tragedy nor comedy -- in the popular acceptation of those terms
-- and yet in some sense both; an idea that need not seem so
paradoxical when we consider the variable character of all
drama, or, indeed, the natural course of human events, of
which the drama is but the reflection. It is not difficult in
actual life to conceive of a happening or a series of happen-
ings that fulfils the requirements of the above elemental defi-
nition. What we consider as tragical and comical have a way
of shading into one another by imperceptible advances, until
the juncture is lost; or what may appeal as tragic to one will
be comic to another. Many a serious event has its humorous
side; that the pathetic is akin to the comical and laughter
neighbor to tears are truisms of long-standing acceptance; ²
while the comparison of life to a tragicomedy is almost as
old as the word itself. ³

What is true of actual experience is equally true of drama.
While tragedy and comedy, the recognized main divisions of
dramatic composition, are theoretically of antipodal emotional
effect, the one is constantly blending with the other, and he
would be a bold man who would presume to distinguish them
absolutely. Fontenelle attempted to put the situation concretely
by distributing the emotions aroused by drama in a sort of
prismatic scale, as the terrible, the sublime, the pathetic, the
tender, the amusing, the absurd; alloting the first two divisions

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