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At fourteen, when she was betrothed to the heir to the French throne, she was a dumpy, mean-looking little creature, with no distinction whatever, and with only her bright golden hair to make amends for her many blemishes. At fifteen she was married and joined the Dauphin in French territory. We must recall for a moment the conditions which prevailed in France. King Louis XV. was nearing his end.
Men loved Browning not only for what he was, but also for what he was not. These blemishes were, under the circumstances, and for a limited audience, strokes of art. It is not to be pretended that, even from this point of view, they were always successful, only that they are organic. The nineteenth century would have to be lived over again to wipe these passages out of Browning's poetry.
"And quaffing off the ruddy ale, "Bard and parson lead the band." Thoroughly tired of these drunken swine, we drew nearer the gate in order to spy out the blemishes in the magnificent court of Love, the purblind king, wherein it is easy to enter, but difficult to get out again, and where are chambers innumerable.
By making the most of these blemishes it is possible to obscure the true aesthetic value of his work, just as his life also, a life of much quiet delicacy and independence, might easily be placed in a false focus, and made to appear a somewhat tame theme in illustration of the more obvious parochial virtues.
Plutarch, like the sculptors of antiquity, has selected only the great and elegant traits of character; and hence his lives, like those statues which are the models of art, possess, with all that is graceful and noble in human nature, the particular features of individuals. He had no taste for the blemishes of mankind.
"She is a very sweet-tempered and affectionate little thing, but I never considered her pretty. She is too much like her father." "Salome, death veils all blemishes." "That depends very much on the character of the survivors; but we will not discuss abstract propositions, especially since I have resolved to follow the old oriental maxim,
'You, my dear sir, he tells Sir Joshua Reynolds in the dedication, 'perceived all the shades which mingled in the grand composition; all the peculiarities and slight blemishes which marked the literary Colossus. The inclusion of the letters and of private details was an integral part of his scheme.
"I thought you had gone abroad with your regiment," said Mrs. Beale, who had received him cordially. "No, not yet," he answered, looking away from Edith for a minute in order to scrutinize her mother. He always seemed to be inspecting the person he addressed, and never spoke of anyone without describing their charms or blemishes categorically. "Fact is, I've just come to say good-bye.
Their music, both vocal and instrumental, is worse than rubbish; in sketching and painting they are without sense of perspective; their architecture is clumsy and coarse; their much-vaunted pottery is full of flaws and blemishes, for which reason a perfect specimen is almost priceless and over which connoisseurs hypnotise themselves; dancing, except by flower-girls, is unknown; while in literature they are safe from adequate criticism, owing to the impossibilities of their language.
She was proud of her daughter one day, jealous of her the next; it seemed as though she could not forgive Doris for growing up, and yet when Doris was barely eighteen she displayed the girl on all occasions and strove hard to force her into the arms of a horrible little middle-aged baronet. She still craved a title for Doris, no matter what moral and physical blemishes that title might decorate.
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