("What, what?  A curtain o’er the world at once!”)

is one of Browning’s most superb surprises, breaking in upon the leisured ease of theory with the suddenness of a horrible practical emergency, and compelling Caliban, in the act of repudiating his theology, to provide its most vivid illustration.

Shakespeare, with bitter irony, brought his half-taught savage into touch with the scum of modern civilisation, and made them conspire together against its benignity and wisdom.  The reader is apt to remember this conjunction when he passes from Caliban to Mr Sludge. Stephano and Trinculo, almost alone among Shakespeare’s rascals, are drawn without geniality, and Sludge is the only one of Browning’s “casuists” whom he treats with open scorn.  That some of the effects were palpably fraudulent, and that, fraud apart, there remained a residuum of phenomena not easy to explain, were all irritating facts.  Yet no one can mistake Sludge for an outflow of personal irritation, still less for an act of literary vengeance upon the impostor who had beguiled the lofty and ardent intelligence of his wife.  The resentful husband is possibly there, but so elementary an emotion could not possibly have taken exclusive possession of Browning’s complex literary faculty, or baulked the eager speculative curiosity which he brought to all new and problematic modes of mind.  His attitude towards spiritualism was in fact the product of strangely mingled conditions.  Himself the most convinced believer in spirit among the poets of his time, he regarded the bogus demonstrations of the “spiritualist” somewhat as the intellectual sceptic regards the shoddy logic by which the vulgar unbeliever proves there is no God.  But even this anger had no secure tenure in a nature so rich in solvents for disdain.  It is hard to say where scorn ends and sympathy begins, or where the indignation of the believer who sees his religion travestied passes over into the curious interest of the believer who recognises its dim distorted reflection in the unlikeliest quarters.  But Sludge is clearly permitted, like Blougram before and Juan and Hohenstiel-Schwangau after him, to assume in good faith positions, or at least to use, with perfect sincerity, language, which had points of contact with Browning’s own.  He has an eye for “spiritual facts” none the less genuine in its gross way that it has been acquired in the course of professional training, and is valued as a professional asset.  But his supernaturalism at its best is devoid of spiritual quality.  His “spiritual facts” are collections of miraculous coincidences raked together by the anteater’s tongue of a cool egoist, who waits for them

        “lazily alive,
      Open-mouthed, ... 
      Letting all nature’s loosely guarded motes
      Settle and, slick, be swallowed.”