the state of things goes from bad to worse until they all lie prone
on the floor. Or again, take a house of cards that has been built up
with infinite care: the first you touch seems uncertain whether to
move or not, its tottering neighbour comes to a quicker decision,
and the work of destruction, gathering momentum as it goes on,
rushes headlong to the final collapse.

These instances are all different, but they suggest the same
abstract vision, that of an effect which grows by arithmetical
progression, so that the cause, insignificant at the outset,
culminates by a necessary evolution in a result as important as it
is unexpected. Now let us open a children's picture-book; we shall
find this arrangement already on the high road to becoming comic.
Here, for instance--in one of the comic chap-books picked up by
chance--we have a caller rushing violently into a drawing-room; he
knocks against a lady, who upsets her cup of tea over an old
gentleman, who slips against a glass window which falls in the
street on to the head of a constable, who sets the whole police
force agog, etc. The same arrangement reappears in many a picture
intended for grownup persons. In the "stories without words"
sketched by humorous artists we are often shown an object which
moves from place to place, and persons who are closely connected
with it, so that through a series of scenes a change in the position
of the object mechanically brings about increasingly serious changes
in the situation of the persons. Let us now turn to comedy. Many a
droll scene, many a comedy even, may be referred to this simple
type. Read the speech of Chicanneau in the Plaideurs: here we find
lawsuits within lawsuits, and the mechanism works faster and faster-
-Racine produces in us this feeling of increasing acceleration by
crowding his law terms ever closer together--until the lawsuit over