several, nay, as great a number as possible, the image of one
another, who come and go, dance and gesticulate together,
simultaneously striking the same attitudes and tossing their arms
about in the same manner. This time, we distinctly think of
marionettes. Invisible threads seem to us to be joining arms to
arms, legs to legs, each muscle in one face to its fellow-muscle in
the other: by reason of the absolute uniformity which prevails, the
very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen as we gaze, and the
actors themselves seem transformed into automata. Such, at least,
appears to be the artifice underlying this somewhat obvious form of
amusement. I daresay the performers have never read Pascal, but what
they do is merely to realise to the full the suggestions contained
in Pascal's words. If, as is undoubtedly the case, laughter is
caused in the second instance by the hallucination of a mechanical
effect, it must already have been so, though in more subtle fashion,
in the first.

Continuing along this path, we dimly perceive the increasingly
important and far-reaching consequences of the law we have just
stated. We faintly catch still more fugitive glimpses of mechanical
effects, glimpses suggested by man's complex actions, no longer
merely by his gestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices
of comedy, the periodical repetition of a word or a scene, the
systematic inversion of the parts, the geometrical development of a
farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must
derive their comic force from the same source,--the art of the
playwright probably consisting in setting before us an obvious
clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully preserving an
outward aspect of probability and thereby retaining something of the
suppleness of life. But we must not forestall results which will be