But Browning’s Caliban is not a single personage.  No one savage, at no one time, would have all these thoughts of his God.  He is the representative of what has been thought, during centuries, by many thousands of men; the concentration into one mind of the ground-thoughts of early theology.  At one point, as if Browning wished to sketch the beginning of a new theological period, Caliban represents a more advanced thought than savage man conceives.  This is Caliban’s imagination of a higher being than Setebos who is the capricious creator and power of the earth—­of the “Quiet,” who is master of Setebos and whose temper is quite different; who also made the stars, things which Caliban, with a touch of Browning’s subtle thought, separates from the sun and moon and earth.  It is plain from this, and from the whole argument which is admirably conducted, that Caliban is an intellectual personage, too long neglected; and Prospero, could he have understood his nature, would have enjoyed his conversation.  Renan agreed with Browning in this estimate of his intelligence, and made him the foundation of a philosophical play.

There is some slight reason for this in Shakespeare’s invention.  He lifts Caliban in intellect, even in feeling, far above Trinculo, Stephano, the Boatswain and the rest of the common men.  The objection, however, has been made that Browning makes him too intelligent.  The answer is that Browning is not drawing Caliban only, but embodying in an imagined personage the thoughts about God likely to be invented by early man during thousands of years—­and this accounts for the insequences in Caliban’s thinking.  They are not the thoughts of one but of several men.  Yet a certain poetic unity is given to them by the unity of place.  The continual introduction of the landscape to be seen from his refuge knits the discursive thinking of the savage into a kind of unity.  We watch him lying in the thick water-slime of the hollow, his head on the rim of it propped by his hands, under the cave’s mouth, hidden by the gadding gourds and vines; looking out to sea and watching the wild animals that pass him by—­and out of this place he does not stir.

In Shakespeare’s Tempest Caliban is the gross, brutal element of the earth and is opposed to Ariel, the light, swift, fine element of the air.  Caliban curses Prospero with the evils of the earth, with the wicked dew of the fen and the red plague of the sea-marsh.  Browning’s Caliban does not curse at all.  When he is not angered, or in a caprice, he is a good-natured creature, full of animal enjoyment.  He loves to lie in the cool slush, like a lias-lizard, shivering with earthy pleasure when his spine is tickled by the small eft-things that course along it,

    Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh.

The poem is full of these good, close, vivid realisations of the brown prolific earth.

Browning had his own sympathy with Caliban Nor does Shakespeare make him altogether brutish.  He has been so educated by his close contact with nature that his imagination has been kindled.  His very cursing is imaginative: