All questions in the earth and out of it.

But whether the truth of the early centuries be an absolute historic fact,

    Or only truth reverberate, changed, made pass
    A spectrum into mind, the narrow eye—­
    The same and not the same, else unconceived—­

the Pope dare not affirm.  Nor does he regard the question as of urgent importance at the present day; the effect of the Christian tale—­historic fact, or higher fact expressed in myth—­remains: 

     So my heart be struck,
    What care I,—­by God’s gloved hand or the bare?

By some means, means divinely chosen even if but a child’s fable-book, we have got our truth, and it suffices for our training here on earth.  Let us give over the endless task of unproving and re-proving the already proved; rather let us straightway put our truth to its proper uses.[92]

If the grotesque occupies a comparatively small place in Dramatis Personae, the example given is of capital importance in this province of Browning’s art.  The devil of Notre Dame, looking down on Paris, is more effectively placed, but is hardly a more impressive invention of Gothic fantasy than Caliban sprawling in the pit’s much mire,

    With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin,

while he discourses, with a half-developed consciousness, itself in the mire and scarcely yet pawing to get free, concerning the nature of his Creator.  The grotesque here is not merely of the kind that addresses the eye; the poem is an experiment in the grotesque of thought; and yet fantastic as it seems, the whole process of this monstrous Bridgewater treatise is governed by a certain logic.  The poem, indeed, is essentially a fragment of Browning’s own Christian apologetics; it stands as a burly gate-tower from which boiling pitch can be flung upon the heads of assailants.  The poet’s intention is not at all to give us a chapter in the origins of religion; nor is Caliban a representative of primitive man.  A frequently recurring idea with Browning is that expressed by Pope Innocent in the passage already cited; the external world proves the power of God; it proves His intelligence:  but the proof of love is derived exclusively from the love that lives in the heart of man.  Are you dissatisfied with such a proof?  Well, then, see what a god we can construct out of intelligence and power, with love left out!  If this world is not a place of trial and training appointed by love, then it is a scene of capricious cruelty or capricious indifference on the part of our Maker; His providence is a wanton sporting with our weakness and our misery.  Why were we brought into being?  To amuse His solitary and weary intelligence, and to become the victims or the indulged manifestations of His power.  Why is one man selected for extreme agony from which a score of his fellows escape?  Because god Setebos resembles Caliban, when through mere caprice he lets twenty crabs march past him unhurt and stones the twenty-first,