Each is a study of the flaws which bring genius to all but ruin, a study of the erroneous conduct of life by men of extraordinary powers.

In each poem the chief personage aspires and fails, yet rises--for Browning was not of the temper to accept ultimate failures, and postulated a heaven to warrant his optimistic creed--rises at the close from failure to a spiritual recovery, which may be regarded as attainment, but an attainment, as far as earth and its uses are concerned, marred and piteous; he recovers in the end his true direction, but recovers it only for service in worlds other than ours which he may hereafter traverse.
He has been seduced or conquered by alien forces and through some inward flaw; he has been faithless to his highest faculties; he has not fulfilled his seeming destiny; yet before death and the darkness of death arrive, light has come; he perceives the wanderings of the way, and in one supreme hour or in one shining moment he gives indefeasible pledges of the loyalty which he has forfeited.

Shelley in _Alastor_, the influence of which on Browning in writing _Pauline_ is evident, had rebuked the idealist within himself, who would live in lofty abstractions to the loss of human sympathy and human love.

Browning in _Pauline_ also recognises this danger, but he indicates others--the risk of the lower faculties of the mind encroaching upon and even displacing the higher, the risk of the spirit of aggrandisement, even in the world of the imagination, obtaining the mastery over the spirit of surrender to that which is higher than self.

It is quite right and needful to speak of the "lesson" of Browning's poem, and the lesson of _Pauline_ is designed to inculcate first loyalty to a man's highest power, and secondly a worshipping loyalty and service to that which transcends himself, named by the speaker in _Pauline_ by the old and simple name of God.
Was it the problem of his own life--that concerning the conduct of high, intellectual and spiritual powers--which Browning transferred to his art, creating personages other than himself to be exponents of his theme?
We cannot tell; but the problem in varied forms persists from poem to poem.