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When the monkey dies and one sees by their melancholy comicalities, and cautious and painful grimaces, that the poor brutes are destined to a short time of it he takes up with white mice, or, lacking these, constructs a dancing-doll, which, with the aid of a short plank with an upright at one end, to which is attached a cord passing through the body of the doll, and fastened to his right leg, he keeps constantly on the jig, to the music of a tuneless tin-whistle, bought for a penny, and a very primitive parchment tabor, manufactured by himself.
And now in connection with this fact let us go back to another, which has also been pointed out before, that all efforts, the sole object of which is to please from moment to moment the man who directs and pays for them, are, whether embodied in the form of commodities or no, really reducible to some kind of personal service, if a toy-maker, in return for food, makes a dancing-doll for another man, he might just as well have pirouetted for so many hours himself; and if the purchaser would be more amused by a man's antics than by a puppet's, this is precisely what the toy-maker would have been set to do.
He is paying the silversmith so to exert his muscles that an ounce or a pound of silver may be wrought into a specific form. If he pays a toy-maker to make him a dancing-doll, he is virtually paying him to dance in his own person. He is paying him to go through a series of prescribed muscular movements.
Well, we know that one essential form of comic fancy lies in picturing to ourselves a living person as a kind of jointed dancing-doll, and that frequently, with the object of inducing us to form this mental picture, we are shown two or more persons speaking and acting as though attached to one another by invisible strings.
This is the real explanation of light comedy, which holds the same relation to actual life as does a jointed dancing-doll to a man walking, being, as it is, an artificial exaggeration of a natural rigidity in things. The thread that binds it to actual life is a very fragile one. It is scarcely more than a game which, like all games, depends on a previously accepted convention.
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