him more or less decisively on the Liberal side. Individualist to the
core, he was conspicuously deficient in the kind of social mind which
makes a poet the voice of an organised community, a nation, or a class.
Progress, again, was with him even more an instinct than a principle;
and he became the _vates sacer_ of unsatisfied aspiration. On the other
hand, that he was not without elements of the temper which makes for
order was shown by his punctilious, almost eager, observance of social
conventions, and, in the last years of his life, by the horror excited
in him by what he took to be the anarchy of Women's Suffrage and Home
Rule. In the other two fields of opposition he belonged decisively to
the spiritual and emotional reaction. Spirit was for him the ultimate
fact of existence, the soul and God were the indissoluble realities. But
his idealism was not potent and pure enough either to control the
realist suggestions of his strong senses and energetic temperament, or
to interpret them in its own terms. And in the conflict between reason
and feeling, or, as he put it, between "head" and "heart," as sources of
insight, and factors in human advancement, feeling found its most
brilliant champion in Browning, and its most impressive statement in his
doctrine of Love. An utilitarian reduction of welldoing to a
distribution of properly calculated doses of satisfaction he dismissed
with a scorn as derisive as Carlyle's; "general utility" was a favourite
of "that old stager the devil."[145] Yet no critic of intellect ever
used intellect more vigorously, and no preacher of the rights of the
heart ever dealt less in flaccid sentiment. Browning was Paracelsus as
well as Aprile, and sharply as he chose to dissever "Knowledge" and
"Love," Love was for him never a foe of intellect, but a more gifted
comrade who does the same work more effectively, who dives deeper, soars
higher, welds more potently into more enduring unities, and flings upon
dry hearts with a more infallible magic the seed of more marvellous new
births. Browning as the poet of Love is thus the last, and assuredly not