hat 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 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