l loiterer, who, with extraordinary gifts,
failed by some inner enervating paralysis[11] to make his spiritual
quality explicit; and who impressed contemporaries sufficiently to start
a brilliant myth of what he did not do, but had to wait for recognition
until he met the eye and lips of Dante. It is difficult not to suspect
the influence of another great poet. _Sordello_ has no nearer parallel
in literature than Goethe's _Tasso_, a picture of the eternal antagonism
between the poet and the world, for which Bordello's failure to "fit to
the finite his infinity" might have served as an apt motto. Browning has
nowhere to our knowledge mentioned _Tasso_; but he has left on record
his admiration of the beautiful sister-drama _Iphigenie_.[12]

[Footnote 11:
"Ah but to find
A certain mood enervate such a mind," &c.
--_Works_, i. 122.]

[Footnote 12: _To E.B.B._, July 7, 1846. He is "vexed" at Landor's
disparagement of the play, and quotes with approval Landor's earlier
declaration that "nothing so Hellenic had been written these two
thousand years."]

The elaboration of this conception is, however, entirely Browning's
own, and discloses at every point the individual quality of his mind.
Like _Faust_, like the Poet in the _Palace of Art_, Sordello bears the
stamp of an age in which the ideal of intellect, art, culture, and the
ideal of humanity, of social service, have both become potent
inspirations, often in apparent conflict, and continually demanding a
solution of their differences. Faust breaks away from the narrow
pedantries of the schools in order to heap upon his breast the weal and
woe of mankind, and to draw all their life and thought into the compass
of his mind. Tennyson's "glorious devil" (by a curious irony intended
for no other than Faust's creator) sets up his lordly pleasure-house
apart from the ways of men, until at last, confuted by experience, he
renounces his folly. _Sordello_ cannot claim the mature and classical
brilliance of the one, nor the limpid melodious beauty of the other; but
it approaches _Faust_ itself in its subtle soundings of the mysteries of
the intellectual life. It is a young poet's attempt to cope with the
problem of the poet's task and the poet's function, the relation of art
to life, and of life to art. Neither Goethe nor Tennyson thought more
loftily of the possibilities of poetic art. And neither insisted more
peremptorily--or rather assumed more unqu