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The dream-scene of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is Leicester Square; but this also is one of the poems of France. The Inn Album alone is English in its characters and their surroundings. Such a grouping of the works of the period is of a superficial nature, and it can be readily dismissed.
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.
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.
He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he is the first of that great series of the apologiæ of apparently evil men, on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative wealth Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of Fifine at the Fair.
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.
In 1871 also appeared Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of Society, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's apologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon III., whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it.
We saw without surprise that during the decade which produced 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau', 'Fifine at the Fair', and 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country', he could give us 'The Inn Album', with its expression of the higher sexual love unsurpassed, rarely equalled, in the whole range of his work: or those two unique creations of airy fancy and passionate symbolic romance, 'Saint Martin's Summer', and 'Numpholeptos'. It was no ground for astonishment that the creative power in him should even ignore the usual period of decline, and defy, so far as is humanly possible, its natural laws of modification.
The masculine characters in the poems are commonly made the exponents of Browning's intellectual casuistry a Hohenstiel-Schwangau, an Aristophanes; and they are made to say the best and the most truthful words that can be uttered by such as they are and from such positions as theirs; the female characters, a Balaustion, the Lady of Sorrows in The Inn Album, and others are often revealers of sudden truth, which with them is either a divine revelation the vision seen from a higher and clearer standpoint or a dictate of pure human passion.
For the poetry of political enthusiasm he had certainly no vocation. When Savoy was surrendered to France Mrs Browning suffered some pain lest her Emperor's generosity might seem compromised. Browning admitted that the liberation of Italy was a great action, adding cynically of his future Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, "But he has taken eighteen-pence for it, which is a pity."
Poet and Teacher in Old Age During the last decade of his life Browning's influence as a literary power was assured. He noted with satisfaction that fourteen hundred copies of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau were sold in five days, and says of Balaustion's Adventure "2500 in five months is a good sale for the likes of me."
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