Let us start with nature.  You laugh at a dog that is half-clipped, at a bed of artificially coloured flowers, at a wood in which the trees are plastered over with election addresses, etc.  Look for the reason, and you will see that you are once more thinking of a masquerade.  Here, however, the comic element is very faint; it is too far from its source.  If you wish to strengthen it, you must go back to the source itself and contrast the derived image, that of a masquerade, with the original one, which, be it remembered, was that of a mechanical tampering with life.  In “a nature that is mechanically tampered with” we possess a thoroughly comic theme, on which fancy will be able to play ever so many variations with the certainty of successfully provoking the heartiest hilarity.  You may call to mind that amusing passage in Tartarin Sur Les Alpes, in which Bompard makes Tartarin—­and therefore also the reader to some slight extent—­accept the idea of a Switzerland choke-full of machinery like the basement of the opera, and run by a company which maintains a series of waterfalls, glaciers and artificial crevasses.  The same theme reappears, though transposed in quite another key, in the Novel Notes of the English humorist, Jerome K. Jerome.  An elderly Lady Bountiful, who does not want her deeds of charity to take up too much of her time, provides homes within easy hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their failing, etc.  There are comic phrases in which this theme is audible, like a distant echo, coupled with an ingenuousness, whether sincere or affected, which acts as accompaniment.  Take, as an instance, the remark made by a lady whom Cassini, the astronomer, had invited to see an eclipse of the moon.  Arriving too late, she said, “M. de Cassini, I know, will have the goodness to begin it all over again, to please me.”  Or, take again the exclamation of one of Gondiinet’s characters on arriving in a town and learning that there is an extinct volcano in the neighbourhood, “They had a volcano, and they have let it go out!”

Let us go on to society.  As we are both in and of it, we cannot help treating it as a living being.  Any image, then, suggestive of the notion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, so to speak, will be laughable.  Now, such a notion is formed when we perceive anything inert or stereotyped, or simply ready-made, on the surface of living society.  There we have rigidity over again, clashing with the inner suppleness of life.  The ceremonial side of social life must, therefore, always include a latent comic element, which is only waiting for an opportunity to burst into full view.  It might be said that ceremonies are to the social body what clothing is to the individual body:  they owe their seriousness to the fact that they are identified, in our minds,