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 detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it.  He makes his models grimace, as they would do themselves if they went to the end of their tether.  Beneath the skin-deep harmony of form, he divines the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter.  He realises disproportions and deformations which must have existed in nature as mere inclinations, but which have not succeeded in coming to a head, being held in check by a higher force.  His art, which has a touch of the diabolical, raises up the demon who had been overthrown by the angel.  Certainly, it is an art that exaggerates, and yet the definition would be very far from complete were exaggeration alone alleged to be its aim and object, for there exist caricatures that are more lifelike than portraits, caricatures in which the exaggeration is scarcely noticeable, whilst, inversely, it is quite possible to exaggerate to excess without obtaining a real caricature.  For exaggeration to be comic, it must not appear as an aim, but rather as a means that the artist is using in order to make manifest to our eyes the distortions which he sees in embryo.  It is this process of distortion that is of moment and interest.  And