ideas corresponding with these
pictures when the pure instinctive feeling throws out its discoveries,
or, in other words, with explaining the hieroglyphs of sensation. If we
strip off its allegorical veil from this conception of the Greeks, the
following appears the only meaning it admits.

Grace is a kind of movable beauty, I mean a beauty which does not belong
essentially to its subject, but which may be produced accidentally in it,
as it may also disappear from it. It is in this that grace is
distinguished from beauty properly so called, or fixed beauty, which is
necessarily inherent in the subject itself. Venus can no doubt take off
her girdle and give it up for the moment to Juno, but she could only give
up her beauty with her very person. Venus, without a girdle, is no
longer the charming Venus, without beauty she is no longer Venus.

But this girdle as a symbol of movable beauty has this particular
feature, that the person adorned with it not only appears more graceful,
but actually becomes so. The girdle communicates objectively this
property of grace, in this contrasting with other articles of dress,
which have only subjective effects, and without modifying the person
herself, only modify the impression produced on the imagination of
others. Such is the express meaning of the Greek myth; grace becomes the
property of the person who puts on this girdle; she does more than appear
amiable, it is so in fact.

No doubt it may be thought that a girdle, which 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 objec