about six hundred feet). The whale came near "and swallowed us up at once, ship and all. He did not, however, crush with his teeth, the vessel luckily slipped through one of the interstices." Even the miracle of

walking on the waves of the sea is not unknown to this irreverent comic writer. In his droll way he tells us how he arrived at a "green and briny sea, where we saw a great number of men running backwards and forwards, resembling ourselves in every part, except the feet which were all of cork." Lucian then scoffingly tells of his visit to Paradise.

The whole city was of gold and the walls of emerald. The seven gates were all made of one trunk of the cinnamon tree, the pavement, within the walls, of ivory, the temples of beryl, the altars of one large amethyst. Round the city flowed a river of the most precious ointment. The baths instead of water were filled with warm dew. For clothes they wear spider's web. They have no bodies, but only the appearance of them, insensible to the touch, and without flesh, yet they stand, taste, move, and speak.

Piling absurdity upon absurdity, he derides the beliefs and traditions current in his time and brings discredit on the credulity of his contemporaries.

Cervantes, in ridiculing the chivalry of the Middle Ages, makes Don Quixote, the knight-errant, work himself up to a pitch of knightly phrenzy in which he loses his wits so completely as to regard the inferior under the glamor of the sublime and the superior. He takes a country inn for a castle, the servant girls for princesses, the innkeeper as the lord of the castle. He fights windmills, regarding them as transformed giants, and attacks herds of sheep under the idea that they are enchanted

armies. Cervantes keeps on heaping absurd incidents in which the folly of the hero is exposed to the reader. In weaving his web of glory around prosaic things the ridiculous character of the knight of the sorrowful figure of La Mancha stands out in an even clearer light with the accumulation of absurd events and with the thickening of the plot of a supersensuous ideal folly.

Similarly Voltaire, when ridiculing the shallow optimistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, makes Candid and Professor Pangloss pass through all sorts of painful situations, exposing with ever greater power and emphasis the weakness, the silliness, the stupidity of professorial optimism. The vast accumulation of mishaps, misfortunes and suffering in this best of all possible worlds is concluded by Pangloss' remark:

"All events are inextricably linked together in this best of all possible worlds; for look you, if you had not been driven out of a magnificent castle by hearty kicks for presuming to make love to Miss Cunegund, if you had not been put into the Inquisition, if you had never run your sword through the Baron or lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado, you would not be here now eating candied citrons and pistachio-nuts."

"Well said!" answered Candid, "but we must attend to our garden."

The full blown bubble of optimism made up of pain, privation and suffering bursts and vanishes.

We may point out another important principle of the ludicrous, that of interchange. Any interchange of cause and effect of antecedents and consequents associated with the relation of superior and inferior arouses the sense of the ludicrous. Thus Stockton, in his humorous descrip

tion of the haunted ghost, also in his directions or instructions given to the young American youth as to how to bring up parents, makes us laugh at the interchange of relations of superior and inferior. The superior reduced to the inferior, or the inferior raised playfully to the level of the superior gives rise to the ludicrous. In short, any interchange of places in a series or in different series of events in the contrasting relationship of superior and inferior is the cause of laughter. Falling into a pit dug for others, being caught into a trap laid for one's neighbor, being entangled in a net intended for your friend or enemy, all that is a source of amusement. Any fooling with others and being fooled in turn cannot help awaken the sense of the ludicrous.

We have here a double play on fooling, human folly is doubly exposed to the view of the observer and hence hilarious laughter. The ghost from haunting the living is haunted by the living, the cheat is deceived by his own well-laid schemes, the intriguer is caught in the network of his own intrigues, the "wise" are entangled in the meshes of their own conceit and folly, the joke is turned on the joker; all such play of interchange of relations is sure to raise in us the laughter of ridicule. Any interchange of links in series of events, giving rise to associations of inferiority, arouses laughter. Many comical situations are brought about by this principle of interchange.

When by association a series of events becomes firmly fixed in the mind, such as manners, customs and beliefs, any change in the sequence of the events, any variation in the order fixed by association of contiguity, a form into which the human mind easily drifts, arouses in the mind the sense of the ludicrous. The philistine regards

all variations from his accepted routine of life as something inherently absurd, silly and ridiculous. On the other hand, nothing forms such a good subject for the comic as the narrow-minded, hide-bound, Lilliputian philistine when viewed from the heights of talent and genius. Society and its ideal average, normal mediocrity with its pleasing, mannerly, commonplace platitudes may have its fling of jeering at genius for not conforming to social usage and for breaking away from the well-trodden paths or social ruts. Far more effective and deadly are the stones of ridicule cast by the hand of genius at the Philistine Goliath, strong in his brute social power, but dull of wits. Social laughter is momentary, soon burns itself out and passes away like the fire and smoke of straw, but genius shakes the very skies with its lasting, inextinguishable laughter.

CHAPTER XII

THE COMIC IN LITERATURE

Shakespeare in his comedies uses inferior, humiliating, clumsy, and awkward situations to throw ridicule on the characters which he wishes to make comic. Thus in the "Merry Wives of Windsor" Shakespeare makes Falstaff relate to Master Brook the adventures passed through with Mistress Ford.

Fal. The peaking Cornute her husband, Master Brook, dwelling in a continual 'larum of jealousy, comes in the instant of our encounter, after we had embraced, kissed, protested and, as it were, spoke the prologue of our comedy; and at his heels a rabble of his companions, thither provoked and instigated by his distemper, and, forsooth, to search his house for his wife's love. Ford. What, while you were there?

Fal. While I was there.

Ford. And did he search for you, and did not find you? Fal. You shall hear. As good luck would have it, comes in one Mistress Page; gives intelligence of Ford's approach; and, in her inventions and Ford's wife's distraction, they conveyed me into a buck-basket.

Fal. By the Lord, a buck-basket!-rammed me in with foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins; that, Master Brook, there was the rankest compound of villainous smell ever offended nostril.