s retirement of
thought into himself, described as taking place in Venice during an
hour, but I dare say ranging over half a year in reality, he tells the
rest of Sordello's story from the outside, as a spectator and describer.

Browning has now resolved to dedicate his art, which is his life, to
love of Humanity, of that pale dishevelled girl, unlovely and lovely,
evil and good; and to tell the story of individual men and women, and of
as many as possible; to paint the good which is always mixed with their
evil; to show that their failures and sins point to a success and
goodness beyond, because they emerged from aspiration and aspiration
from the divinity at the root of human nature. But to do this, a poet
must not live like Sordello, in abstractions, nor shrink from the shock
of men and circumstance, nor refuse to take men and life as they
are--but throw himself into the vital present, with its difficulties,
baffling elements and limitations; take its failures for his own; go
through them while he looks beyond them, and, because he looks beyond
them, never lose hope, or retreat from life, or cease to fight his way
onward. And, to support him in this, there is but one thing--infinite
love, pity, and sympathy for mankind, increased, not lessened by
knowledge of the sins and weakness, the failure and despairs of men.
This is Browning's second thought for life. But this is the very thing
Sordello, as conceived by Browning, did not and could not do. He lived
in abstractions and in himself; he tried to discard his human nature, or
to make it bear more than it could bear. He threw overboard the natural
physical life of the body because it limited, he thought, the outgoings
of the imaginative soul, and only found that in weakening the body he
enfeebled the soul. At every point he resented the limits of human life
and fought against them. Neither would he live in the world allotted to
him, nor among the men of his time, nor in its turmoil; but only in
imagination of his own inner world, among men whom he created for
himself, of which world he was to be sole king. He had no love for men;
they wearied, jarred, and disturbed his ideal world. All he wanted was
their applause or their silence, not their criticism, not their
affection. And of course human love and sympathy for men and insight
into them, departed from him, and with them his art departed. He never
became a true poet.

It is this failure, passing through several phas