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Browning and Dogma. Ethel M. Naish
Читать онлайн.Название Browning and Dogma
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isbn 4064066127787
Автор произведения Ethel M. Naish
Жанр Документальная литература
Издательство Bookwire
Reading again those scenes of The Tempest, in which Caliban plays a part, we become more than ever convinced that the Caliban of the poem is but the Caliban of the play seen through the medium of Browning’s phantasy. This, however, is not equivalent to the admission of simplicity as a characteristic of this strange being, merely is it a recognition that the potentialities existent in Shakespeare’s Caliban are nearer to becoming actualities in the Caliban of Browning. Caliban’s may, indeed, be the nature of a primitive being, but the nature is not, therefore, simple; to the peculiarly complex character of his personality is due the main interest of the poem—curiously undeveloped in some departments of his nature, the moral sense appears to be almost non-existent, he is, nevertheless, an imaginative creature with a distinct poetic and artistic vein in his composition. Whilst Prospero’s estimate of him seems to have been a fairly accurate one:
The most lying slave
Whom stripes may move, not kindness;
as Mr. Stopford Brooke has pointed out “his very cursing is imaginative”[9]—
As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed
With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both. (Act I, Sc. ii.)
And it is Caliban who appreciates the music of Ariel which to Trinculo and Stephano, products of civilization so-called, is a thing fearful as the work of the devil.
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. (Act III, Sc. ii.)
Such is the re-assurance offered by the “man-monster” of Shakespeare. But the Caliban of Browning is yet in his primitive condition, untouched by contact with the outer world as represented even by these dregs of a civilization which, whilst checking the expression of the brutish instinct, increases by repression the force of passions struggling for an outlet to which conventionality bars the way.
To the Caliban of The Tempest Prospero rather than Setebos is the immediate author of the evils of his environment. He has not yet reached the stage of formulated speculation with regard to the character of his mother’s god—to which Browning’s Caliban shows himself to have attained. And it is worthy of notice that the Caliban of the poem does not accept without examination such information as he has received from Sycorax concerning Setebos. Only after due consideration does he advance his own ideas (not according with those of Sycorax) on the subject; proving himself thus capable not merely of imagination but of reasoning; his intellect is alive whatever limitations may be assigned to its capacity for exercise. Although no immediate evidence is afforded of the capabilities of Shakespeare’s Caliban in the regions of abstract thought, yet of the potential existence of the ratiocinative faculty sufficient testimony is afforded by his attitude towards the supernatural powers of Prospero, by his scheme for rendering the new-comers instruments, subserving his own interests in his designs against his employer and tyrant—all this clearly the outcome of something more than a mere brute cunning.
With these aspects of the character of Caliban before him as ground-work, Browning has developed his poem; and in the twenty-three opening lines, introductory to the definite reflections concerning Setebos, are discoverable evidences of all the characteristics of the Caliban of The Tempest. Browning has done nothing without intention, and we are here prepared, or should be prepared, for what is to follow later in the poem. Here the “man-monster” is described as sprawling in the mire, in the enjoyment of such comfort as may be derived from the sunshine in the heat of the day: the sensuous side of the nature finding its satisfaction in
Kicking both feet in the cool slush
and feeling
About his spine small eft things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh. (ll. 5, 6.)
At the same time is recognizable the artistic element in the composition—for not only does he enjoy
A fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,
but he
Looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times.) (ll. 11-14.)
Here is assuredly the language of no mere savage! Compare with this the later descriptions of the inhabitants of the island as assigned to Setebos (ll. 44-55). No mere dry category of animal life, it suggests the result of the observations of a mind at once poetic and imaginative.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech,
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants: the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole.
Not because this is the work of a poet, but because it is the work of a dramatic poet do we get these lines: and Browning has unquestionably, I think, given its character to this earlier passage with intention. He would suggest that this element—poetic and imaginative—in Caliban’s nature must of necessity influence his conception of his Deity.
But whilst emphasis is thus given to the sensuous and artistic aspects of the character of this most complex being, by these introductory lines is more than suggested the obliquity of the moral nature—this, too, influencing, as is inevitable, its theology. Deception is to the Caliban of Browning as to the Caliban of Shakespeare, the very breath of life. His pleasure in inactivity is vastly intensified by the consciousness