A Death in the Desert, though a poem of great beauty, must be set, in intrinsic value, below these two. To attack Strauss through the mouth of the dying apostle was a smart pamphleteering device; but it gave his otherwise noble verse a disagreeable twang of theological disputation, and did no manner of harm to Strauss, who had to be met on other ground and with other weapons,—the weapons of history and comparative religion—in which Browning's skill was that only of a brilliant amateur. But the impulse which created it had deeper springs than this. What is most clearly personal and most deeply felt in it is the exaltation of love, which seems to have determined the whole imaginative fabric. Love, Browning's highest expression of spiritual vitality, was the cardinal principle of his creed; God was vital to him only as a loving God, and Christ only as the human embodiment and witness of God's love. The traditional story of Christ was in this sense of profound significance for him, while he turned away with indifference or disgust from the whole doctrinal apparatus of the Atonement, which, however closely bound up with the popular conception of God's love, had nothing to do with his conception of it, and he could thus consistently decline the name of Christian, as some witnesses aver that he did.[42] It was thus in entire keeping with his way of approaching Christianity that he imagined this moving episode,—the dying apostle whose genius had [made] that way so singularly persuasive, the little remnant of doomed and hunted fugitives who seem to belong to earth only by the spiritual bond of their love to him, as his own physical life is now a firebrand all but extinct,—"all ashes save the tip that holds a spark," but that still glowing with undiminished soul. The material fabric which enshrines this fine essence of the Christian spirit is of the frailest; and the contrast is carried out in the scenic setting,—the dim cool cavern, with its shadowy depth and faint glimmerings of day, the hushed voices, the ragged herbage, and the glory in the face of the passing saint within; without, the hard dazzling glare of the desert noon, and the burning blue, and the implacable and triumphant might of Rome.
[42] Other testimony, it is true, equally strong, asserts that he accepted the name; in any case he used it in a sense of his own.
The discourse of the "aged friend" is full of subtle and vivid thinking, and contains some of Browning's most memorable utterances about Love, in particular the noble lines—
"For life with all it yields of joy and woe ...
Is just our chance of the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is."
Nowhere, either, do we see more clearly how this master-conception of his won control of his reasoning powers, framing specious ladders to conclusions towards which his whole nature yearned, but which his vision of the world did not uniformly bear out. Man loved, and God would not be above man if He did not also love. The horrible spectre of a God who has power without love never ceased to lurk in the background of Browning's [thought], and he strove with all his resources of dialectic and poetry to exorcise it. And no wonder. For a loving God was the very keystone of Browning's scheme of life and of the world, and its withdrawal would have meant for him the collapse of the whole structure.
It is no accident that the Death in the Desert is followed immediately by a theological study in a very different key, Caliban upon Setebos. For in this brilliantly original "dramatic monologue" Caliban—the "savage man"—appears "mooting the point 'What is God?'" and constructing his answer frankly from his own nature. It was quite in Browning's way to take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque parallels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly believed; a proclivity aided by the curious subtle relation between his grotesquerie and his seriousness, which makes Pacchiarotto, for instance, closely similar in effect to parts of Christmas-Eve. Browning is one of three or four sons of the nineteenth century who dared to fill in the outlines, or to complete the half-told tale, of Shakespeare's Caliban.[43] Kenan's hero is the quondam disciple of Stephano and Trinculo, finished and matured in the corrupt mob-politics of Europe; a caustic symbol of democracy, as Renan saw it, alternately trampling on and patronising culture. Browning's Caliban is far truer to Shakespeare's conception; he is the Caliban [of] Shakespeare, not followed into a new phase but observed in a different attitude,—Caliban of the days before the Storm, an unsophisticated creature of the island, inaccessible to the wisdom of Europe, and not yet the dupe of its vice. His wisdom, his science, his arts, are all his own. He anticipates the heady joy of Stephano's bottle with a mash of gourds of his own invention. And his religion too is his own,—no decoction from any of the recognised vintages of religious thought, but a home-made brew cunningly distilled from the teeming animal and plant life of the Island. It is a mistake to call Caliban's theology a study of primitive religion; for primitive religion is inseparable from the primitive tribe, and Caliban the savage, who has never known society, was a conception as unhistorical as it was exquisitely adapted to the individualist ways of Browning's imagination. Tradition and prescription, which fetter the savage with iron bonds, exist for Caliban only in the form of the faith held by his dam, which he puts aside in the calm decisive way of a modern thinker, as one who has nothing to fear from the penalties of heresy, and has even outlived the exultation of free thought:—
"His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so;
Who made them weak, made weakness He might vex."
[43] It is characteristic that M. Maeterlinck found no place for Caliban in his striking fantasia on the Tempest, Joyzelle.
Caliban's theology has, moreover, very real points of contact with Browning's own. His god is that sheer Power which Browning from the first recognised; it is [because] Setebos feels heat and cold, and is therefore a weak creature with ungratified wants, that Caliban decides there must be behind him a divinity that "all it hath a mind to, doth." Caliban is one of Browning's most consummate realists; he has the remorselessly vivid perceptions of a Lippo Lippi and a Sludge. Browning's wealth of recondite animal and plant lore is nowhere else so amazingly displayed; the very character of beast or bird will be hit off in a line,—as the pie with the long tongue
"That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,"