequently do we notice in dreams a particular CRESCENDO, a weird
effect that grows more pronounced as we proceed. The first concession
extorted from reason introduces a second; and this one, another of a
more serious nature; and so on till the crowning absurdity is reached.
Now, this progress towards the absurd produces on the dreamer a very
peculiar sensation. Such is probably the experience of the tippler when
he feels himself pleasantly drifting into a state of blankness in which
neither reason nor propriety has any meaning for him. Now, consider
whether some of Moliere's plays would not produce the same sensation:
for instance, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, which, after beginning almost
reasonably, develops into a sequence of all sorts of absurdities.
Consider also the Bourgeois gentilhomme, where the different characters
seem to allow themselves to be caught up in a very whirlwind of madness
as the play proceeds. "If it is possible to find a man more completely
mad, I will go and publish it in Rome." This sentence, which warns us
that the play is over, rouses us from the increasingly extravagant
dream into which, along with M. Jourdain, we have been sinking.
But, above all, there is a special madness that is peculiar to dreams.
There are certain special contradictions so natural to the imagination
of a dreamer, and so absurd to the reason of a man wide-awake, that it
would be impossible to give a full and correct idea of their nature to
anyone who had not experienced them. We allude to the strange fusion
that a dream often effects between two persons who henceforth form only
one and yet remain distinct. Generally one of these is the dreamer
himself. He feels he has not ceased to be what he is; yet he has become
someone else. He is himself, and not himself. He hears himself speak
and sees himself act, but he feels that some other "he" has borrowed
his body and stolen his voice. Or perhaps he is conscious of speaking
and acting as usual, but he speaks of himself as a stranger with whom
he has nothing in common; he has stepped out of his own self. Does it
not seem as though we found this same extraordinary confusion in many a
comic scene? I am not speaking of Amphitryon, in which play the
confusion is perhaps suggested to the mind of the spectator, though the
bulk of the comic effect proceeds rather from what we have already
called a "reciprocal interference of two series." I am speaking of the
extravagant and comic reasonings in which we really meet with this
confusion in its pure form, though it requires some looking into to
pick it out. For instance, listen to Mark Twain's replies to the
reporter who called to interview him:
QUESTION. Isn't that a brother of yours? ANSWER. Oh! yes, yes, yes! Now
you remind me of it, that WAS a brother of mine. That's William--BILL
we called him. Poor old Bill!
Q. Why? Is he dead, then? A. Ah! well, I suppose so. We never could
tell. There was a great mystery about it.
Q. That is sad, very sad. He disappeared, then? A. Well, yes, in a sort
of general way. We buried him.
Q. BURIED him! BURIED him, without knowing whether he was dead or not?
A. Oh no! Not that. He was dead enough.
Q. Well, I confess that I can't understand this. If you buried him, and
you knew he was dead--A. No! no! We only thought he was.
Q. Oh, I see! He came to life again? A. I bet he didn't.
Q. Well, I never heard anything like this. SOMEBODY was dead. SOMEBODY
was buried. Now, where was the mystery? A. Ah! that's just it! That's
it exactly. You see, we were twins,--defunct and I,--and we got mixed
in the bath-tub when we were only two weeks old, and one of us was
drowned. But we didn't know which. Some think it was Bill. Some think
it was me.
Q. Well, that is remarkable. What do YOU think? A. Goodness knows! I
would give whole worlds to know. This solemn, this awful tragedy has
cast a gloom over my whole life. But I will tell you a secret now,
which I have never revealed to any creature before. One of us had a
peculiar mark,--a large mole on the back of his left hand: that was ME.
THAT CHILD WAS THE ONE THAT WAS DROWNED! ... etc., etc.
A close examination will show us that the absurdity of this dialogue is
by no means an absurdity of an ordinary type. It would disappear were
not the speaker himself one of the twins in the story. It results
entirely from the fact that Mark Twain asserts he is one of these
twins, whilst all the time he talks as though he were a third person
who tells the tale. In many of our dreams we adopt exactly the same
method.
V
Regarded from this latter point of view, the comic seems to show itself
in a form somewhat different from the one we lately attributed to it.
Up to this point, we have regarded laughter as first and foremost a
means of correction. If you take the series of comic varieties and
isolate the predominant types at long intervals, you will find that all
the intervening varieties borrow their comic quality from their
resemblance to these types, and that the types themselves are so many
models of impertinence with regard to society. To these impertinences
society retorts by laughter, an even greater impertinence. So evidently
there is nothing very benevolent in laughter. It seems rather inclined
to return evil for evil.
But this is not what we are immediately struck by in our first
impression of the laughable. The comic character is often one with
whom, to begin with, our mind, or rather our body, sympathises. By this
is meant that we put ourselves for a very short time in his place,
adopt his gestures, words, arid actions, and, if amused by anything
laughable in him, invite him, in imagination, to share his amusement
with us; in fact, we treat him first as a playmate. So, in the laugher
we find a "hail-fellow-well-met" spirit--as far, at least, as
appearances go--which it would be wrong of us not to take into
consideration. In particular, there is in laughter a movement of
relaxation which has often been noticed, and the reason of which we
must try to discover. Nowhere is this impression more noticeable than
in the last few examples. In them, indeed, we shall find its
explanation.
When the comic character automatically follows up his idea, he
ultimately thinks, speaks and acts as though he were dreaming. Now, a
dream is a relaxation. To remain in touch with things and men, to see
nothing but what is existent and think nothing but what is consistent,
demands a continuous effort of intellectual tension. This effort is
common sense. And to remain sensible is, indeed, to remain at work. But
to detach oneself from things and yet continue to perceive images, to
break away from logic and yet continue to string together ideas, is to
indulge in play or, if you prefer, in dolce far niente. So, comic
absurdity gives us from the outset the impression of playing with
ideas. Our first impulse is to join in the game. That relieves us from
the strain of thinking. Now, the same might be said of the other forms
of the laughable. Deep-rooted in the comic, there is always a tendency,
we said, to take the line of least resistance, generally that of habit.
The comic character no longer tries to be ceaselessly adapting and
readapting himself to the society of which he is a member. He slackens
in the attention that is due to life. He more or less resembles the
absentminded. Maybe his will is here even more concerned than his
intellect, and there is not so much a want of attention as a lack of
tension; still, in some way or another, he is absent, away from his
work, taking it easy. He abandons social convention, as indeed--in the
case we have just been considering--he abandoned logic. Here, too, our
first impulse is to accept the invitation to take it easy. For a short
time, at all events, we join in the game. And that relieves us from the
strain of living.
But we rest only for a short time. The sympathy that is capable of
entering into the impression of the comic is a very fleeting one. It
also comes from a lapse in attention. Thus, a stern father may at times
forget himself and join in some prank his child is playing, only to
check himself at once in order to correct it.
Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it
must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is
directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken
with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy
or kindness.
Shall we be told that the motive, at all events; may be a good one,
that we often punish because we love, and that laughter, by checking
the outer manifestations of certain failings, thus causes the person
laughed at to correct these failings and thereby improve himself
inwardly?
Much might be said on this point. As a general rule, and speaking
roughly, laughter doubtless exercises a useful function. Indeed, the
whole of our analysis points to this fact. But it does not therefore
follow that laughter always hits the mark or is invariably inspired by
sentiments of kindness or even of justice.
To be certain of always hitting the mark, it would have to proceed from
an act of reflection. Now, laughter is simply the result of a mechanism
set up in us by nature or, what is almost the same thing, by our long
acquaintance with social life. It goes off spontaneously and returns
tit for tat. It has no time to look where it hits. Laughter punishes
certain failing's somewhat as disease punishes certain forms of excess,
striking down some who are innocent and sparing some who are guilty,
aiming at a general result and incapable of dealing separately with
each individual case. And so it is with everything that comes to pass
by natural means instead of happening by conscious reflection. An
average of justice may show itself in the total result, though the
details, taken separately, often point to anything but justice.
In this sense, laughter cannot be absolutely just. Nor should it be
kind-hearted either. Its function is to intimidate by humiliating. Now,
it would not succeed in doing this, had not nature implanted for that
very purpose, even in the best of men, a spark of spitefulness or, at
all events, of mischief. Perhaps we had better not investigate this
point too closely, for we should not find anything very flattering to
ourselves. We should see that this movement of relaxation or expansion
is nothing but a prelude to laughter, that the laugher immediately
retires within himself, more self-assertive and conceited than ever,
and is evidently disposed to look upon another's personality as a
marionette of which he pulls the strings. In this presumptuousness we
speedily discern a degree of egoism and, behind this latter, something
less spontaneous and more bitter, the beginnings of a curious pessimism
which becomes the more pronounced as the laugher more closely analyses
his laughter.
Here, as elsewhere, nature has utilised evil with a view to good. It is
more especially the good that has engaged our attention throughout this
work. We have seen that the more society improves, the more plastic is
the adaptability it obtains from its members; while the greater the
tendency towards increasing stability below, the more does it force to
the surface the disturbing elements inseparable from so vast a bulk;
and thus laughter performs a useful function by emphasising the form of
these significant undulations. Such is also the truceless warfare of
the waves on the surface of the sea, whilst profound peace reigns in
the depths below. The billows clash and collide with each other, as
they strive to find their level. A fringe of snow-white foam, feathery
and frolicsome, follows their changing outlines. From time to time, the
receding wave leaves behind a remnant of foam on the sandy beach. The
child, who plays hard by, picks up a handful, and, the next moment, is
astonished to find that nothing remains in his grasp but a few drops of
water, water that is far more brackish, far more bitter than that of
the wave which brought it. Laughter comes into being in the self-same
fashion. It indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life. It
instantly adopts the changing forms of the disturbance. It, also, is
afroth with a saline base. Like froth, it sparkles. It is gaiety
itself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may find
that the substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter.
[THE END]