A Hero and Some Other Folks Part 3

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

"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.