or the lumpish sea-beast which he blinded and called Caliban (an admirable trait)—
"A bitter heart that bides its time and bites."
And all this curious scrutiny is reflected in Caliban's god. The sudden catastrophe at the close
("What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!")
is one of Browning's most superb surprises, breaking in upon the leisured ease of theory with the suddenness of a horrible practical emergency, and compelling Caliban, in the act of repudiating his theology, to provide its most vivid illustration.
Shakespeare, with bitter irony, brought his half-taught savage into touch with the scum of modern civilisation, and made them conspire together against its benignity and wisdom. The reader is apt to remember this [conjunction] when he passes from Caliban to Mr Sludge. Stephano and Trinculo, almost alone among Shakespeare's rascals, are drawn without geniality, and Sludge is the only one of Browning's "casuists" whom he treats with open scorn. That some of the effects were palpably fraudulent, and that, fraud apart, there remained a residuum of phenomena not easy to explain, were all irritating facts. Yet no one can mistake Sludge for an outflow of personal irritation, still less for an act of literary vengeance upon the impostor who had beguiled the lofty and ardent intelligence of his wife. The resentful husband is possibly there, but so elementary an emotion could not possibly have taken exclusive possession of Browning's complex literary faculty, or baulked the eager speculative curiosity which he brought to all new and problematic modes of mind. His attitude towards spiritualism was in fact the product of strangely mingled conditions. Himself the most convinced believer in spirit among the poets of his time, he regarded the bogus demonstrations of the "spiritualist" somewhat as the intellectual sceptic regards the shoddy logic by which the vulgar unbeliever proves there is no God. But even this anger had no secure tenure in a nature so rich in solvents for disdain. It is hard to say where scorn ends and sympathy begins, or where the indignation of the believer who sees his religion travestied passes over into the curious interest of the believer who recognises its dim distorted reflection in the unlikeliest quarters. But Sludge is clearly permitted, like Blougram before and [Juan] and Hohenstiel-Schwangau after him, to assume in good faith positions, or at least to use, with perfect sincerity, language, which had points of contact with Browning's own. He has an eye for "spiritual facts" none the less genuine in its gross way that it has been acquired in the course of professional training, and is valued as a professional asset. But his supernaturalism at its best is devoid of spiritual quality. His "spiritual facts" are collections of miraculous coincidences raked together by the anteater's tongue of a cool egoist, who waits for them
"lazily alive,
Open-mouthed, ...
Letting all nature's loosely guarded motes
Settle and, slick, be swallowed."
Like Caliban, who also finds the anteater an instructive symbol, he sees "the supernatural" everywhere, and everywhere concerned with himself. But Caliban's religion of terror, cunning, and cajolery is more estimable than Sludge's business-like faith in the virtue of wares for which he finds so profitable a market, and which he gets on such easy terms. Caliban tremblingly does his best to hitch his waggon to Setebos's star—when Setebos is looking; Sludge is convinced that the stars are once for all hitched to his waggon; that heaven is occupied in catering for his appetite and becoming an accomplice in his sins. Sludge's spiritual world was genuine for him, but it had nothing but the name in [common] with that of the poet of Ben Ezra, and of the Epilogue which immediately follows.[44]
[44] The foregoing account assumes that the poem was not written, as is commonly supposed, in Florence in 1859-60, but after his settlement in London. The only ground for the current view is Mrs Browning's mention of his having been "working at a long poem" that winter (Letters, May 18, 1860). I am enabled, by the kindness of Prof. Hall Griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from Browning to Buchanan in 1871 shows this "long poem" to have been one on Napoleon III. (cf. above, p. [90]). Some of it probably appears in Hohenstiel Schwangau.
This Epilogue is one of the few utterances in which Browning draws the ambiguous dramatic veil from his personal faith. That he should choose this moment of parting with the reader for such a confession confirms one's impression that the focus of his interest in poetry now, more than ever before, lay among those problems of life and death, of God and man, to which nearly all the finest work of this collection is devoted. Far more emphatically than in the analogous Christmas-Eve, Browning resolves not only the negations of critical scholarship but the dogmatic affirmations of the Churches into symptoms of immaturity in the understanding of spiritual things; in the knowledge how heaven's high with earth's low should intertwine. The third speaker voices the manifold protest of the nineteenth century against all theologies built upon an aloofness of the divine and human, whether the aloof God could be reached by special processes and ceremonies, or whether he was a bare abstraction, whose ["pale bliss"] never thrilled in response to human hearts. The best comment upon his faith is the saying of Meredith, "The fact that character can be and is developed by the clash of circumstances is to me a warrant for infinite hope."[45] Only, for Browning, that "infinite hope" translates itself into a sense of present divine energies bending all the clashing circumstance to its benign end, till the walls of the world take on the semblance of the shattered Temple, and the crowded life within them the semblance of the seemingly vanished Face, which