s very much in
a figure which is originally well made. The momentary charm of movement
is lost in the permanent charm of form; the creature could not be
otherwise than delightful, made as it is; and we thus miss the sense of
selection and deliberate arrangement, the sense of beauty as movement,
that is, as grace. Whereas, in the case of defective form, any grace
that may be obtained affects us _per se_. It need not have been there;
indeed, it was unlikely to be there; and hence it obtains the value and
charm of the unexpected, the rare, the far-fetched. This, I think, is
the explanation of the something of exotic beauty that attaches to
Botticelli: we perceive the structural form only negatively, sufficiently
to value all the more the ingenuity of arrangement by which it is made
to furnish a beautiful outline and beautiful movement; and we perceive
the great desire thereof. If we allow our eye to follow the actual
structure of the bodies, even in the Primavera, we shall recognise that
not one of these figures but is downright deformed and out of drawing.
Even the Graces have arms and shoulders and calves and stomachs all at
random; and the most beautiful of them has a slice missing out of her
head. But if, instead of looking at heads, arms, legs, bodies, separately,
and separate from the drapery, we follow the outline of the groups against
the background, drapery clinging or wreathing, arms intertwining, hands
combed out into wonderful fingers; if we regard these groups of figures
as a pattern stencilled on the background, we recognise that no pattern
could be more exquisite in its variety of broken up and harmonised lines.
The exquisite qualities of all graceful things, flowers, branches,
swaying reeds, and certain animals like the stag and peacock, seem to
have been abstracted and given to these half-human and wholly wonderful
creatures--these thin, ill put together, unsteady youths and ladies. The
ingenious grace of Botticelli passes sometimes from the realm of art
to that of poetry, as in the case of those flowers, with stiff, tall
stems, which he places by the uplifted foot of the middle Grace, thus
showing that she has trodden over it, like Virgil's Camilla, without
crushing it. But the element of sentiment and poetry depends in reality
upon the fascination of movement and arrangement; fascination seemingly
from within, a result of exquisite breeding in those imperfectly made
creatures. It is the grace of a woman no