of telling everything. Each "I don't say that!" reveals a growing
effort to repress something that strives and struggles to get out.
And so the tone in which the phrase is uttered gets more and more
violent, Alceste becoming more and more angry--not with Oronte. as
he thinks--but with himself. The tension of the spring is
continually being renewed and reinforced until it at last goes off
with a bang. Here, as elsewhere, we have the same identical
mechanism of repetition.

For a man to make a resolution never henceforth to say what he does
not think, even though he "openly defy the whole human race," is not
necessarily laughable; it is only a phase of life at its highest and
best. For another man, through amiability, selfishness, or disdain,
to prefer to flatter people is only another phase of life; there is
nothing in it to make us laugh. You may even combine these two men
into one, and arrange that the individual waver between offensive
frankness and delusive politeness, this duel between two opposing
feelings will not even then be comic, rather it will appear the
essence of seriousness if these two feelings through their very
distinctness complete each other, develop side by side, and make up
between them a composite mental condition, adopting, in short, a
modus vivendi which merely gives us the complex impression of life.
But imagine these two feelings as INELASTIC and unvarying elements
in a really living man, make him oscillate from one to the other;
above all, arrange that this oscillation becomes entirely mechanical
by adopting the well-known form of some habitual, simple, childish
contrivance: then you will get the image we have so far found in all
laughable objects, SOMETHING MECHANICAL IN SOMETHING LIVING; in
fact, something comic.