THE AGE OF BEAUTY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20104, 24 March 1928, Page 14 (Supplement)

THE AGE OF BEAUTY

A CENTURY-OLD VENUS. The refusal of this generation to grow old has been the subject of much discussion by moralists and men of science. The professions are crowded with sprightly youths of three score and ten. The age of a woman has become impossible to guess, and indeed a matter of mere statistical interest. Grandmothers dazzle us with the shape and the complexion of ingenues, and if, by compensation, the ingenue knows as much as her grandmother, no doubt that also is evidence of the progress of humanity. Once upon a time our elders used to sigh “Si la jounesse savait, si la vieillessc pouvait!” Now there is nothing which youth does not know, and hardly anything which age does not think it can do. But, as usual they have gone .further than this in America, (says the London Daily Telegraph). Their hist exponent of lhe theory and practice of being beautiful is a Venus of 103. Madame Marie Charlotte Davenport, camo to the United States from Russia 50 years ago.* Ever since, or for the greater ]Kirt of the time, for she began by rearing her 1.1 children, she has been lecturing on the pursuit of beauty. \ et, we arc assured, she remains a shining example of her precepts, and might be “taken for a woman several score years younger.” A certain vagueness as to how many score may be in such a case permitted to the dazzled eyes of the reporter. We are to confess that this seems likely to be another American record. Wo hardly know which to admire the more, the endurance of Madame Davenport or America’s appetite for lectures. Where shall we find her riyal? Poets have dreamed that Helen of Troy was ever young and ever beautiful. Rider Haggard’s heroine enchanted generation after generation. But that was art magic. The books say that Ninon de I’Endos was beautiful at 70 as at. 17, and had at her feet the sons of those whose fathers had been her lovers. But Ninon died when she was a mrre chit of 90. We must give the apple to Madame Davenport. Happy is America in being taught by such a professor how to keep young and how to grow old beautifully." °