nybody talks in our hearing, we become readers of pages
in his soul. He thinks himself talking about things; while we, if
wise, know he is giving glimpses of individual memorabilia. Caliban is
talking. He is talking to himself. He does not know anybody is
listening; therefore will there be in him nothing theatrical, but his
words will be sincere. He plays no part now, but speaks his soul.

Browning is nothing if not bold. He attempts things audacious as the
voyages of Ulysses. Nothing he has attempted impresses me as more
bold, if so bold, as this exploit of entering into the consciousness of
a besotted spirit, and stirring that spirit to frame a system of
theology. Nansen's tramp along the uncharted deserts of the Polar
winter was not more brilliant in inception and execution. Caliban is a
theorist in natural theology. He is building a theological system as
certainly as Augustine or Calvin or Spinoza did. This poem presents
that satire which constitutes Browning's humor. Conceive that he here
satirizes those omniscient rationalists who demolish, at a touch, all
supernatural systems of theology, and proceed to construct purely
natural systems in their place as devoid of vitality and inspiration as
dead tree-trunks are of vital saps. So conceive this dramatic
monologue, and the baleful humor appears, and is captivating in its
biting sarcasm and unanswerable argument. Caliban is, in his own
opinion, omniscient. He trusts himself absolutely. He is as
infallible as the Positivists, and as full of information as the
Agnostics, absurd as such an attitude on their part must appear; for,
as Romanes has shown in his "Thoughts on Religion," the Agnostic must
simply assert his inability to know, and must not dogmatize as to what
is or is not. So soon as he does, he has ceased to be a philosophic
Agnostic. Caliban's theology, though grotesque, is not a whit more so
than much which soberly passes in our day for "advanced thinking" and
"new theology."

Some things are apparent in Caliban. He is a man, not a beast, in that
no beast has any commerce with the thought of God. Man is declared
man, not so much by thinking or by thinking's instrument--language--as
by his moral nature. Man prays; and prayer is the imprimatur of man's
manhood. Camels kneel for the reception of their burdens, but never
kneel to God. Only man has a shrine and an altar. Such things, we are
told, are signs of an infantile state of civiliz