d 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 s