direct and primitive impression. The vision you will reacquire will
be one of this kind. You will have before you a man bent on
cultivating a certain rigid attitude--whose body, if one may use the
expression, is one vast grin.

Now, let us go back to the point we wished to clear up. By toning
down a deformity that is laughable, 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