elements taken from inferior nature?
How, even supposing we could forgive the illusion produced, how could we
avoid despising the deception? If we are told that grace is artificial,
our heart at once closes; our soul, which at first advanced with so much
vivacity to meet the graceful object, shrinks back. That which was mind
has suddenly become matter. Juno and her celestial beauty has vanished,
and in her place there is nothing but a phantom of vapour.

Although grace ought to be, or at least ought to appear, something
involuntary, still we seek it only in the movements that depend more or
less on the will. I know also that grace is attributed to a certain
mimic language, and we say a pleasing smile, a charming blush, though the
smile and the blush are sympathetic movements, not determined by the
will, but by moral sensibility. But besides that, the first of these
movements is, after all, in our power, and that it is not shown that in
the second there is, properly speaking, any grace, it is right to say, in
general, that most frequently when grace appears it is on the occasion of
a voluntary movement. Grace is desired both in language and in song; it
is asked for in the play of the eyes and of the mouth, in the movements
of the hands and the arms whenever these movements are free and
voluntary; it is required in the walk, in the bearing, and attitude, in a
word, in all exterior demonstrations of man, so far as they depend on his
will. As to the movements which the instinct of nature produces in us,
or which an overpowering affection excites, or, so to speak, is lord
over; that which we ask of these movements, in origin purely physical,
is, as we shall see presently, quite another thing than grace. These
kinds of movements belong to nature, and not to the person, but it is
from the person alone, as we have seen, that all grace issues.

If, then, grace is a property that we demand only from voluntary
movements, and if, on the other hand, all voluntary element should be
rigorously excluded from grace, we have no longer to seek it but in that
portion of the intentional movements to which the intention of the
subject is unknown, but which, however, does not cease to answer in the
soul to a moral cause.

We now know in what kind of movements he must ask for grace; but we know
nothing more, and a movement can have these different characters, without
on that account being graceful; it is as yet only speaking (or mimic).

I