[Published in December, 1871. (Poetical Works, Vol.  XI. pp.
123-210).]

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau[44] is a blank verse monologue, supposed to be spoken, in a musing day-dream, by Louis Napoleon, while Emperor of the French, and calling himself, to the delight of ironical echoes, the “Saviour of Society.”  The work is equally distant in spirit from the branding satire and righteous wrath of Victor Hugo’s Chatiments and Napoleon le Petit, and from Lord Beaconsfield’s couleur de rose portrait, in Endymion, of the nominally pseudonymous Prince Florestan.  It is neither a denunciation nor a eulogy, nor yet altogether an impartial delineation.  It is an “apology,” with much the same object as those of Bishop Blougram or Mr. Sludge, the Medium:  “by no means to prove black white or white black, or to make the worse appear the better reason, but to bring a seeming monster and perplexing anomaly under the common laws of nature, by showing how it has grown to be what it is, and how it can with more or less of self-illusion reconcile itself to itself."[45]

The poem is very hard reading, perhaps as a whole the hardest intellectual exercise in Browning’s work, but this arises not so much from the obscurity of its ideas and phrases as from the peculiar complexity of its structure.  To apprehend it we must put ourselves at a certain standpoint, which is not easy to reach.  The monologue as a whole represents, as we only learn at the end, not a direct speech to a real person in England, but a mere musing over a cigar in the palace in France.  It is divided into two distinct sections, which need to be kept clearly apart in the mind.  The first section, up to the line, more than half-way through, “Something like this the unwritten chapter reads,” is a direct self-apology.  Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau puts forward what he represents as his theory of practice.  It is founded on the principle of laisser-faire, and resolves itself into conformity:  concurrence with things as they are, with society as it is.  He finds existing institutions, not indeed perfect, but sufficiently good for practical purposes; and he conceives his mission to be that of a builder on existing foundations, that of a social conservator, not of a social reformer:  “to do the best with the least change possible.”  On his own showing, he has had this single aim in view from first to last, and on this ground, that of expediency, he explains and defends every act of his tortuous and vacillating policy.  He has had his ambitions and ideals of giving freedom to Italy, for example, but he has set them aside in the interests of his own people and for what he holds to be their more immediate needs.  So far the direct apology.  He next proceeds to show what he might have done, but did not, the ideal course as it is held; commenting the while, as “Sagacity,” upon the imaginary new version of his career.  His comments represent his real conduct, and they are such as he assumes would naturally be made on the “ideal” course by the very critics who have censured his actual temporising policy.  The final pages contain an involuntary confession that, even in his own eyes, Prince Hohenstiel is not quite satisfied with either his conduct or his defence of it.