up once for all and capable of working automatically.  It is, if you will, that which causes us to imitate ourselves.  And it is also, for that very reason, that which enables others to imitate us.  Every comic character is a type.  Inversely, every resemblance to a type has something comic in it.  Though we may long have associated with an individual without discovering anything about him to laugh at, still, if advantage is t taken of some accidental analogy to dub him with the name of a famous hero of romance or drama, he will in our eyes border upon the ridiculous, if only for a moment.  And yet this hero of romance may not be a comic character at all.  But then it is comic to be like him.  It is comic to wander out of one’s own self.  It is comic to fall into a ready-made category.  And what is most comic of all is to become a category oneself into which others will fall, as into a ready-made frame; it is to crystallise into a stock character.

Thus, to depict characters, that is to say, general types, is the object of high-class comedy.  This has often been said.  But it is as well to repeat it, since there could be no better definition of comedy.  Not only are we entitled to say that comedy gives us general types, but we might add that it is the only one of all the arts that aims at the general; so that once this objective has been attributed to it, we have said all that it is and all that the rest cannot be.  To prove that such is really the essence of comedy, and that it is in this respect opposed to tragedy, drama and the other forms of art, we should begin by defining art in its higher forms:  then, gradually coming down to comic poetry, we should find that this latter is situated on the border-line between art and life, and that, by the generality of its subject-matter, it contrasts with the rest of the arts.  We cannot here plunge into so vast a subject of investigation; but we needs must sketch its main outlines, lest we overlook what, to our mind, is essential on the comic stage.

What is the object of art?  Could reality come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves, probably art would be useless, or rather we should all be artists, for then our soul would continually vibrate in perfect accord with nature.  Our eyes, aided by memory, would carve out in space and fix in time the most inimitable of pictures.  Hewn in the living marble of the human form, fragments of statues, beautiful as the relics of antique statuary, would strike the passing glance.  Deep in our souls we should hear the strains of our inner life’s unbroken melody,—­a music that is ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintive and always original.  All this is around and within us, and yet no whit of it do we distinctly perceive.  Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed:  a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,—­thin,