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 savage with iron bonds, exist for Caliban
only in the form of the faith held by his dam, which he puts aside in
the calm decisive way of a modern thinker, as one who has nothing to
fear from the penalties of heresy, and has even outlived the exultation
of free thought:--

"His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so;
Who made them weak, made weakness He might vex."

[Footnote 43: It is characteristic that M. Maeterlinck found no place
for Caliban in his striking fantasia on the _Tempest, Joyzelle_.]

Caliban's theology has, moreover, very real points of contact with
Browning's own. His god is that sheer Power which Browning from the
first recognised; it is because Setebos feels heat and cold, and is
therefore a weak creature with ungratified wants, that Caliban decides