Chapter XIV

Problem and Narrative Poems

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, which appeared in December 1871, four months after the publication of Balaustions Adventure, was written by Browning during a visit to friends in Scotland.  His interest in modern politics was considerable, but in general it remained remote from his work as a poet.  He professed himself a liberal, but he was a liberal who because he was such, claimed the right of independent judgment.  He had rejoiced in the enfranchisement of Italy.  During the American Civil War he was strongly on the side of the North, as letters to Story, written when his private grief lay heavy upon him, abundantly show.  He was at one time a friend of the movement in favour of granting the parliamentary suffrage to women, but late in life his opinion on this question altered.  He was as decidedly opposed to the proposals for a separate or subordinate Parliament for Ireland as were his friends Carlyle and Tennyson and Matthew Arnold.  After the introduction of the Home Rule Bill he could not bring himself, though requested by a friend, to write words which would have expressed or implied esteem for the statesman who had made that most inopportune experiment in opportunism[112] and whose talents he admired.  Yet for a certain kind of opportunism—­that which conserves rather than destroys—­Browning thought that much might fairly be said.  To say this with a special reference to the fallen Emperor of France he wrote his Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

Browning’s instinctive sympathies are not with the “Saviour of Society,” who maintains for temporary reasons a tottering edifice.  He naturally applauds the man who builds on sure foundations, or the man who in order to reach those foundations boldly removes the accumulated lumber of the past.  But there are times when perhaps the choice lies only between conservation of what is imperfect and the attempt to erect an airy fabric which has no basis upon the solid earth; and Browning on the whole preferred a veritable civitas hominum, however remote from the ideal, to a sham civitas Dei or a real Cloudcuckootown.  “It is true, that what is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit; and those things, which have long gone together, are as it were confederate within themselves; whereas new things piece not so well; but though they help by their utility, yet they trouble by their inconformity.”  These words, of one whose worldly wisdom was more profoundly studied than ever Browning’s was, might stand as a motto for the poem.  But the pregnant sentence of Bacon which follows these words should be added—­“All this is true if time stood still.”  Browning’s pleading is not a merely ingenious defence of the untenable, either with reference to the general thesis or its application to the French Empire.  He did not, like his wife, think of the Emperor as if he were a