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 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 Without it." To Eglamor his art is a mysterious ritual, of which he is the sacrosanct priest, and his happy rhyme the divine response vouchsafed to him in answer. Such beauty as he produces is no effluence from a soul mating itself, like Wordsworth's, "in love and holy passion with the universe," but a cunning application of the approved recipes for effective writing current in the literary guild;-- "He, no genius rare, Transfiguring in fire or wave or air At will, but a poor gnome that, cloistered up In some rock-chamber, with his agate-cup, His topaz-rod, his seed-pearl, in these few And their arrangement finds enough to do For his best art."[13] [Footnote 13: Works, i. 131.]