t, if he were not a democrat, he would be
false to poetry, and he answers his detractors,

Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise,
That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope
Of his pure song.

In the Victorian period the same view holds. The Brownings were ardent
champions of democracy. Mrs. Browning averred that the poet's thirst for
ubiquitous beauty accounts for his love of freedom:

Poets (hear the word)
Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.
Oh, not that they're disloyal to the high,
But loyal to the low, and cognizant
Of the less scrutable majesties.
[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.]

Tennyson conceived of the poet as the author of democracy. [Footnote:
_See The Poet_.] Swinburne prolonged the Victorian paean to the
liberty-loving poet [Footnote: See _Mater Triumphilis_, _Prelude_,
_Epilogue_, _Litany of Nations_, and _Hertha_.] till our new group of
singers appeared, whose devotion to liberty is self-evident.

It is true that to the poet liberty is an inner thing, not always
synonymous with suffrage. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, all came to
distrust the machinery of so-called freedom in society. Likewise
Browning was not in favor of too radical social changes, and Mrs.
Browning went so far as to declare, "I love liberty so much that I hate
socialism." Mob rule is as distasteful to the deeply thoughtful poet as
is tyranny, for the liberty which he seeks to bring into the world is
simply the condition in which every man is expressing the beauty of his
truest self.

If the poet has proved that his visions are true, and that he is eager
to bring society into harmony with them, what further charge remains
against him? That he is "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings
in the void." He may see a vision of Utopia, and long that men shall
become citizens there, but the man who actually perfects human society
is he who patiently toils at the "dim, vulgar, vast, unobvious work"
[Footnote: See _Sordello_.] of the world, here amending a law, here
building a settlement house, and so on. Thus the reformer charges the
poet. Mrs. Browning, in _Aurora Leigh_, makes much of the issue,
and there the socialist, Romney Leigh, sneers at the poet's
inefficiency, telling Aurora that the world

Forgets
To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back
Those savage hungry dogs that hunt her down
To the empty grave of Christ ...