e, we ought to obtain an ugliness that is
comic. A laughable expression of the face, then, is one that will make
us think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated, in the wonted
mobility of the face. What we shall see will be an ingrained twitching
or a fixed grimace. It may be objected that every habitual expression
of the face, even when graceful and beautiful, gives us this same
impression of something stereotyped? Here an important distinction must
be drawn. When we speak of expressive beauty or even expressive
ugliness, when we say that a face possesses expression, we mean
expression that may be stable, but which we conjecture to be mobile. It
maintains, in the midst of its fixity, a certain indecision in which
are obscurely portrayed all possible shades of the state of mind it
expresses, just as the sunny promise of a warm day manifests itself in
the haze of a spring morning. But a comic expression of the face is one
that promises nothing more than it gives. It is a unique and permanent
grimace. One would say that the person's whole moral life has
crystallised into this particular cast of features. This is the reason
why a face is all the more comic, the more nearly it suggests to us the
idea of some simple mechanical action in which its personality would
for ever be absorbed. Some faces seem to be always engaged in weeping,
others in laughing or whistling, others, again, in eternally blowing an
imaginary trumpet, and these are the most comic faces of all. Here
again is exemplified the law according to which the more natural the
explanation of the cause, the more comic is the effect. Automatism,
inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and maintained, are
clearly the causes why a face makes us laugh. But this effect gains in
intensity when we are able to connect these characteristics with some
deep-seated cause, a certain fundamental absentmindedness, as though
the soul had allowed itself to be fascinated and hypnotised by the
materiality of a simple action.

We shall now understand the comic element in caricature. However
regular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines and
supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether perfect:
there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, the
vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short some favourite
distortion towards which nature seems to be particularly inclined. The
art of the caricaturist consists in detect