When Dorine is telling Orgon of his wife’s illness, and the latter continually interrupts him with inquiries as to the health of Tartuffe, the question:  “Et tartuffe?” repeated every few moments, affords us the distinct sensation of a spring being released.  This spring Dorine delights in pushing back, each time she resumes her account of Elmire’s illness.  And when Scapin informs old Geronte that his son has been taken prisoner on the famous galley, and that a ransom must be paid without delay, he is playing with the avarice of Geronte exactly as Dorine does with the infatuation of Orgon.  The old man’s avarice is no sooner repressed than up it springs again automatically, and it is this automatism that Moliere tries to indicate by the mechanical repetition of a sentence expressing regret at the money that would have to be forthcoming:  “What the deuce did he want in that galley?” The same criticism is applicable to the scene in which Valere points out to Harpagon the wrong he would be doing in marrying his daughter to a man she did not love.  “No dowry wanted!” interrupts the miserly Harpagon every few moments.  Behind this exclamation, which recurs automatically, we faintly discern a complete repeating-machine set going by a fixed idea.

At times this mechanism is less easy to detect, and here we encounter a fresh difficulty in the theory of the comic.  Sometimes the whole interest of a scene lies in one character playing a double part, the intervening speaker acting as a mere prism, so to speak, through which the dual personality is developed.  We run the risk, then, of going astray if we look for the secret of the effect in what we see and hear,—­in the external scene played by the characters,—­and not in the altogether inner comedy of which this scene is no more than the outer refraction.  For instance, when Alceste stubbornly repeats the words, “I don’t say that!” on Oronte asking him if he thinks his poetry bad, the repetition is laughable, though evidently Oronte is not now playing with Alceste at the game we have just described.  We must be careful, however, for, in reality, we have two men in Alceste:  on the one hand, the “misanthropist” who has vowed henceforth to call a spade a spade, and on the other the gentleman who cannot unlearn, in a trice, the usual forms of politeness, or even, it may be, just the honest fellow who, when called upon to put his words into practice, shrinks from wounding another’s self-esteem or hurting his feelings.  Accordingly, the real scene is not between Alceste and Oronte, it is between Alceste and himself.  The one Alceste would fain blurt out the truth, and the other stops his mouth just as he is on the point of telling everything.  Each “I don’t say that!” reveals a growing effort to repress something that strives and struggles to get out.  And so the tone in which the phrase is uttered gets more and more violent, Alceste becoming more and more angry—­not with Oronte. as he thinks—­but with himself.  The tension of the spring is continually being renewed and reinforced until it at last goes off with a bang.  Here, as elsewhere, we have the same identical mechanism of repetition.