decent attention to
it. No doubt he is partly responsible for this impression himself. His
ideals of literary form were not altogether those commonly recognised in
literature. If we understand by form the quality of clear-cut outline
and sharply defined articulation, there is a sense in which it was one
of the most ingrained instincts of his nature, indulged at times with
even morbid excess. Alike in life and in art he hated sloth,--the
slovenliness of the "ungirt loin" and of the indecisive touch. In
conduct, this animus expressed itself in a kind of punctilious
propriety. The forms of social convention Browning observed not merely
with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the
enthusiasm of the virtuoso. Near akin in genius to the high priests of
the Romantic temple, Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of
adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts
of the Romantic Bohemia. His "individualism" was not of the type which
overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too
profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In his
poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape. Not a little, both of
its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined
exuberance of his joy in form. An acute criticism of Mrs Browning's--in
some points the very best critic he ever had--puts one aspect of this
admirably. _The Athenaeum_ had called him "misty." "Misty," she retorts,
"is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity. You never are misty,
not even in _Sordello_--never vague. Your graver cuts deep sharp lines,
always,--and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts,
from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general
significance seems to escape."[72] That is the overplus of form
producing obscurity. But through immense tracts of Browning the effect
of the extra-distinctness of his images and thoughts, of the deep sharp
lines cut by his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full
in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression. Yet he is no more a
realist of the ordinary type here than in his colouring. His deep sharp
lines are caught from life, but under the control of a no less definite
bias of eye and brain. Sheer nervous and muscular energy had its part
here also. As he loved the intense colours which most vigorously
stimulate the optic nerve, so he delighted in the angular, indented,
in