Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

Once admit these two things—namely, that his nature, though not of the highest, is such as God gave him, and his lack of responsibility in regard to any moral ideal, so that he accomplishes the purpose of this nature—and a loophole is given for any inconsistencies he may choose to indulge in in bringing about that strengthening of an old ideal in which he believes. The old ideal is, of course, the monarchical principle of government, administered, however, in such a manner that it will be for the good of society in all its complex manifestations of to-day. His notion of society’s good consists in a balancing of all its forces, secured by the smoothing down of any extreme tendencies, each having its orbit marked but no more, so that none shall impede the other’s path.

“In this wide world—though each and all alike,
Save for [him] fain would spread itself through space
And leave its fellow not an inch of way.”

Browning makes him indulge in a curiously sophisticated view of the relativity of good and evil in the course of his argument, to the effect that since there is a further good conceivable beyond the utmost earth can realize, therefore to change the agency—the evil whereby good is brought about, try to make good do good as evil does—would be just as foolish as if a chemist wanting white and knowing that black ingredients were needed to make the dye insisted these should be white, too. A bad world is that which he experiences and approves. A good world he does not want in which there would be no pity, courage, hope, fear, sorrow, joy—devotedness, in short—which he believes form the ultimate allowed to man; therefore it has been his policy not to do away with the evil in the society he is saving. To mitigate, not to cure, has been his aim.

Browning would, himself, answer the sophistry, here, by showing that evil though permitted by divine power was only a means of good through man’s working against whatever he conceives to be evil with the whole strength of his being. To deliberately follow the policy of conserving evil would be in the end to annihilate the good. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau could not see so far as this.

It is not astonishing that with such a policy as this his methods of carrying it out might seem somewhat dubious if not positively criminal. His departure from his early idealism is excused for the reason that idealism is not practicable when the region of talk is left for the real action of life. Every step in his own aggrandizement is apologized for on the ground that what needed to be accomplished could only be done by a strong hand and that strong hand his own. He was in fact an unprincipled utilitarian as Browning presents him, who spoiled even what virtue resides in utilitarianism by letting his care for saving society be too much influenced by his desire for personal glory. One ideal undertaking he permitted himself, the freeing of Italy from the Austrian yoke. But he was not strong enough for any such high flight of idealism, as the sequel proved.

Browning does not bring out in the poem the Emperor’s real reasons for stopping short in the Italian campaign, which certainly were sufficient from a practical standpoint, but as Archibald Forbes says in his “Life of Napoleon,” should have been thought of before he published his program of freedom to Italy “from the Alps to the Adriatic.” “Even when he addressed the Italians at Milan,” continues Forbes, “the new light had not broken in upon him which revealed the strength of the quadrilateral, the cost of expelling the Austrians from Venetia, and the conviction that further French successes would certainly bring mobilized Germany into the field. That new light seems to have flashed upon Napoleon for the first time from the stern Austrian ranks on the day of Solferino. It was then he realized that should he go forward he would be obliged to attack in front an enemy entrenched behind great fortresses, and protected against any diversion on his flanks by the neutrality of the territories surrounding him.”

Mrs. Browning, whose consternation and grief over Villafranca broke out in burning verse, yet made a defence of Napoleon’s action here which might have been worked into Browning’s poem with advantage. She wrote to John Foster that while Napoleon’s intervention in Italy overwhelmed her with joy it did not dazzle her into doubts as to the motive of it, “but satisfied a patient expectation and fulfilled a logical inference. Thus it did not present itself to my mind as a caprice of power, to be followed perhaps by an onslaught on Belgium and an invasion of England. Have we not watched for a year while every saddle of iniquity has been tried on the Napoleonic back, and nothing fitted? Wasn’t he to crush Piedmontese institutions like so many eggshells? Was he ever going away with his army, and hadn’t he occupied houses in Genoa with an intention of bombarding the city? Didn’t he keep troops in the north after Villafranca on purpose to come down on us with a grand duke or a Kingdom of Etruria and Plon-Plon to rule it? And wouldn’t he give back Bologna to the Pope?... Were not Cipriani, Farini and other patriots his ‘mere creatures’ in treacherous correspondence with the Tuileries ‘doing his dirty work’?” Of such accusations as these the intelligent English journals were full, but she maintains that against “The Inane and Immense Absurd” from which they were born is to be set “a nation saved.” She realized also how hard Napoleon’s position in France must be to maintain “forty thousand priests with bishops of the color of Monseigneur d’Orleans and company, having, of course, a certain hold on the agricultural population which forms so large a part of the basis of the imperial throne. Then add to that the parties who use this Italian question as a weapon simply.”

Many of Napoleon’s own statements have furnished Browning with the arguments used in the apology. After deliberately destroying the constitution, for example, and himself being the cause of the violence and bloodshed in Paris, he coolly addressed the people in the following strain, in which we certainly recognize Hohenstiel-Schwangau:

“Frenchmen! the disturbances are appeased. Whatever may be the decision of the people, society is saved. The first part of my task is accomplished. The appeal to the nation, for the purpose of terminating the struggle of parties, I knew would not cause any serious risk to the public tranquillity. Why should the people have risen against me? If I do not any longer possess your confidence—if your ideas are changed—there is no occasion to make precious blood flow; it will be sufficient to place an adverse vote in the urn. I shall always respect the decision of the people.”

His cleverness in combining the idea of authority with that of the idea of obeying the will of the people is curiously illustrated in his speech at the close of his dictatorship, during which it must be confessed that he had done excellently well for the country—so well, indeed, that even the socialists were ready to cry “Vive l’Empereur!”