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 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 there must be behind him a divinity that “all it hath a mind to, doth.”  Caliban is one of Browning’s most consummate realists; he has the remorselessly vivid perceptions of a Lippo Lippi and a Sludge.  Browning’s wealth of recondite animal and plant lore is nowhere else so amazingly displayed; the very character of beast or bird will be hit off in a line,—­as the pie with the long tongue

     “That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
      And says a plain word when she finds her prize,”

or the lumpish sea-beast which he blinded and called Caliban (an admirable trait)—­

     “A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.”

And all this curious scrutiny is reflected in Caliban’s god.  The sudden catastrophe at the close