To separate the truth from the falsehood in this dramatic monologue has not been Browning’s intention, and it need not be ours.  It may be repeated that Browning is no apologist for Louis Napoleon:  he simply calls him to the front, and, standing aside, allows him to speak for himself.[46] In his speech under these circumstances we find just as much truth entangled with just as much sophistry as we might reasonably expect.  Here, we get what seems the genuine truth; there, in what appears to the speaker a satisfactory defence, we see that he is simply exposing his own moral defect; again, like Bishop Blougram, he “says true things, but calls them by wrong names.”  Passages of the last kind are very frequent; are, indeed, to be found everywhere throughout the poem; and it is in these that Browning unites most cleverly the vicarious thinking due to his dramatic subject, and the good honest thought which we never fail to find dominant in his most exceptional work.  The Prince gives utterance to a great deal of very true and very admirable good sense; we are at liberty to think him insincere in his application of it, but an axiom remains true, even if it be wrongly applied.

The versification of the poem is everywhere vigorous, and often fine; perhaps the finest passage it contains is that referring to Louis Napoleon’s abortive dreams on behalf of Italy.

      “Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught,
      Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine
      For ever!  Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct,
      Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth
      Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there
      Imparting exultation to the hills! 
      Sweep of the swathe when only the winds walk
      And waft my words above the grassy sea
      Under the blinding blue that basks o’er Rome—­
      Hear ye not still—­’Be Italy again?’
      And ye, what strikes the panic to your heart? 
      Decrepit council-chambers,—­where some lamp
      Drives the unbroken black three paces off
      From where the greybeards huddle in debate,
      Dim cowls and capes, and midmost glimmers one
      Like tarnished gold, and what they say is doubt,
      And what they think is fear, and what suspends
      The breath in them is not the plaster-patch
      Time disengages from the painted wall
      Where Rafael moulderingly bids adieu,
      Nor tick of the insect turning tapestry
      To dust, which a queen’s finger traced of old;
      But some word, resonant, redoubtable,
      Of who once felt upon his head a hand
      Whereof the head now apprehends his foot.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 44:  The name Hohenstiel-Schwangau is formed from Hohen Schwangau, one of the castles of the late king of Bavaria.]

[Footnote 45:  James Thomson on The Ring and the Book.]