gesture slips out unawares, it is automatic.  In action, the entire person is engaged; in gesture, an isolated part of the person is expressed, unknown to, or at least apart from, the whole of the personality.  Lastly—­and here is the essential point—­ action is in exact proportion to the feeling that inspires it:  the one gradually passes into the other, so that we may allow our sympathy or our aversion to glide along the line running from feeling to action and become increasingly interested.  About gesture, however, there is something explosive, which awakes our sensibility when on the point of being lulled to sleep and, by thus rousing us up, prevents our taking matters seriously.  Thus, as soon as our attention is fixed on gesture and not on action, we are in the realm of comedy.  Did we merely take his actions into account, Tartuffe would belong to drama:  it is only when we take his gestures into consideration that we find him comic.  You may remember how he comes on to the stage with the words:  “Laurent, lock up my hair-shirt and my scourge.”  He knows Dorine is listening to him, but doubtless he would say the same if she were not there.  He enters so thoroughly into the role of a hypocrite that he plays it almost sincerely.  In this way, and this way only, can he become comic.  Were it not for this material sincerity, were it not for the language and attitudes that his long-standing experience as a hypocrite has transformed into natural gestures, Tartuffe would be simply odious, because we should only think of what is meant and willed in his conduct.  And so we see why action is essential in drama, but only accessory in comedy.  In a comedy, we feel any other situation might equally well have been chosen for the purpose of introducing the character; he would still have been the same man though the situation were different.  But we do not get this impression in a drama.  Here characters and situations are welded together, or rather, events form part and parcel with the persons, so that were the drama to tell us a different story, even though the actors kept the same names, we should in reality be dealing with other persons.

To sum up, whether a character is good or bad is of little moment:  granted he is unsociable, he is capable of becoming comic.  We now see that the seriousness of the case is of no importance either:  whether serious or trifling, it is still capable of making us laugh, provided that care be taken not to arouse our emotions.  Unsociability in the performer and insensibility in the spectator—­ such, in a word, are the two essential conditions.  There is a third, implicit in the other two, which so far it has been the aim of our analysis to bring out.