The ethical confusion that arises from the romantic cult of “soul” and the closely allied tendency towards a hybrid art--art that lacks high seriousness without being frankly recreative--may also be illustrated from the field of poetry. Many volumes have been published and are still being published on Browning as a philosophic and religious teacher. But Browning can pass as a prophet only with the half-educated person, the person who has lost traditional standards and has at the same time failed to work out with the aid of the ethical imagination some fresh scale of values and in the meanwhile lives impulsively and glorifies impulse. Like the half-educated person, Browning is capable of almost any amount of intellectual and emotional subtlety, and like the half-educated person he is deficient in inner form: that is he deals with experience impressionistically without reference to any central pattern or purpose.[136] It is enough that the separate moments of this experience should each stand forth like The quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a lighted match. One may take as an illustration of this drift towards the melodramatic the “Ring and the Book.” The method of this poem is peripheral, that is, the action is viewed not from any centre but as refracted through the temperaments of the actors. The twelve monologues of which the poem is composed illustrate the tendency of romantic writing to run into some “song of myself” or “tale of my heart.” The “Ring and the Book” is not only off the centre, but is designed to raise a positive prejudice against everything that is central. Guido, for example, had observed decorum, had done all the conventional things and is horrible. Pompilia, the beautiful soul, had the great advantage of having had an indecorous start. Being the daughter of a drab, she is not kept from heeding the voice of nature. Caponsacchi again shows the beauty of his soul by violating the decorum of the priesthood. This least representative of priests wins our sympathy, not by his Christianity, but by his lyrical intensity: O lyric love, half angel and half bird, And all a wonder and a wild desire! Browning here escapes for once from the clogging intellectualism that makes nearly all the “Ring and the Book” an indeterminate blend of verse and prose, and achieves true poetry though not of the highest type. The hybrid character of his art, due partly to a lack of outer form, to a defective poetical technique, arises even more from a lack of inner form--from an attempt to give a semblance of seriousness to what is at bottom unethical. The aged Pope may well meditate on the revolution that is implied in the substitution of the morality of the beautiful soul for that of St. Augustine.[137] In seeming to accept this revolution Browning’s Pope comes near to breaking all records, even in the romantic movement, for paradox and indecorum.