As I have seen in one autumnal face.
But you will observe he said “one” not many; and he had in mind not a number of charming old ladies, but just one. No doubt there are a sufficient number of exceptions to give added stability to the rule.
Browning said the reason why youth is so fair is that it would be intolerable without it; beauty is youth’s only asset. Nature makes boys and girls lovely to look upon so they can be tolerated until they acquire some sense. As soon as they are able to pull their weight in the work of the world and in the intellectual clearing-house of society, then grace and beauty depart. Thus mature people who have no brains and no sense are the last word in futility. They are as ridiculous as old apple-blossoms which for some reason never went into fruition.
The second class of objects which are beautiful only in youth are those which are built mainly for use. The purpose of an automobile is to go. A motor car one year old is better than when ten years old; it is also more attractive to the eye. I suppose Americans are the only people in the world who often buy new cars. If an Englishman has a car that carries him satisfactorily, he keeps it; the American “turns it in.” There is no more striking evidence of the “prosperity” of the American people than the twofold fact of the abundance of new cars, and also—amazing, when you think about it—that the tremendously efficient T-model Ford was not sufficiently lovely to pay for its continued manufacture.
When I was a boy, the number of my acquaintances whose fathers owned a horse and carriage could be counted on the fingers of one hand, like those who now own a steam yacht; the fact that the old Ford car is not “good enough” indicates how times have changed. For the proper epitaph for the T-model we should have to adapt the words of Shakespeare, which he put into a funeral oration:
But yesterday the Ford T-model might
Have stood against the world; now lies it there,
And none so poor to do it reverence.
Beauty and newness are inseparable in the case of bicycles, grocery-wagons, machinery, steamboats, factory buildings, flannel shirts, shoes, typewriters, trousers, socks; with all of these articles age means ugliness. In mechanical objects there is no charm in the accumulation of years.
But cathedrals, trees, mountains, castles, manor-houses, college lawns, violins, with the increase of age take on not only dignity but beauty. A thirteenth-century cathedral is more lovely than a glossy new church; an old tree is more beautiful than any sapling; the ancient turf in the quads of Oxford is fairer to behold than the graded front yard of a new house in Dakota.