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 unquestioningly--that it only
fulfils these possibilities when the poet labours in the service of man.
He is "earth's essential king," but his kingship rests upon his carrying
out the kingliest of mottoes--"Ich dien." Browning all his life had a
hearty contempt for the foppery of "Art for Art," and he never conveyed
it with more incisive brilliance than in the sketch of Bordello's
"opposite," the Troubadour Eglamor.

"How he loved that art!
The calling marking him a man apart
From men--one not to care, take counsel for
Cold hearts, comfortless faces, ... since verse, the gift
Was his, and men, the whole of them, must shift