The great
curse of the Elizabethans is upon her, that she cannot leave anything
alone, she cannot write a single line without a conceit:
"And the eyes of the peacock fans
Winked at the alien glory,"
she said of the Papal fans in the presence of the Italian tricolour:
"And a royal blood sends glances up her princely eye to trouble,
And the shadow of a monarch's crown is softened in her hair,"
is her description of a beautiful and aristocratic lady. The notion of
peacock feathers winking like so many London urchins is perhaps one of
her rather aggressive and outrageous figures of speech. The image of a
woman's hair as the softened shadow of a crown is a singularly vivid and
perfect one. But both have the same quality of intellectual fancy and
intellectual concentration. They are both instances of a sort of
ethereal epigram. This is the great and dominant characteristic of Mrs.
Browning, that she was significant alike in failure and success. Just as
every marriage in the world, good or bad, is a marriage, dramatic,
irrevocable, and big with coming events, so every one of her wild
weddings between alien ideas is an accomplished fact which produces a
certain effect on the imagination, which has for good or evil become
part and parcel of our mental vision forever. She gives the reader the
impression that she never declined a fancy, just as some gentlemen of
the eighteenth century never declined a duel. When she fell it was
always because she missed the foothold, never because she funked the
leap.
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