All that is serious in life comes from our freedom.  The feelings we have matured, the passions we have brooded over, the actions we have weighed, decided upon, and carried through, in short, all that comes from us and is our very own, these are the things that give life its ofttimes dramatic and generally grave aspect.  What, then, is requisite to transform all this into a comedy?  Merely to fancy that our seeming, freedom conceals the strings of a dancing-Jack, and that we are, as the poet says,

... humble marionettes The wires of which are pulled by Fate. [Footnote:  ... d’humbles marionnettes Dont le fil est aux mains de la Necessite.  Sully-Prudhomme.]

So there is not a real, a serious, or even a dramatic scene that fancy cannot render comic by simply calling forth this image.  Nor is there a game for which a wider field lies open.

3.  The snow-ball.—­The farther we proceed in this investigation into the methods of comedy, the more clearly we see the part played by childhood’s memories.  These memories refer, perhaps, less to any special game than to the mechanical device of which that game is a particular instance.  The same general device, moreover, may be met with in widely different games, just as the same operatic air is found in many different arrangements and variations.  What is here of importance and is retained in the mind, what passes by imperceptible stages from the games of a child to those of a man, is the mental diagram, the skeleton outline of the combination, or, if you like, the abstract formula of which these games are particular illustrations.  Take, for instance, the rolling snow-ball, which increases in size as it moves along.  We might just as well think of toy soldiers standing behind one another.  Push the first and it tumbles down on the second, this latter knocks down the third, and the state of things goes from bad to worse until they all lie prone on the floor.  Or again, take a house of cards that has been built up with infinite care:  the first you touch seems uncertain whether to move or not, its tottering neighbour comes to a quicker decision, and the work of destruction, gathering momentum as it goes on, rushes headlong to the final collapse.

These instances are all different, but they suggest the same abstract vision, that of an effect which grows by arithmetical progression, so that the cause, insignificant at the outset, culminates by a necessary evolution in a result as important as it is unexpected.  Now let us open a children’s picture-book; we shall find this arrangement already on the high road to becoming comic.  Here, for instance—­in one of the comic chap-books picked up by chance—­we have a caller rushing violently into a drawing-room; he knocks against a lady, who upsets her cup of tea over an old gentleman, who slips against a glass window which falls in the street on to the head of a constable, who sets the whole police force agog, etc.