Part 3 (2/2)
”Terrible: watch his feats in proof!
One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope, He hath a spite against me, that I know, Just as He favors Prospero; who knows why?
So it is all the same as well I find.
. . . So much for spite.”
There is no after-life.
”He doth His worst in this our life, Giving just respite lest we die through pain, Saving last pain for worst--with which, an end.
Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire Is, not to seem too happy.”
Poor Caliban, not to have known that in the summer of man's joy our G.o.d grows glad! All he hopes is,
”Since evils sometimes mend, Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime, That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch And conquer Setebos, or likelier he Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die.”
This is tragic as few tragedies know how to be. Setebos is mean, revengeful, fitful, spiteful, everything but good and n.o.ble; and his votary will live to hope that he will either be conquered by a mightier or will slumber forever!
So Caliban creates a G.o.d, a cosmogony, a theology; gets no thought of goodness from G.o.d or for himself; gets no sign of reformation in character; rises not a cubit above the ground where he constructs his monologue; puts into G.o.d only what is in Caliban; has no faint hint of love toward him from G.o.d, or from him toward G.o.d, when suddenly
”A curtain o'er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird--or, yes, There scuds His raven that has told Him all!
It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move, And fast invading fires begin! White blaze-- A tree's head snaps--and there, there, there, there, there, His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!”
And there, like a groveling serpent in the ooze, there lies Caliban, abject in fear, with not a ray of love. Hopeless, loveless, see him lie--a spectacle so sad as to make the ragged crags of ocean weep!
So pitiful a theology, yet no more pitiful than theologies created in our own epoch. Men, not brutal but opinionated, a.s.sume to comprehend all things, G.o.d included. They destroy and create theologies with the flippant egotism of a French chevalier of the days of the Grand Monarch. They settle matters with a ”Thus it is, and thus it is not.”
Would not those men do well to read the parable, ”Caliban upon Setebos?” Grant Allen and Huxley would be generously helped; for the more they would lose in dogmatism, so much the more would they gain in wisdom. And what is true of them is true of others of their fraternity. This irony of Browning's is caustic, but very wholesome.
Barren as Caliban's theology is, certain contemporary theologies are not less so. A day to suffer and enjoy--and then the night, long, dark, dreamless, eternal!
How sane Browning was! What breadth of meaning is here disclosed!
What preacher of this century has preached a more inspired sermon than ”Caliban upon Setebos?” He saw the irrationality of rationalism. He knew that knowledge of G.o.d came, as the new earth, ”down from G.o.d out of heaven.” Men will do better to receive theologies from G.o.d than to create them. A life we may live, having the Pattern ”showed us in the mount.” Christ gives the lie to Caliban's estimate of Deity. Not spite, nor misused might, nor caprice, nor life surcharged with either indifference or spleen; but love and ministry and fertile thought and wide devotion to others' good, an oblation of Himself--this is G.o.d, of whom Caliban had no dream, and of whom the Christ was exegete.
IV
William the Silent
Few ill.u.s.trious characters are so little known as William the Silent.
His face has faded from the sky of history as glory from a sunset cloud; though, on attention, reasons why this is so may not be difficult to find. Some of them are here catalogued: He did not live to celebrate the triumph of his statesmans.h.i.+p. The nation whose autonomy and independence he secured is no longer a Republic, and so has, in a measure, ceased to bear the stamp of his genius. The narrow limits of his theater of action; for the Belgic States were a trifling province of Philip Second's stupendous empire, stretching, as it did, from Italy to the farthest western promontory of the New World. A theater is something. Throw a heroic career on a world theater, such as Julius Caesar had, and men will look as they would on burning Moscow. The scene prevents obscuration. And last, Holland has, in our days, pa.s.sed into comparative inconsequence, and presents few symptoms of that strength which once aspired to the rulers.h.i.+p of the oceans.
The Belgic provinces were borrowed from the ocean by an industry and audacity which must have astonished the sea, and continues a glory to those men who executed the task, and to all men everywhere as well, since deeds of prowess or genius, wrought by one man or race, inure to the credit of all men and all races, achievement being, not local, but universal. These Netherlands, lying below sea-levels, became the garden-spot of Europe, nurturing a thrifty, capable people, possessing positive genius in industry, so that they not only grew in their fertile soil food for nations, if need be, but became weavers of fabrics for the clothing of aristocracies in remote nations; this, in turn, leading of necessity to a commerce which was, in its time, for the Atlantic what that of Venice had been to the Mediterranean; for the Netherlanders were as aquatic as sea-birds, seeming to be more at home on sea than on dry land. This is a brief survey of those causes which made Flanders, though insignificant in size, a princ.i.p.ality any king might esteem riches. In the era of William the Silent the Netherlands had reached an acme of relative wealth, influence, and commanding importance, and supplied birthplace and cradle to the Emperor Charles V, who, for thirty-seven years (reaching from 1519 to 1556) was the controlling force in European politics. This ruler was grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, and thus of interest to Americans, whose thought must be riveted on any one connected, however remotely, with the discovery of this New World, which supplies a stage for the latest and greatest experiment in civilization and liberty, religion, and individual opportunity. Low as Spain has now fallen, we can not be oblivious to the fact how that, on a day, Columbus, rebuffed by every ruler and every court, found at the Spanish court a queen who listened to his dream, and helped the dreamer, because the enthusiasm and eloquence of this arch-pleader lifted this sovereign, for a moment at least, above herself toward the high level where Columbus himself stood; and that she staked her jewels on the casting of this die must always glorify Queen Isabella, and s.h.i.+ne some glory on the nation whose sovereign she was. For such reason we are predisposed in Charles V's favor. He is as a messenger from one we love, whom we love because of whence he comes. His mother, Joanna, died, crazed and of a broken heart, from the indifference, perfidy, and neglect of her husband, Philip, Archduke of Austria. Her story reads like a novelist's plot, and reasonably too; for every fiction of woman's fidelity in love and boundlessness and blindness of affection is borrowed from living woman's conduct. Woman originates heroic episodes, her love surviving the wildest winter of cruelty and neglect, as if a flower prevailed against an Arctic climate, despite the month-long night and severity of frosts, and still opened petals and dispensed odors as blossoming in daytime and sunlight of a far, fair country.
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