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, t