"Undue Levity": The Moral Complexity of Browning's "Pied Piper"

"The Pied Piper of Hamelin; A Child's Story" occupies a paradoxical position in the work of Robert Browning. To begin with, it is one of only two children's poems written by Browning, whose other work was considered so difficult by his contemporaries that it failed to reach more than a few readers until after the publication of The Ring and the Book in 1868-69, thirty-five years after his debut in print. Second, "The Pied Piper" is most closely related in verse form and narrative technique to one of Browning's most serious and least accessible works, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, the paired religious poems published in 1850. Finally, within the text of "The Pied Piper" inheres another paradox: the moral tag at the end is seemingly irrelevant, if not cheerfully contradictory, to the rest. These puzzling facts about Browning's poem are worth special attention for the light they shed on his other poetry and the insights they suggest about the treatment of moral problems in other Victorian literature for children.

Early in 1841, Browning wrote "The Cardinal and the Dog" for Willie Macready, the ten-year-old son of the famous tragedian William Macready, when the child was confined to his bed with a respiratory illness. This short poem narrates the death by terror of Crescenzio, the Cardinal of Verona (known for his implacable pursuit of Protestants), after he is visited by a huge black dog with "flaming eyes." The poem ends with the rather compressed and offhand suggestion that the dog was providentially sent to save the Protestants, who in return should themselves be tolerant. Willie illustrated the poem with enthusiasm, and the next year, probably in early May, Browning sent him "The Pied Piper," a longer and richer poem.¹ Willie first tackled an elaborate illustration of the town council, which he glossed with a line from the fourth stanza, "Only a scraping of shoes on the mat." But then he wrote to Browning on 18 May that, although he was satisfied with the other drawings for "The Pied Piper," they were not "so good as the Council chamber, or the other one that I did."²

Browning had pinned his hopes for success as a playwright on William Macready the elder, an actor-manager associated with the Covent Garden and Drury Lane Theatres, but despite Browning's obvious wish to appeal to the father, Willie evidently touched the poet's heart and challenged him as a poet. Browning recalled the relationship many years later in a letter to his friend William Furnival:

The "W. M. the younger" [as the dedication reads] was poor William Macready's eldest boy—dead, a few years ago. He had a talent for drawing, and asked me to give him some little thing to illustrate, so I made a bit of a poem out of an old account of the death of the Pope's legate at the Council of Trent—which he made such clever drawings for, that I tried a more picturesque subject, the Piper. I still possess the half dozen of the designs he gave me.

(Peterson 27)

Almost forty years later, when Browning heard the rumor that the last quatrain of the poem—which counselled paying pipers and keeping promises—referred to his own less than amicable relationship with Willie's father, he reacted in a letter to Courthope Bowen that

it would perhaps have been better to see no "sly hit" in what was merely the obvious moral of a poem meant for a little boy. His father never broke a promise to me. . . . I certainly had a difference of opinion with him . . . but long after "The Pied Piper" was written.

(qtd. Poetical Works, 275 n. 303.)

Two of Browning's motivations become apparent in these letters: he wrote both poems as a basis for pictorial images, and he intended them as entertainments and distractions for a sick child. The moral theme of the second poem, Browning observes, is "obvious." In his essay on Shelley, Browning analyzes his own work as objective rather than subjective, descriptive rather...