Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay
Flock within stone's throw, glad their foe is hurt:

Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth,

"I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing,

I make the cry my maker cannot make

With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!"
Would not I smash it with my foot?'

The self-made god, if it be fancy-wrought, and not carven of wood or stone, must take its pattern and compass from the conceiving mind. Under a process of evolution which begets religious reverence and worship out of developed perceptions and sensations, the imagined deity will grow with the imagining devotee; but it must derive all its attributes from him. The selfconceived God of the Arafura or Kaffir savage, will therefore be altogether such an one as himself, and can

no

more get beyond the mental conception of its originator than the quart can be contained in a pint measure. It is unquestionable that the divine ideal of the savage very frequently presents just such characteristics. It is hard indeed to recover any trace of an instinctive consciousness of God, or any clear realisation of immortality; whatever we may make of his belief in an hereafter. In reality it is scarcely possible to formulate the dimly conceived ideas of the savage mind on such subjects. With man far above the savage state the inspirations of conscience and religious reverence are not easily reducible to written terms. They are indeed apt, not only to elude the formulist, but actually to disappear with the effort: as the synthetic processes of the poet's fancy are incompatible with the anatomisings of the critic. But if there be a human soul, distinct from the mere animal life; and if there be also, as we believe, a wholly different God, for rudest savage as for civilised man, revealing Himself in the lilies of the field, in the

fowls of the air, in the stars of night; taking care of the sparrow, numbering the very hairs of our head; not very far from every one of us :-then it may be possible for man, even in a ruder state than the Kaffir Sekesa, dimly to conceive of that unknown God, whom Paul found the Athenians ignorantly worshipping: 'God that made the world and all things therein, the Lord of heaven and earth, who giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.'

The religion of the old Greek had unquestionably more to do with the æsthetic faculty than the moral sense. His worship, to a large extent, addressed the sensuous emotions, and deceived himself, as fine ritual and solemn harmonies are apt to do, by affecting the emotional sensibilities alone. But this, and much else by which morality and religion were kept apart, belong to the evolutions of late ages. The traces of an underlying current of belief in something greatly more spiritual than the Zeus of his poetical mythology, is apparent in many allusions; though too frequently this supreme omnipresence seemed to the Greek only an omnipotent, unapproachable, inexorable fate: ruler over gods and men, destined survivor of Olympus even more than of earth; or as Caliban, in the dim searchings after a great First Cause, which belong to his later metaphysical stage, defines it 'the something over Setebos.' For, as he

reasons,

'There may be something quiet o'er His head,
Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
Since both derive from weakness in some way.
I joy because the quails come; would not joy
Could I bring quails here when I have a mind :
This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth.
'Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch,

But never spends much thought nor care that way.
It may look up, work up,-the worse for those
It works on! 'Careth but for Setebos

The many handed as a cuttle-fish,

Who, making Himself feared through what He does,
Looks up, first, and perceives He cannot soar

To what is quiet and hath happy life;

Next looks down here, and out of very spite

Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real,

These good things to match those as hips do grapes.
'Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport.'

For Caliban himself lately peeping, eyed Prospero at his magic books; and, vexed at the sight, stitched himself a make-believe magic book of leaves, scrawled thereon meaningless characters, portentous enough according to his wish; peeled for himself a wand, robed himself in skin of spotted oncelot, and tried to fancy himself Prospero. He has his tamed sleek ounce, which he makes cower, crouch, and mind his eye; he keeps his Ariel too, a tall pouch-bill crane, which at his word will go wade for fish and straight disgorge; and, to complete this realisation of being himself a lordly Prospero, he has got

Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared,

Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame,
And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
In a hole o' the rock, and calls him Caliban;
A bitter heart, that bides its time and bites.
'Plays thus at being Prosper in a way.'

In many respects he seems to see a likeness to his own ways in the doings of the invisible power Setebos, or the something over Setebos. But, alas! if He has any favouring leanings, they are not towards him.

He is terrible: watch His feats in proof!
One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope.
He hath a spite against me, that I know,
Just as he favours Prosper, who knows why?

So it is, all the same, as well I find.
'Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm
With stone and stake, to stop she-tortoises
Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave,

Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck,

Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue,
And licked the whole labour flat: so much for spite.
'Dug up a newt He may have envied once
And turned to stone, shut up inside a stone.

Please Him, and hinder this?-What Prosper does?
Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He!—'

So Caliban proceeds, reasoning in his obscure, confused way: not, however, as Shakespeare's, but wholly as Browning's Caliban. For he is no longer the intermediate, half-brute, missing link that wants discourse of reason,' but the human savage, grovelling before the Manitou of his own conception; betaking himself even to burnt sacrifices to appease this unseen Setebos, and ward off His envy, hoping the while that, some day, that other than Setebos may conquer Him; or, likelier still, that He may grow decrepit, doze, and But at this stage the clouds gather, the wind rises to a hurricane,

die.

'Crickets stop hissing; not a bird-or, yes,

There scuds His raven that hath told Him all!

It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind

Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,

And fast invading fires begin! White blaze-

A tree's head snaps-and there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool, to gibe at Him.'

Like the old Indian of Lake Superior, he hears the voice of God only in the violence and the terrors of nature; and, like the first conscious offenders, when they heard, not the tempest and the whirlwind, but the still small voice among the trees of the garden, he is afraid. The evolution is, in truth, altogether too complete. This is no partially-developed irrational anthropoid, but man as he is to be met with in many a stage of mental progression far above the rude savage.

I

Ο

CHAPTER VII.

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

'How perplext

Grows belief!

Well, this clay-cold clod

Was man's heart.

Crumble it-and what comes next?

Is it God?'-Browning.

NE more idea, very foreign to anything pertaining to the brute-mind, presents itself, in modified evolution, to the Caliban of the later poet. Shakespeare's Caliban has his conception of death in its purely destructive form; but not greatly differing, except in its definiteness, from that of the ravening beast. When Trinculo mocks him, he proposes at once that Stephano shall bite him to death;' and when, in answer to the question 'Wilt thou destroy him, then?' Stephano promises, on his honour, that the tyrant Prospero shall be brained, Caliban is transported with joy. But in all this death is no more to him than to the wolf or the tiger, when it wrathfully makes an end of its foe, though the desire for it has something of the human in its treasured craving for revenge.

A dog is very capable of just such hatred, under similar provocation; and its revenge, if unchecked, will not stop short of death. But the metaphysical island-monster of the modern poet gets greatly nearer to civilised humanity in his reasonings on the mystery of death. He does not indeed clearly realise the