soul, he breaks for a passing hour into the song which conquers Eglamor.  When, at the end, he does try to shape himself without for the sake of men he is too late for this life.  He dies of the long struggle, of the revelation of his failure and the reasons of it, of the supreme light which falls on his wasted life; and yet not wasted, since even in death he has found his soul and all it means.  His imagination, formerly only intellectual, has become emotional as well; he loves mankind, and sacrifices fame, power, and knowledge to its welfare.  He no longer thinks to avoid, by living only in himself, the baffling limitations which inevitably trouble human life; but now desires, working within these limits, to fix his eyes on the ineffable Love; failing but making every failure a ladder on which to climb to higher things.  This—­the true way of life—­he finds out as he dies.  To have that spirit, and to work in it, is the very life of art.  To pass for ever out of and beyond one’s self is to the artist the lesson of Bordello’s story.

It is hardly learnt.  The self in Sordello, the self of imagination unwarned by love of men, is driven out of the artist with strange miseries, battles and despairs, and these Browning describes with such inventiveness that at the last one is inclined to say, with all the pitiful irony of Christ, “This kind goeth not forth but with prayer and fasting.”

The position in the poem is at root the same as that in Tennyson’s Palace of Art.  These two poets found, about the same time, the same idea, and, independently, shaped it into poems.  Tennyson put it into the form of a vision, the defect of which was that it was too far removed from common experience.  Browning put it into the story of a man’s life.  Tennyson expressed it with extraordinary clearness, simplicity, and with a wealth of lovely ornament, so rich that it somewhat overwhelmed the main lines of his conception.  Browning expressed it with extraordinary complexity, subtlety, and obscurity of diction.  But when we take the trouble of getting to the bottom of Sordello, we find ourselves where we do not find ourselves in The Palace of Art—­we find ourselves in close touch and friendship with a man, living with him, sympathising with him, pitying him, blessing him, angry and delighted with him, amazingly interested in his labyrinthine way of thinking and feeling; we follow with keen interest his education, we see a soul in progress; we wonder what he will do next, what strange turn we shall come to in his mind, what new effort he will make to realise himself; and, loving him right through from his childhood to his death, we are quite satisfied when he dies.  At the back of this, and complicating it still more—­but, when we arrive at seeing it clearly, increasing the interest of the poem—­is a great to-and-fro of humanity at a time when humanity was alive and keen and full of attempting; when men were savagely original, when life was lived to its last drop, and when a new world was dawning.  Of all this outside humanity there is not a trace in Tennyson, and Browning could not have got on without it.  Of course, it made his poetry difficult.  We cannot get excellences without their attendant defects.  We have a great deal to forgive in Sordello.  But for the sake of the vivid humanity we forgive it all.