Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas.”

The ideal that fails means the birth of a new ideal.  The very centre of Browning as an artist is there: 

    Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
      Sleep to wake!

Sordello is another example of his theory, of a different type from Aprile, or that poet in Pauline who gave Browning the sketch from which Sordello was conceived.  But Browning, who, as I have said, repeated his theory, never repeated his examples:  and Sordello is not only clearly varied from Aprile and the person in Pauline, but the variations themselves are inventively varied.  The complex temperament of Sordello incessantly alters its form, not only as he grows from youth to manhood, but as circumstances meet him.  They give him a shock, as a slight blow does to a kaleidoscope, and the whole pattern of his mind changes.  But as with the bits of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope, the elements of Bordello’s mind remain the same.  It is only towards the end of his career, on the forcible introduction into his life of new elements from the outward world, that his character radically changes, and his soul is born.  He wins that which he has been without from the beginning.  He wins, as we should say, a heart.  He not only begins to love Palma otherwise than in his dreams, but with that love the love of man arises—­for, in characters like Sordello, personal love, once really stirred, is sure to expand beyond itself—­and then, following on the love of man, conscience is quickened into life, and for the first time recognises itself and its duties.  In this new light of love and conscience, directed towards humanity, he looks back on his life as an artist, or rather, Browning means us to do so; and we understand that he has done nothing worthy in his art; and that even his gift of imagination has been without the fire of true passion.  His aspirations, his phantasies, his songs, done only for his own sake, have been cold, and left the world cold.

He has aspired to a life in the realm of pure imagination, to winning by imagination alone all knowledge and all love, and the power over men which flows from these.  He is, in this aspiration, Paracelsus and Aprile in one.  But he has neither the sincerity of Paracelsus nor the passion of Aprile.  He lives in himself alone, beyond the world of experience, and only not conscious of those barriers which limit our life on which Browning dwells so much, because he does not bring his aspirations or his imaginative work to the test by shaping them outside of himself.  He fails, that is, to create anything which will please or endure; fails in the first aim, the first duty of an artist.  He comes again and again to the verge of creating something which may give delight to men, but only once succeeds, when by chance, in a moment of excited impulse, caused partly by his own vanity, and partly by the waves of humanity at Palma’s Court of Love beating on his