it from establishing a connection with the rest of the soul in which it has taken up its abode.  This rigidity may be manifested, when the time comes, by puppet-like movements, and then it will provoke laughter; but, before that, it had already alienated our sympathy:  how can we put ourselves in tune with a soul which is not in tune with itself?  In Moliere’s L’Avare we have a scene bordering upon drama.  It is the one in which the borrower and the usurer, who have never seen each other, meet face to face and find that they are son and father.  Here we should be in the thick of a drama, if only greed and fatherly affection, conflicting with each other in the soul of Harpagon, had effected a more or less original combination.  But such is not the case.  No sooner has the interview come to an end than the father forgets everything.  On meeting his son again he barely alludes to the scene, serious though it has been:  “You, my son, whom I am good enough to forgive your recent escapade, etc.”  Greed has thus passed close to all other feelings absentmindedly, without either touching them or being touched.  Although it has taken up its abode in the soul and become master of the house, none the less it remains a stranger.  Far different would be avarice of a tragic sort.  We should find it attracting and absorbing, transforming and assimilating the divers energies of the man:  feelings and affections, likes and dislikes, vices and virtues, would all become something into which avarice would breathe a new kind of life.  Such seems to be the first essential difference between high-class comedy and drama.

There is a second, which is far more obvious and arises out of the first.  When a mental state is depicted to us with the object of making it dramatic, or even merely of inducing us to take it seriously, it gradually crystallises into actions which provide the real measure of its greatness.  Thus, the miser orders his whole life with a view to acquiring wealth, and the pious hypocrite, though pretending to have his eyes fixed upon heaven, steers most skilfully his course here below.  Most certainly, comedy does not shut out calculations of this kind; we need only take as an example the very machinations of Tartuffe.  But that is what comedy has in common with drama; and in order to keep distinct from it, to prevent our taking a serious action seriously, in short, in order to prepare us for laughter, comedy utilises a method, the formula of which may be given as follows:  Instead of concentrating our attention on actions, comedy directs it rather to gestures.  By gestures we here mean the attitudes, the movements and even the language by which a mental state expresses itself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no other cause than a kind of inner itching.  Gesture, thus defined, is profoundly different from action.  Action is intentional or, at any rate, conscious;