when the carriage is advancing in a straight line:  this point turns like the wheel, though it advances like the carriage.  Or else we might think of an immense avenue such as are to be seen in the forest of Fontainebleau, with crosses at intervals to indicate the cross-ways:  at each of these we shall walk round the cross, explore for a while the paths that open out before us, and then return to our original course.  Now, we have just reached one of these mental crossways.  Something mechanical encrusted on the living, will represent a cross at which we must halt, a central image from which the imagination branches off in different directions.  What are these directions?  There appear to be three main ones.  We will follow them one after the other, and then continue our onward course.

1.  In the first place, this view of the mechanical and the living dovetailed into each other makes us incline towards the vaguer image of some rigidity or other applied to the mobility of life, in an awkward attempt to follow its lines and counterfeit its suppleness.  Here we perceive how easy it is for a garment to become ridiculous.  It might almost be said that every fashion is laughable in some respect.  Only, when we are dealing with the fashion of the day, we are so accustomed to it that the garment seems, in our mind, to form one with the individual wearing it.  We do not separate them in imagination.  The idea no longer occurs to us to contrast the inert rigidity of the covering with the living suppleness of the object covered:  consequently, the comic here remains in a latent condition.  It will only succeed in emerging when the natural incompatibility is so deep-seated between the covering and the covered that even an immemorial association fails to cement this union:  a case in point is our head and top hat.  Suppose, however, some eccentric individual dresses himself in the fashion of former times:  our attention is immediately drawn to the clothes themselves, we absolutely distinguish them from the individual, we say that the latter is disguising himself,—­as though every article of clothing were not a disguise!—­and the laughable aspect of fashion comes out of the shadow into the light.

Here we are beginning to catch a faint glimpse of the highly intricate difficulties raised by this problem of the comic.  One of the reasons that must have given rise to many erroneous or unsatisfactory theories of laughter is that many things are comic de jure without being comic de facto, the continuity of custom having deadened within them the comic quality.  A sudden dissolution of continuity is needed, a break with fashion, for this quality to revive.  Hence the impression that this dissolution of continuity is the parent of the comic, whereas all it does is to bring it to our notice.  Hence, again, the explanation of laughter by surprise, contrast, etc., definitions which would equally apply to a host of cases in which we have no inclination whatever to laugh.  The truth of the matter is far from being so simple.  But to return to our idea of disguise, which, as we have just shown, has been entrusted with the special mandate of arousing laughter.  It will not be out of place to investigate the uses it makes of this power.