rd the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some
friendly and jubilant city. Would not every man, through all the long
miles of march, feel as if he also were within the gates?

FOOTNOTE:

[39] Compare Blake, in the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "Improvement
makes straight roads; but the crooked roads, without improvement,
are roads of Genius."

IV

NOTES ON THE MOVEMENTS OF YOUNG CHILDREN

(1874)

I wish to direct the reader's attention to a certain quality in the
movements of children when young, which is somehow lovable in them,
although it would be even unpleasant in any grown person. Their
movements are not graceful, but they fall short of grace by something so
sweetly humorous that we only admire them the more. The imperfection is
so pretty and pathetic, and it gives so great a promise of something
different in the future, that it attracts us more than many forms of
beauty. They have something of the merit of a rough sketch by a master,
in which we pardon what is wanting or excessive for the sake of the very
bluntness and directness of the thing. It gives us pleasure to see the
beginning of gracious impulses and the springs of harmonious movement
laid bare to us with innocent simplicity.

One night some ladies formed a sort of impromptu dancing-school in the
drawing-room of an hotel in France. One of the ladies led the ring, and
I can recall her as a model of accomplished, cultured movement. Two
little girls, about eight years old, were the pupils; that is an age of
great interest in girls, when natural grace comes to its consummation of
justice and purity, with little admixture of that other grace of
forethought and discipline that will shortly supersede it altogether. In
these two, particularly, the rhythm was sometimes broken by an excess of
energy, as though the pleasure of the music in their light bodies could
endure no longer the restraint of regulated dance. So that, between
these and the lady, there was not only some beginning of the very
contrast I wish to insist upon, but matter enough to set one thinking a
long while on the beauty of motion. I do not know that, here in England,
we have any good opportunity of seeing what that is; the generation of
British dancing men and women are certainly more remarkable for other
qualities than for grace: they are, many of them, very conscientious
artists, and give quite a serious regard to the technical parts of their
perfo