e "incidents in
the development of a soul." The portrait of Sordello is one of the most
elaborate and complete which he has given us. It is painted with more
accessory detail and on a larger canvas than any other single figure.
Like _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, with which it has points of affinity,
the poem is a study of ambition and of egoism; of a soul "whose
ambition," as it has been rightly said, "is in extravagant disproportion
to its physical powers and means, and whose temptation is at every
crisis to seek pleasure in the picture of willing and doing rather than
in willing and doing itself." Sordello's youth is fed upon fancy: he
imagines himself Apollo, this or that hero of the time; in dreams he is
and does to the height of his aspirations. But from any actual doing he
shrinks; at the approach or the call of action, his will refuses to act.
We might sum up his character in a general sense by saying that his
imagination overpowers every other faculty; an imagination intensely
personal, a sort of intellectual egoism, which removes him equally from
action and from sympathy. He looks on men as foils to himself, or as a
background on which to shine. But the root of his failure is this, and
it is one which could never be even apprehended by a vulgar egoism: he
longs to grasp the whole of life at once, to realise his aims in their
entirety, without complying with the necessary conditions. His mind
perceives the infinite and essential so clearly that it scorns or spurns
the mere accidents. But earth being earth, and life growth, and
accidents an inevitable part of life, the rule remains that man, to
attain, must climb step by step, and not expect to fly at once to the
top of the ladder. Finding that he cannot do everything, Sordello sees
no alternative but to do nothing. Consequently his state comes to be a
virtual indolence or inactivity; though it is in reality that of the
top, spinning so fast that its motion is imperceptible. Poet and man of
action, for he contains more than the germ of both, confound and break
down one another. He meets finally with a great temptation, conquers it,
but dies of the effort. For the world his life has been a failure, for
himself not absolutely so, since, before his eyes were closed, he was
permitted to see the truth and to recognise it. But in all his aims, in
all his ambitions, he has failed; and the world has gained nothing from
them or from him but the warning of his example.

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