ation and superstition;
but they may be boldly affirmed to be, in fact, infallible signs of the
divinity of the human soul. Caliban is thinking of his god, brutal,
devilish; yet he thinks of a god, 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 god. The
attempt would be humorous were it not pathetic. If his conclusions are
absurd, they are what might be anticipated when man engages in the task
of god-making. "Caliban upon Setebos" is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of
the attempt of man to create God. God rises not from man to the
firmament, but falls from the firmament to man. God 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 godless theories of the
evolution of mankind. Mankind can not create God. God creates
mankind. All the man-made gods are fashioned after the similitude of
Caliban's Setebos. They are grotesque, carnal, devilish. Paganism was
but an installment of Caliban's theory. God 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 god 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 God. 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