Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island. (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) The original of Caliban is the savage and deformed slave of Shakespeare’s Tempest. The island may be identified with the Utopia ουτοπος, the nowhere) of Hythloday. Setebos was the Patagonian god (Settaboth in Pigafetta), which was by 1611 familiar to the hearers of The Tempest. Patagonia was discovered by Magellan in 1520. The new worlds which Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Gomara, Lane, Harriott and Raleigh described, should, according to the popular fancy of the time, be peopled by just such beings of bestial type as the Caliban of The Tempest. The ancients thought the inhabitants of strange and distant lands were half human, half brutal, and monstrous creatures, ogres, and “anthropophagi, men who each other eat.” The famous traveller Sir John Mandeville, in the fourteenth century, describes “the land of Bacharie, where be full evil folk and full cruel. In that country been many Ipotaynes, that dwell sometimes in the water and sometimes on the land; half-man and half-horse, and they eat men when they may take them.” Marco Polo (1254-1324) represents the Andaman Islanders as a most brutish savage race, having heads, eyes and teeth resembling the canine species, who ate human flesh raw and devoured every one on whom they could lay their hands. The islander as monster was therefore familiar enough to English readers in Shakespeare’s time, and the date of the old book of travels “Purchas his Pilgrimage,” very nearly corresponding with the probable date of the production of The Tempest, affords reasonable proof that the poet has embodied the story given in that work of the pongo, the huge brute-man seen by Andrew Battle in the kingdom of Congo, where he lived some nine months. This pongo slept in the trees, building a roof to shelter himself from the rain, and living wholly on nuts and fruits. Mr. Browning has taken the Caliban of Shakespeare, “the strange fish legged like a man, and his fins like arms,” yet “no fish, but an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt,” and has evolved him into “a savage with the introspective powers of a Hamlet and the theology of an evangelical churchman.” Shakespeare’s monster did not speculate at all; he liked his dinner, liked to be stroked and made much of, and was willing to be taught how to name the bigger light and how the less. He could curse, and he could worship the man in the moon; he could work for those who were kind to him, and had a doglike attachment to Prospero. Mr. Browning’s Caliban has become a metaphysician; he talks Browningese, and reasons high
“Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.”
He has studied Calvin’s Institutes of Theology, and knows enough of St. Augustine to caricature his teaching. Considered from the anthropologist’s point of view, the poem is not a scientific success; Caliban is a degradation from a higher type, not a brute becoming slowly developed into a man. Mr. Browning’s early training amongst the Nonconformists of the Calvinistic type had familiarised him with a theology which, up to fifty years ago, was that of a very large proportion of the Independents, the Baptists, and a considerable part of the Evangelical school in the Church of England. Without some acquaintance with this theological system it is impossible to understand the poem. At the head is a quotation from Psalm l. 21, where God says to the wicked, “thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself,” and the object of the poem is to rebuke the anthropomorphic idea of God as it exists in minds of a narrow and unloving type. It is not a satire upon Christianity, as has been sometimes declared, but is an attempt to trace the evolution of the concrete idea of God in a coarse and brutal type of mind. Man from his advent on the earth has everywhere occupied himself in creating God in his own image and likeness:
“Make us a god, said man:
Power first the voice obeyed;
And soon a monstrous form
Its worshippers dismayed.”
The motto of the poem shows us how much nobler was the Hebrew conception of God than that of the nations who knew Him not. The poem opens with Caliban talking to himself in the third person, while he sprawls in the mire and is cheating Prospero and Miranda, who think he is at work for them. He begins to speculate on the Supreme Being—Setebos: he thinks His dwelling-place is the moon, thinks He made the sun and moon, but not the stars—the clouds and the island on which he dwells; he has no idea of any land beyond that which is bounded by the sea. He thinks creation was the result of God being ill at ease. The cold which He hated and which He was powerless to change impelled Him. So He made the trees, the birds and beasts and creeping things, and made everything in spite. He could not make a second self to be His mate, but made in envy, listlessness or sport all the things which filled the island as playthings. If Caliban could make a live bird out of clay, he would laugh if the creature broke his brittle clay leg; he would play with him, being his and merely clay. So he (Setebos). It would neither be right nor wrong in him, neither kind nor cruel—merely an act of the Divine Sovereignty. If Caliban saw a procession of crabs marching to the sea, in mere indifferent playfulness he might feel inclined to let twenty pass and then stone the twenty-first, pull off a claw from one with purple spots, give a worm to a third fellow, and two to another whose nippers end in red, all the while “Loving not, hating not, just choosing so!” [Apart from revelation, mankind has not reached the conception of the Fatherhood of God, whose tender mercies are over all His works. The gods of the heathen are gods of caprice, of malice and purposeless interference with creatures who are not the sheep of their pastures, but the playthings of unloving Lords.] But he will suppose God is good in the main; He has even made things which are better than Himself, and is envious that they are so, but consoles Himself that they can do nothing without Him. If the pipe which, blown through, makes a scream like a bird, were to boast that it caught the birds, and made the cry the maker could not make, he would smash it with his foot. That is just what God Setebos does; so Caliban must be humble, or pretend to be. But why is Setebos cold and ill at ease? Well, Caliban thinks there may be a something over Setebos, that made Him, something quiet, impassible—call it The Quiet. Beyond the stars he imagines The Quiet to reside, but is not much concerned about It. He plays at being simple in his way—makes believe: so does Setebos. His mother, Sycorax, thought The Quiet made all things, and Setebos only troubled what The Quiet made. Caliban does not agree with that. If things were made weak and subject to pain they were made by a devil, not by a good or indifferent being. No! weakness and pain meant sport to Him who created creatures subject to them. Setebos makes things to amuse himself, just as Caliban does; makes a pile of turfs and knocks it over again. So Setebos. But He is a terrible as well as a malicious being; His hurricanes, His high waves, His lightnings are destructive, and Caliban cannot contend with His force, neither can he tell that what pleases Him to-day will do so to-morrow. We must all live in fear of Him therefore, till haply The Quiet may conquer Him. All at once a storm comes, and Caliban feels that he was a fool to gibe at Setebos. He will lie flat and love Him, will do penance, will eat no whelks for a month to appease Him.
There are few, if any, systems of theology which escape one or other of the arrows of this satire. Anthropomorphism in greater or less degree is inseparable from our conceptions of the Supreme. The abstract idea of God is impossible to us, the concrete conception is certain to err in making God to be like ourselves. That the Almighty must in Himself include all that is highest and noblest in the soul of man is a right conception, when we attribute to Him our weaknesses and failings we are but as Caliban. The doctrine of election, and the hideous doctrine of reprobation, are most certainly aimed at in the line—
“Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.”
The doctrine of reprobation is thus stated in the Westminster Confession of Faith, iii. 7. “The rest of mankind [i.e. all but the elect] God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy as He pleaseth, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious grace.” Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, taught that “God has predestinated some to eternal life, while the rest of mankind are predestinated to condemnation and eternal death” (Encyc. Brit. iv., art. “Calvin,” p. 720).