always
to be pure nature, that is to say, involuntary (or at least appear to be
so), to be graceful. The subject even ought not to appear to know that
it possesses grace.

By which we can also see incidentally what we must think of grace, either
imitated or learned (I would willingly call it theatrical grace, or the
grace of the dancing-master). It is the pendant of that sort of beauty
which a woman seeks from her toilet-table, reinforced with rouge, white
paint, false ringlets, pads, and whalebone. Imitative grace is to true
grace what beauty of toilet is to architectonic beauty. One and the
other could act in absolutely the same manner upon the senses badly
exercised, as the original of which they wish to be the imitation; and at
times even, if much art is put into it, they might create an illusion to
the connoisseur. But there will be always some indication through which
the intention and constraint will betray it in the end, and this
discovery will lead inevitably to indifference, if not even to contempt
and disgust. If we are warned that the architectonic beauty is
factitious, at once, the more it has borrowed from a nature which is not
its own, the more it loses in our eyes of that which belongs to humanity
(so far as it is phenomenal), and then we, who forbid the renunciation
lightly of an accidental advantage, how can we see with pleasure or even
with indifference an exchange through which man sacrifices a part of his
proper nature in order to substitute 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, prop