paladin of modern romance; but he honestly believed that he had for a time done genuine service—­though not the highest—­to France and to the world.  “My opinion of the solid good rendered years ago,” he wrote in September 1863 to Story, “is unchanged.  The subsequent deference to the clerical party in France and support of brigandage is poor work; but it surely is doing little harm to the general good.”  And to Miss Blagden after the publication of his poem:  “I thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, et pour cause; better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made, and gave indications of intending to redeem.  I think him very weak in the last miserable year.”  It seemed to Browning a case in which a veritable apologia was admissible in the interests of truth and justice, and by placing this apologia in the mouth of the Emperor himself certain sophistries were also legitimate that might help to give the whole the dramatic character which the purposes of poetry, as the exposition of a complex human character, required.

The misfortune was that in making choice of such a subject Browning condemned himself to write with his left hand, to fight with one arm pinioned, to exhibit the case on behalf of the “Saviour of Society” with his brain rather than with brain and heart acting together.  He was to demonstrate that in the scale of spiritual colours there is a respectable place for drab.  This may be undertaken with skill and vigour, but hardly with enthusiastic pleasure. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is an interesting intellectual exercise, and if this constitutes a poem, a poem it is; but the theme is fitter for a prose discussion.  Browning’s intellectual ability became a snare by which the poet within him was entrapped.  The music that he makes here is the music of Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha: 

    So your fugue broadens and thickens,
    Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
    Till one exclaims—­“But where’s music, the dickens!”

The mysterious Sphinx who expounds his riddle and dissertates on himself in an imaginary Leicester Square says many things that deserve to be considered; but they are addressed to our understanding in the first instance, and only in a secondary and indirect way reach our feelings and our imagination.  The interest of the poem is virtually exhausted in a single reading; to a true work of art we return again and again for renewed delight.  We return to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau as to a valuable store-house of arguments or practical considerations in defence of a conservative opportunism; but if we have once appropriated these, we do not need the book.  There is a spirit of conservation, like that of Edmund Burke, which has in it a wise enthusiasm, we might almost say a wise mysticism.  Browning’s Prince is not a conservator possessed by this enthusiasm.  Something almost pathetic may be felt in his sense that the work allotted to