seen, the garment was to the body itself—­inert matter dumped down upon living energy.  The impression of the comic will be produced as soon as we have a clear apprehension of this putting the one on the other.  And we shall experience it most strongly when we are shown the soul tantalised by the needs of the body:  on the one hand, the moral personality with its intelligently varied energy, and, on the other, the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its machine-like obstinacy.  The more paltry and uniformly repeated these claims of the body, the more striking will be the result.  But that is only a matter of degree, and the general law of these phenomena may be formulated as follows:  Any incident is comic that calls our attention to the physical in A person when it is the moral side that is concerned.

Why do we laugh at a public speaker who sneezes just at the most pathetic moment of his speech?  Where lies the comic element in this sentence, taken from a funeral speech and quoted by a German philosopher:  “He was virtuous and plump”?  It lies in the fact that our attention is suddenly recalled from the soul to the body.  Similar instances abound in daily life, but if you do not care to take the trouble to look for them, you have only to open at random a volume of Labiche, and you will be almost certain to light upon an effect of this kind.  Now, we have a speaker whose most eloquent sentences are cut short by the twinges of a bad tooth; now, one of the characters who never begins to speak without stopping in the middle to complain of his shoes being too small, or his belt too tight, etc.  A person embarrassed by his body is the image suggested to us in all these examples.  The reason that excessive stoutness is laughable is probably because it calls up an image of the same kind.  I almost think that this too is what sometime makes bashfulness somewhat ridiculous.  The bashful man rather gives the impression of a person embarrassed by his body, looking round for some convenient cloak-room in which to deposit it.

This is just why the tragic poet is so careful to avoid anything calculated to attract attention to the material side of his heroes.  No sooner does anxiety about the body manifest itself than the intrusion of a comic element is to be feared.  On this account, the hero in a tragedy does not eat or drink or warm himself.  He does not even sit down any more than can be helped.  To sit down in the middle of a fine speech would imply that you remembered you had a body.  Napoleon, who was a psychologist when he wished to be so, had noticed that the transition from tragedy to comedy is effected simply by sitting down.  In the “Journal inedit” of Baron Gourgaud—­ when speaking of an interview