Browning and Dogma. Ethel M. Naish
in the ordinary acceptation of the term as an appeal to the senses affording distinctly pleasurable sensations. But the attraction peculiar to the grotesque in any form is here present in a marked degree: an attraction frequently stronger than that exerted by the purely beautiful, involving as it does a more direct intellectual appeal; since grotesqueness, whether in Nature or in Art, does not usually denote simplicity. And Caliban is by no means a simple being, rather is he a singularly remarkable creation even for the genius of Browning. As we know, the idea suggested itself whilst the poet was reading The Tempest, when there flashed through his mind the passage from the Psalms (l, 21) which stands beneath the title: “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself.” In a recognition of the full significance of this fact may be found the key to all seeming inconsistencies which have evoked criticisms describing the poem from its theological aspect as a “monstrous Bridgewater treatise,”[5] and “a fragment of Browning’s own Christian apologetics,” the “reasoning” of Caliban as “an initial absurdity,”[6] whilst Caliban himself is designated “a savage with the introspective powers of a Hamlet and the theology of an Evangelical clergyman”[7]—the entire scheme of this “wonderful” work being even summarized as a “design to describe the way in which a primitive nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them.”[8] There is perhaps more to be said for the poem than the suggestions involved in any or all of these comments. A protracted investigation as to how far Browning’s Caliban is an immediate development of the Caliban of The Tempest would be beside the main object of these Lectures; but for an understanding of the value to be reasonably attached to the soliloquy it is essential to estimate as fairly as may be possible the character, intellectual and moral, of the soliloquist, since Caliban’s conception of his Creator must necessarily be influenced by the limitations of his own powers, whether physical or mental. For here, as elsewhere in the dramatic poems, Browning has completely identified himself with his soliloquist. How far, therefore, we are justified in claiming for Caliban’s theology the title of “a fragment of Browning’s own Christian apologetics” can only be decided by a careful consideration and a comparison with work not avowedly dramatic in character.
Reading again those scenes of The Tempest, in which Caliban plays a part, we become more than ever convinced that the Caliban of the poem is but the Caliban of the play seen through the medium of Browning’s phantasy. This, however, is not equivalent to the admission of simplicity as a characteristic of this strange being, merely is it a recognition that the potentialities existent in Shakespeare’s Caliban are nearer to becoming actualities in the Caliban of Browning. Caliban’s may, indeed, be the nature of a primitive being, but the nature is not, therefore, simple; to the peculiarly complex character of his personality is due the main interest of the poem—curiously undeveloped in some departments of his nature, the moral sense appears to be almost non-existent, he is, nevertheless, an imaginative creature with a distinct poetic and artistic vein in his composition. Whilst Prospero’s estimate of him seems to have been a fairly accurate one:
The most lying slave
Whom stripes may move, not kindness;
as Mr. Stopford Brooke has pointed out “his very cursing is imaginative”[9]—
As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed
With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both. (Act I, Sc. ii.)
And it is Caliban who appreciates the music of Ariel which to Trinculo and Stephano, products of civilization so-called, is a thing fearful as the work of the devil.
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. (Act III, Sc. ii.)
Such is the re-assurance offered by the “man-monster” of Shakespeare. But the Caliban of Browning is yet in his primitive condition, untouched by contact with the outer world as represented even by these dregs of a civilization which, whilst checking the expression of the brutish instinct, increases by repression the force of passions struggling for an outlet to which conventionality bars the way.
To the Caliban of The Tempest Prospero rather than Setebos is the immediate author of the evils of his environment. He has not yet reached the stage of formulated speculation with regard to the character of his mother’s god—to which Browning’s Caliban shows himself to have attained. And it is worthy of notice that the Caliban of the poem does not accept without examination such information as he has received from Sycorax concerning Setebos. Only after due consideration does he advance his own ideas (not according with those of Sycorax) on the subject; proving himself thus capable not merely of imagination but of reasoning; his intellect is alive whatever limitations may be assigned to its capacity for exercise. Although no immediate evidence is afforded of the capabilities of Shakespeare’s Caliban in the regions of abstract thought, yet of the potential existence of the ratiocinative faculty sufficient testimony is afforded by his attitude towards the supernatural powers of Prospero, by his scheme for rendering the new-comers instruments, subserving his own interests in his designs against his employer and tyrant—all this clearly the outcome of something more than a mere brute cunning.
With these aspects of the character of Caliban before him as ground-work, Browning has developed his poem; and in the twenty-three opening lines, introductory to the definite reflections concerning Setebos, are discoverable evidences of all the characteristics of the Caliban of The Tempest. Browning has done nothing without intention, and we are here prepared, or should be prepared, for what is to follow later in the poem. Here the “man-monster” is described as sprawling in the mire, in the enjoyment of such comfort as may be derived from the sunshine in the heat of the day: the sensuous side of the nature finding its satisfaction in
Kicking both feet in the cool slush
and feeling
About his spine small eft things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh. (ll. 5, 6.)
At the same time is recognizable the artistic element in the composition—for not only does he enjoy
A fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,
but he
Looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times.) (ll. 11-14.)
Here is assuredly the language of no mere savage! Compare with this the later descriptions of the inhabitants of the island as assigned to Setebos (ll. 44-55). No mere dry category of animal life, it suggests the result of the observations of a mind at once poetic and imaginative.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech,
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants: the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole.
Not because this is the work of a poet, but because it is the work of a dramatic poet do we get these lines: and Browning has unquestionably, I think, given its character to this earlier passage with intention. He would suggest that this element—poetic and imaginative—in Caliban’s nature must of necessity influence his conception of his Deity.
But whilst emphasis is thus given to the sensuous and artistic aspects of the character of this most complex being, by these introductory lines is more than suggested the obliquity of the moral nature—this, too, influencing, as is inevitable, its theology. Deception is to the Caliban of Browning as to the Caliban of Shakespeare, the very breath of life. His pleasure in inactivity is vastly intensified by the consciousness