Part 3 (1/2)
Browning has taken his text from the words of Paul; in ”Caliban upon Setebos,” his text is found in Asaph's psalm, and the words are, ”Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself.” A word will set a great brain on fire, as if the word were a torch and the brain a pine-forest, and to thoughtful minds it must be deeply interesting to know that this study in psychology, which stands distinctly alone in English literature and in universal literature, was suggested by a phrase from the Book of G.o.d.
To begin with, Caliban is one of Shakespeare's finest conceptions in creative art. Caliban is as certain in our thoughts as Ferdinand, Miranda, or Prospero. He is become, by Shakespeare's grace, a person among us who can not be ignored. Study his biography in ”The Tempest,”
and find how masterly the chief dramatist was in rendering visible those forms lying in the shadow-land of psychology. As Dowden has suggested, doubtless Caliban's name is a poet's spelling, or anagram, of ”cannibal;” and, beyond question, Setebos is a character in demonology, taken from the record of the chronicler of Magellan's voyages, who pictures the Patagonians, when taken captive, as roaring, and ”calling on their chief devil, Setebos.” So far the historical setting of Caliban and Sycorax and Setebos. In character, Caliban and Jack Falstaff are related by ties closer than those of blood. Both are b.e.s.t.i.a.l, operating in different departments of society; but in the knight, as in the slave, only animal instincts dominate. l.u.s.t is tyrant. Animality destroys all manhood, and lowers to the slush and ooze of degradation every one given over to its control. A man degraded to the gross level of a beast because he prefers the animal to the spiritual--this is Caliban. His mind is atrophied, in part, because l.u.s.t sins against reason. Caliban is Prospero's slave, but he is l.u.s.t's slave more--a slavery grinding and ignominious as servitude to Prospero can be. Prospero must always, in the widest sense, lord it over Caliban, with his diminished understanding and aggravated appet.i.tes, who vegetates rather than lives. His days are narrow as the days of browsing sheep and cattle; but his soul knows the lecherous intent, the petty hate, the cankerous envy, the evil discontents, indigenous only to the soul of man. Plainly, Caliban is man, not beast; for his proclivities, while b.e.s.t.i.a.l, are still human. In a beast is a certain dignity, in that action is instinctive, irrevocable, and so far necessary. Caliban is not so. He might be other than he is. He is depraved, but yet a man, as Satan was an angel, though fallen. The most profligate man has earmarks of manhood on him that no beast can duplicate. And Caliban (on whom Prospero exhausts his vocabulary of epithets) attempting rape on Miranda; scowling in ill-concealing hate in service; playing truant in his task when from under his master's eyes; traitor to Prospero, and, as a co-conspirator with villains like himself, planning his hurt; a compound of spleen, malignancy, and murderous intent; irritated under conditions; failing to seize moral and manly positions with such ascendency as grows out of them, yet full of bitter hate toward him who wears the supremacy won by moral worth and mastery,--really, Caliban seems not so foreign to our knowledge after all. Such is Shakespeare's Caliban.
Him Browning lets us hear in a monologue. Whoever sets man or woman talking for us does us a service. To be a good listener is to be astute. When anybody talks in our hearing, we become readers of pages in his soul. He thinks himself talking about things; while we, if wise, know he is giving glimpses of individual memorabilia. Caliban is talking. He is talking to himself. He does not know anybody is listening; therefore will there be in him nothing theatrical, but his words will be sincere. He plays no part now, but speaks his soul.
Browning is nothing if not bold. He attempts things audacious as the voyages of Ulysses. Nothing he has attempted impresses me as more bold, if so bold, as this exploit of entering into the consciousness of a besotted spirit, and stirring that spirit to frame a system of theology. Nansen's tramp along the uncharted deserts of the Polar winter was not more brilliant in inception and execution. Caliban is a theorist in natural theology. He is building a theological system as certainly as Augustine or Calvin or Spinoza did. This poem presents that satire which const.i.tutes Browning's humor. Conceive that he here satirizes those omniscient rationalists who demolish, at a touch, all supernatural systems of theology, and proceed to construct purely natural systems in their place as devoid of vitality and inspiration as dead tree-trunks are of vital saps. So conceive this dramatic monologue, and the baleful humor appears, and is captivating in its biting sarcasm and unanswerable argument. Caliban is, in his own opinion, omniscient. He trusts himself absolutely. He is as infallible as the Positivists, and as full of information as the Agnostics, absurd as such an att.i.tude on their part must appear; for, as Romanes has shown in his ”Thoughts on Religion,” the Agnostic must simply a.s.sert his inability to know, and must not dogmatize as to what is or is not. So soon as he does, he has ceased to be a philosophic Agnostic. Caliban's theology, though grotesque, is not a whit more so than much which soberly pa.s.ses in our day for ”advanced thinking” and ”new theology.”
Some things are apparent in Caliban. He is a man, not a beast, in that no beast has any commerce with the thought of G.o.d. Man is declared man, not so much by thinking or by thinking's instrument--language--as by his moral nature. Man prays; and prayer is the imprimatur of man's manhood. Camels kneel for the reception of their burdens, but never kneel to G.o.d. Only man has a shrine and an altar. Such things, we are told, are signs of an infantile state of civilization and superst.i.tion; but they may be boldly affirmed to be, in fact, infallible signs of the divinity of the human soul. Caliban is thinking of his G.o.d, brutal, devilish; yet he thinks of a G.o.d, and that is a possibility as far above the brute as stars are above the meadow-lands. He has a divinity. He is dogmatist, as ignorance is bound to be. He knows; and distrust of himself or his conclusions is as foreign to him as to the rationalists of our century and decade. Caliban makes a G.o.d. The attempt would be humorous were it not pathetic. If his conclusions are absurd, they are what might be antic.i.p.ated when man engages in the task of G.o.d-making. ”Caliban upon Setebos” is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the attempt of man to create G.o.d. G.o.d rises not from man to the firmament, but falls from the firmament to man. G.o.d does not ascend as the vapor, but descends as the light. This is the wide meaning of this uncanny poem. It is the sanity of the leading poet of the nineteenth century, and the greatest poet since Shakespeare, who saw clearly the inanity of so-called scientific conclusions and G.o.dless theories of the evolution of mankind. Mankind can not create G.o.d. G.o.d creates mankind. All the man-made G.o.ds are fas.h.i.+oned after the similitude of Caliban's Setebos. They are grotesque, carnal, devilish. Paganism was but an installment of Caliban's theory. G.o.d was a bigger man or woman, with aggravated human characteristics, as witness Jove and Venus and Hercules and Mars. Greek mythology is a commentary on Caliban's monologue. For man to evolve a G.o.d who shall be non-human, actually divine in character and conduct, is historically impossible. No man could create Christ. The attempt to account for religion by evolution is a piece of sorry sarcasm. Man has limitations. Here is one. By evolution you can not explain language, much less religion. Such is the lesson of ”Caliban upon Setebos.” Shakespeare created a brutalized man, a dull human slave, whom Prospero drove as he would have driven a vicious steed. This only, Shakespeare performed. Browning proposed to give this man to thought, to surrender him to the widest theme the mind has knowledge of--to let him reason on G.o.d. How colossal the conception! Not a man of our century would have cherished such a conception but Robert Browning. The design was unique, needful, valuable, stimulative. The originality, audacity, and brilliancy of the attempt are always a tonic to my brain and spiritual nature. With good reason has this poem been termed ”extraordinary;” and that thinker and critic, James Mudge, has named it ”the finest ill.u.s.tration of grotesque art in the language.”
The picture of Caliban sprawling in the ooze, brute instincts regnant, is complete and admirable. Stealing time from service to be truant (seeing Prospero sleeps), he gives him over to pure animal enjoyment, when, on a sudden, from the cavern where he lies,
”He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross And recross till they weave a spider web, Meshes of fire, And talks to his own self howe'er he please, Touching that other whom his dam called G.o.d;”
but talks of G.o.d, not as a promise of a better life, but purely of an evil mind,
”Because to talk about Him vexes Prospero!
And it is good to cheat the pair [Miranda and Prospero], and gibe, Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.”
What a motive for thinking on the august G.o.d! He now addresses himself to the conceiving of a divinity. He thrusts his mother's beliefs aside rudely, as a beast does the flags that stand along its way in making journey to the stream to slake its thirst. He is grossly self-sufficient. He is boor and fool conjoined. Where wise men and angels would move with reverent tread and forehead bent to earth, he walks erect, unhumbled; nay, without a sense of wors.h.i.+p. How could he or another find G.o.d so? The mood of prayer is the mood of finding G.o.d.
Who seeks Him must seek with thought aflame with love. Caliban's reasoning ambles like a drunkard staggering home from late debauch.
His grossness shames us. And yet were he only Caliban, and if he were all alone, we could forget his maudlin speech--but he is more. He is a voice of our own era. His babblings are not more crude and irreverential than much that pa.s.ses for profound thinking. Nay, Caliban is our contemporaneous shame. He a.s.serts (he does not think--he a.s.serts, settles questions with a word) that Setebos created not all things--the world and sun--
”But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;”
and this goodly frame of ocean and of sky and earth came of Setebos.
”Being ill at ease, He hated that he can not change his cold Nor cure its ache.”
His G.o.d is selfishness, operating on a huge scale. But more, he
”Made all we see and us in spite: how else?
But did in envy, listlessness, or sport Make what himself would fain in a manner be-- Weaker in most points, stronger in a few, Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while.”
Made them to plague, as Caliban would have done. And caprice is Setebos's method. He does things wantonly. No n.o.ble master pa.s.sion flames in him. No goodness blesses him. Such a G.o.d Caliban makes, so that it is odds whether Caliban make G.o.d or G.o.d make Caliban. Be sure, a man-made G.o.d is like the man who made him. The sole explanation of G.o.d, ”who dwelleth in light which no man can approach unto,” and who is whiter than the light in which he dwells, is, he is not myth, man-made.
G.o.d made man, and revealed to him the Maker. Thus only do we explain the surpa.s.sing picture the prophets and the Christ and the evangelists have left us of the mighty G.o.d. Caliban will persist in the belief that the visible system was created in Setebos's moment of being ill at ease and in cruel sportiveness. Nature is a freak of a foul mind. But Caliban's G.o.d is not solitary. How hideous were the Aztec G.o.ds! They were pictured horrors. Montezuma's G.o.ds were Caliban's. Caliban's Setebos was another Moloch of the Canaanites, or a Hindoo Krishna. And the Greek and Norse G.o.ds were the infirm shadows of the men who dreamed them. Who says, after familiarizing himself with the religions of the world, that Caliban or his theology is myth? Setebos has no morals.
He has might. But this was Jupiter. Read ”Prometheus Bound,” and know a Greek conception of Greek Zeus:
”Such shows nor right nor wrong in him, Nor kind nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs That march now from the mountain to the sea; Let twenty pa.s.s and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.”
How hideous this G.o.d, decrepit in all save power! But for argument, suppose
”He is good i' the main, Placable if his mind and ways were guessed, But rougher than his handiwork, be sure.”
Caliban thinks Setebos is himself a creature, made by something he calls ”Quiet;” and what is this but the Gnostic notion of aeons and their subordination to the great, hid G.o.d? No, this brief dramatic lyric is far from being an imagination. Rather say it is a chapter taken from the history of man's traffic in G.o.ds. Setebos is creative; lacks moral qualities in that he may be evil or good; acts from spleen, and by simple caprice; is loveless; to be feared, deceived, tricked, as Caliban tricks Prospero,--so run the crude theological speculations of this man. He gets no step nearer truth. He walks in circles. He is shut in by common human limitations. Man can not dream about the sky until he has seen a sky, nor can he dream out G.o.d till G.o.d has been revealed. Caliban is no more helpless here than other men. His failure in theology is a picture of the failure of all men. G.o.d must show himself at Sinais and at Calvarys, at cross and grave and resurrection and ascension; must pa.s.s from the disclosure of his being the ”I Am” to those climacteric moments of the world when he discovered to us that he was the ”I am Love” and the ”I am the Resurrection and the Life.” G.o.d is