deuce did he want in that galley?" The same criticism is applicable
to the scene in which Valere points out to Harpagon the wrong he
would be doing in marrying his daughter to a man she did not love.
"No dowry wanted!" interrupts the miserly Harpagon every few
moments. Behind this exclamation, which recurs automatically, we
faintly discern a complete repeating-machine set going by a fixed
idea.

At times this mechanism is less easy to detect, and here we
encounter a fresh difficulty in the theory of the comic. Sometimes
the whole interest of a scene lies in one character playing a double
part, the intervening speaker acting as a mere prism, so to speak,
through which the dual personality is developed. We run the risk,
then, of going astray if we look for the secret of the effect in
what we see and hear,--in the external scene played by the
characters,--and not in the altogether inner comedy of which this
scene is no more than the outer refraction. For instance, when
Alceste stubbornly repeats the words, "I don't say that!" on Oronte
asking him if he thinks his poetry bad, the repetition is laughable,
though evidently Oronte is not now playing with Alceste at the game
we have just described. We must be careful, however, for, in
reality, we have two men in Alceste: on the one hand, the
"misanthropist" who has vowed henceforth to call a spade a spade,
and on the other the gentleman who cannot unlearn, in a trice, the
usual forms of politeness, or even, it may be, just the honest
fellow who, when called upon to put his words into practice, shrinks
from wounding another's self-esteem or hurting his feelings.
Accordingly, the real scene is not between Alceste and Oronte, it is
between Alceste and himself. The one Alceste would fain blurt out
the truth, and the other stops his mouth just as he is on the point