be:  thus irony may grow so hot within us that it becomes a kind of high-pressure eloquence.  On the other hand, humour is the more emphasised the deeper we go down into an evil that actually is, in order t o set down its details in the most cold-blooded indifference.  Several authors, Jean Paul amongst them, have noticed that humour delights in concrete terms, technical details, definite facts.  If our analysis is correct, this is not an accidental trait of humour, it is its very essence.  A humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist, something like an anatomist who practises dissection with the sole object of filling us with disgust; so that humour, in the restricted sense in which we are here regarding the word, is really a transposition from the moral to the scientific.

By still further curtailing the interval between the terms transposed, we may now obtain more and more specialised types of comic transpositions.  Thus, certain professions have a technical vocabulary:  what a wealth of laughable results have been obtained by transposing the ideas of everyday life into this professional jargon!  Equally comic is the extension of business phraseology to the social relations of life,—­for instance, the phrase of one of Labiche’s characters in allusion to an invitation he has received, “Your kindness of the third ult.,” thus transposing the commercial formula, “Your favour of the third instant.”  This class of the comic, moreover, may attain a special profundity of its own when it discloses not merely a professional practice, but a fault in character.  Recall to mind the scenes in the Faux Bonshommes and the Famille Benoiton, where marriage is dealt with as a business affair, and matters of sentiment are set down in strictly commercial language.

Here, however, we reach the point at which peculiarities of language really express peculiarities of character, a closer investigation of which we must hold over to the next chapter.  Thus, as might have been expected and may be seen from the foregoing, the comic in words follows closely on the comic in situation and is finally merged, along with the latter, in the comic in character.  Language only attains laughable results because it is a human product, modelled as exactly as possible on the forms of the human mind.  We feel it contains some living element of our own life; and if this life of language were complete and perfect, if there were nothing stereotype in it, if, in short, language were an absolutely unified organism incapable of being split up into independent organisms, it would evade the comic as would a soul whose life was one harmonious whole, unruffled as the calm surface of a peaceful lake.  There is no pool, however, which has not some dead leaves floating on its surface, no human soul upon which there do not settle habits that make it rigid against itself by making it rigid against others, no language, in short, so subtle and instinct with life, so fully alert in each of its