after all is only an
outward, artificial ornament, does not prove a perfectly correct emblem
to express grace as a personal quality. But a personal quality that is
conceived at the same time as separable from the subject, could only be
represented to the senses by an accidental ornament which can be detached
from the person, without the essence of the latter being affected by it.

Thus the girdle of charms operates not by a natural effect (for then it
would not change anything in the person itself) but by a magical effect;
that is to say, its virtue extends beyond all natural conditions. By
this means, which is nothing more, I admit, than an expedient, it has
been attempted to avoid the contradiction to which the mind, as regards
its representative faculty, is unavoidably reduced, every time it asks an
expression from nature herself, for an object foreign to nature and which
belongs to the free field of the ideal. If this magic girdle is the
symbol of an objective property which can be separated from its subject
without modifying in any degree its nature, this myth can only express
one thing--the beauty of movement, because movement is the only
modification that can affect an object without changing its identity.

The beauty of movement is an idea that satisfies the two conditions
contained in the myth which now occupies us. In the first place, it is
an objective beauty, not entirely depending upon the impression that we
receive from the object, but belonging to the object itself. In the
second place, this beauty has in itself something accidental, and the
object remains identical even when we conceive it to be deprived of this
property. The girdle of attractions does not lose its magic virtue in
passing to an object of less beauty, or even to that which is without
beauty; that is to say, that a being less beautiful, or even one which is
not beautiful, may also lay claim to the beauty of movement. The myth
tells us that grace is something accidental in the subject in which we
suppose it to be. It follows that we can attribute this property only to
accidental movements. In an ideal of beauty the necessary movements must
be beautiful, because inasmuch as necessary they form an integral part of
its nature; the idea of Venus once given, the idea of this beauty of
necessary movements is that implicitly comprised in it; but it is not the
same with the beauty of accidental movements; this is an extension of the
former; there