n 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
the least, in the line which handed on the torch of Plato. The author of
the _Phoedrus_ saw in the ecstasy of Love one of the avenues to the
knowledge of the things that indeed are. To Dante the supreme realities
were mirrored in the eyes of Beatrice. For Shelley Love was interwoven
through all the mazes of Being; it was the source of the strength by
which man masters his gods. To all these masters of idealism Browning's
vision of Love owed something of its intensity and of its range. With
the ethical Love of Jesus and St Paul his affinities were more apparent,
but less profound. For him, too, love was the sum of all morality and
the root of all goodness. But it resembled more the joyous
self-expansion of the Greek than the humility and self-abnegation of
Christian love. Not the saintly ascetic nor the doer of good works, but
the artist and the "lover," dom