are the outward characteristics—­whether real or apparent is of little moment—­which distinguish the living from the merely mechanical.  Let us take the counterpart of each of these:  we shall obtain three processes which might be called repetition, inversion, and reciprocal interference of series.  Now, it is easy to see that these are also the methods of light comedy, and that no others are possible.

As a matter of fact, we could discover them, as ingredients of varying importance, in the composition of all the scenes we have just been considering, and, a fortiori, in the children’s games, the mechanism of which they reproduce.  The requisite analysis would, however, delay us too long, and it is more profitable to study them in their purity by taking fresh examples.  Nothing could be easier, for it is in their pure state that they are found both in classic comedy and in contemporary plays.

1.  Repetition.-Our present problem no longer deals, like the preceding one, with a word or a sentence repeated by an individual, but rather with a situation, that is, a combination of circumstances, which recurs several times in its original form and thus contrasts with the changing stream of life.  Everyday experience supplies us with this type of the comic, though only in a rudimentary state.  Thus, you meet a friend in the street whom you have not seen for an age; there is nothing comic in the situation.  If, however, you meet, him again the same day, and then a third and a fourth time, you may laugh at the “coincidence.”  Now, picture to yourself a series of imaginary events which affords a tolerably fair illusion of life, and within this ever-moving series imagine one and the same scene reproduced either by the same characters or by different ones:  again you will have a coincidence, though a far more extraordinary one.

Such are the repetitions produced on the stage.  They are the more laughable in proportion as the scene repeated is more complex and more naturally introduced—­two conditions which seem mutually exclusive, and which the play-writer must be clever enough to reconcile.

Contemporary light comedy employs this method in every shape and form.  One of the best-known examples consists in bringing a group of characters, act after act, into the most varied surroundings, so as to reproduce, under ever fresh circumstances, one and the same series of incidents or accidents more or less symmetrically identical.

In several of Moliere’s plays we find one and the same arrangement of events repeated right through the comedy from beginning to end.  Thus, the Ecole des femmes does nothing more than reproduce and repeat a single incident in three tempi:  first tempo, Horace tells Arnolphe of the plan he has devised to deceive Agnes’s guardian, who turns out to be Arnolphe himself; second tempo, Arnolphe thinks he has checkmated the move; third tempo, Agnes contrives