With but one or two exceptions the plays which we have so far passed in review fail in some respect or other of the plot that makes a comedy. A plot that is argumentative, that is a ratiocination or _exemplum_ conducted by abstractions, is not sufficient to constitute comedy, though it may contribute to its development a unity of interest, a spiritual sequence; nor are sporadic situations and incidents sufficient, though humorously conceived and executed; nor glimpses of types, characters or manners, nor hints of passion, nor satiric speeches and dialogues, though artistically dramatized, true, appropriate, and witty. None of these constitutes comedy. Comedy demands action vitalized by a plot that is capable of revealing the social significance of the individual: an action of sufficient scope and reality to display the spirit of society in individual types and manners, or in character and sentiment; a plot sufficiently urgent to interest us, not only in the phenomena, in the concomitants, of every deed, but in its motive and inherent passion. The comedy of external life may present, by means of typical individuals and conventional manners, a reflex of that which is actual, or a criticism of it; and such a play will be realistic or satirical. The comedy of the inner life, on the other hand, since it reveals the characteristics of humanity in the heat and moment of passion, may present a vision of the ideal made concrete; it is therefore at once interpretative, constructive, and romantic. These two kinds of comedy are alike in that they display the triumph of freedom when regulated by common sense, the adjustment of the individual to society. But as they vary in function and result, so these kinds of comedy differ in the quality of action which each may present. The play of convention and manners can use only the externals of action, actions that neither strike deep nor spring from the depths, for such a play aims to reproduce appearances or merely to re-create them--to criticise and correct rather than construct. The play of character and passion, not the so-called realistic, but idealistic, selects for presentation actions whose springs are in the inner life; and that is because it would present men and women as they should be,--individuals widening the social, pressing toward the ideal, not by overstepping that which is conventional, but by informing it with new meaning and pushing back its limits. Comedy, therefore, is in the plot, and the plot must proceed from the wisdom essential to a comic view of life: acceptance of the social environment as it appears to be, because one believes in society as it should be. The dramatist, his plot and his characters, are the exponents of common sense and freedom, of the light of life as it is with the sweetness of life as it may be. Common sense, however, may become prosaic, or liberty licentious; and it is in preventing such extremes that wit and humour perform their function.