But he was beyond all question
stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Home
was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to
conjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may
have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we think
that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious
character, we can still feel that Browning might have achieved his
purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces
again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a
subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full
comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than
might have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginative
tolerance. AEstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the
artist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, he
hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything,
from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose
white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their
own way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in all
things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the right
attitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligence
on the ground of genius, he said, "That is an error: Noblesse oblige."

Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy
order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It
never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows
nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something
about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of
resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly
dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to
be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter
or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can
think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair
way to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great
intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word,
"postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that
remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias
was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But
almost all the men he really knew he admired, almo