make one excellent. Such, personages, I think, would please nobody but the painter that made them. Not but I think a painter may make a better face than ever was; but he must do it by a kind of felicity,[1] (as a musician that maketh an excellent air in music,) and not by rule. A man shall see faces, that if you examine them part by part, you shall find never a good; and yet altogether do well. If it be true that the principal part of beauty is in decent motion, certainly it is no marvel though persons in years seem many times more amiable; pulchrorum autumnus pulcher;[2] for no youth can be comely but by pardon, and considering the youth as to make up the comeliness. Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt, and cannot last; and for the most part it makes a dissolute youth, and an age a little out of countenance; but yet certainly again, if it light well, it maketh virtue shine, and vices blush.
- ↑ felicitate quâdam et casu. Keats seems to have felt that this is true also with regard to his own art:—
"When I behold upon the night's starred face
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance."
Life, Letters, &c. of John Keats, vol. ii. p. 293. S.
- ↑ The autumn of the beautiful is beautiful. A thought from Euripides, quoted in the beginning of Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades. "Euripides would say of persons that were beautiful, and yet in some years, In fair bodies not only the spring is pleasant, but also the autumn." Bacon. Apophthegmes New and Old. 145.
The spiritual beauty of old age as one sees it in the faces of old men and women who have lived good lives is nowhere so finely described as by Edmund Waller:"The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made."
Edmund Waller. Old Age.
