aside the sober blank verse line, and lead the little play to a close in rich and delicate pulsation of melody. This is so wide a departure from the traditions of masquewriting, that some critics have denied Comus the title, and declared that it is no more a masque than is Lyly's Endymion or Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Besides this metrical sobriety, the adoption of a simple human story for the central motive instead of a more artificial and fantastic theme, marks off Comus from the ordinary masque, and brings it nearer to the romantic drama of the Shakespeare or Fletcher type. A tradition of long standing asserts that this central episode of the sister and brothers losing their way in the woods was based upon an actual occurrence; that the Lady Alice Egerton, with her brothers, Mr. Thomas Egerton and the Viscount Brackley, did actually go astray in this way in Haywood forest, Dear Ludlow, while returning by night from a visit to some relatives in Herefordshire; that the sister was in some way separated from her brothers; and that the party was rescued by a servant from the castle. It is more probable that this story is merely an outgrowth of the masque than that the masque was based upon it, since a similar motive occurs in the Old Wives' Tale of the early Elizabethan dramatist Peele, in a connection which makes it almost certain that Milton had that odd play in his mind when composing Comus. But upon this simple human episode there is imposed a mythological element which is entirely in the masque spirit, though it is made to subserve ends of moral teaching essentially alien to the ordinary masque-writer's aim. Here in Haywood Forest dwells Comus, a strayed reveller from the Pantheon of Greece. He is the son of Bacchus and Circe. From his father, the blithe god of revel, he has beguiling beauty and gamesomeness; from his mother, the enchantress, he has a strain of dark and eerie cruelty, a sardonic de light in subjecting human souls to uncouth sin and fitting human bodies with features of grotesque bestiality. Like his mother, he dwells in the midst of his victims, persons whom he has changed by his spells into creatures half man and half beast, and whom he leads nightly through the forests in abhorrent carousal. When he feels, by some subtle spiritual antipathy, the presence of the Sister drawing near in the night woods, he hushes his crew, and approaches her alone, in the guise of a simple peasant, whom "thrift keeps up about his country gear." Under pretence of conducting her to a neighboring hut for shelter, he beguiles her across the threshold of his palace, builded faerily in the wilderness. Here he seats her on a throne in a room of state "set out with all manner of deliciousness," and casting aside his disguise, trusts to his beauty and eloquence to subdue her innocence to sin and bring her under the power of his deforming magic. Then ensues the dialogue in which the moral meaning of the masque is fully developed. His Circean enchantments give the god power only over the body of his victim, not over her soul: he has but to wave his wand, and her senses are "all chained up in alabaster;" but before he can make her a part of his brute fellowship, he must corrupt her heart and subdue her will to sin. The whole device of Comus and his band must be regarded, if we would penetrate to the moral symbolism which lies behind the artistic propriety of their introduction, as an allegory of that Platonic doctrine of idealism which the Elder Brother thus expresses: "So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence, But most by lewd and lavish act of sin, The uncouth crew that follows the enchanter in his nocturnal revels typify those human souls, which, after rendering up their inner purity, have gradually become imbodied and imbruted, and lost their divine property. But such loss and such transmogrification cannot be imposed from without; they are rather the inevitable result of inner yielding. So long as the heart is sound and the will firm there is nothing to fear from malice, sorcery, or evil chance, for, 'Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt, Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled; Yea, even that which Mischief meant most harm, Shall in the happy trial prove most glory. Comus, no vulgar incarnation of sensuality, Comus; for to a nineteenth century mora sense, mellowed by a larger humanism tha seventeenth century England knew, ther is a suggestion of prudery, not to say prig gishness, in some of the utterances. T be just, we must hold in mind the fact, to little taken account of in popular estimate of Milton's character, that he achieved thi ideal only by severe struggle, and in th face of a nature uncommonly exposed to passion. The character of Comus may fairly b regarded as an authentic creation of Mil ton's. Some hints, it is true, gathered her and there, helped him to the conception In the Elkoves, or Imagines, by Philostra tus, a Greek author of the third century he had seen Comus described as a winged god of revel and drunkenness. Ben Jon son had used the personification of the Greek noun Kuos, from which our word 66 comedy" is derived, as a personage in his masque of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue written in 1619. Milton had also doubt less read the Latin extravaganza, entitled Comus, sive Phagesiposia Cimmeria: Som nium, by the Dutch writer Henrik van de Putten, or, as his scholar's name went Erycius Puteanus. This last is a curious work in mixed prose and verse, recounting a dream in which the author beholds Co mus, the revel-god, in his palace, feasting and making orgy with his guests; the description is given a certain philosophic significance by the introduction of dia logues on the hedonistic theory of life. Of these three possible sources the third was richest in suggestion for Milton's purposes The Comus of Ben Jonson's masque is a sodden belly-god, who is hailed as plump paunch" and, — 66 and thrilling. To oppose the promptings of the lady's chaste heart, he creates a nature as poignant in its way as the mightier incarnation of evil in the Lucifer of Paradise Lost, and as far removed as that from the imagery of popular moral terrorism. Upon the character of Comus and his enchanted crew Milton chiefly depended for that spectacular interest and that remoteness from actuality which is proper to the masque. But he added two other dramatis persona deftly calculated at once to enrich the arabesque of spectacle, to increase the opportunities for lyric embellishment, and to deepen the philosophic symbolism of the poem. These are the Attendant Spirit and the river-nymph Sabrina. Of these, the first is the more characteristic of Milton's mind. The idea of a guardian genius, assigned by divine benevolence to watch over an individual human life, comes out in his epigram upon Leonora Baroni, the Neapolitan singer, by whose voice he was fascinated during his second visit to Rome (See Epigrams, page 344). There he says, "To every man his angel is allotted, his winged angel from the ethereal bierarchies." This conception of a "good angel" is doubtless pagan in origin, but it has been so thoroughly assimilated by Christian thought as to belong now entirely to the region of Christian imagery. Nothing is more remarkable in Milton's handling of the materials of his intellectual world than his persistent linking of classic and pseudo-classic myth with what he conreived to be permanent religious truth. The best known examples of this are to be found in Lycidas, where St. Peter appears in the same procession with Triton and Father Camus (a personification of the river Cam at Cambridge), and in the famous identification in Paradise Lost of the heathen gods with the fallen angels. But this curious blending of two divergent systems of thought and imagery appears throughout his work. He had, it is true, ample prece dent for such a use of classical material; for throughout the pastoral poetry of the Renaissance we can never be sure whether Olympus means the pagan or the Christian heaven, whether Pan is intended for a frolicsome nature - god or for Jehovah. But of all the pastoralists Milton accomplishes this interfusion with least effort, and draws into the synthesis the greatest number of divergent associations. Thyrsis, the Attendant Spirit, is manifestly akin to the Ariel of the Tempest, and even reminds us in his closing song of the Puck of Midsummer Night's Dream. Yet this very song is a description, under a thin classic veil, of the bliss of the redeemed spirits in Heaven, and an exposition of Milton's mystic doctrine of paradisaic Love. In the magic herb Hæmony, by means of which Thyrsis is enabled to enter the palace of the enchanter and restore the captive lady, there is a recollection of the herb Moly, which saved Odysseus from the spells of Circe. Yet there can be little doubt that the plant symbolizes Christian grace; and that when the poet declares that the golden flower which it bears under better skies cannot come to blossom in the harsh soil where the shepherd found it, he is brooding over the corruptions of the English Church, in a spirit only less intense than that which three years later found such surprising expression within the fantastic framework of Lycidas. Sabrina, the nymph of the river Severn, who is called up from her watery depths by the Attendant Spirit to release the lady from the marble spell cast over her by Comus, is conceived more purely in the masque spirit. She is perhaps a recollection from Fletcher's pastoral play, The Faithful Shepherdess; certainly the lyric music which companions her shows the influence of that beautiful work. The entrance of the goddess and her waternymphs, in her gorgeous chariot, "Thickset with agate, and the azurn sheen Of turkis blue, and emerald green," must have combined with the descent of the Attendant Spirit from the clouds, the pageantry of Comus's palace, and the dancing of the bewitched monsters, to give just the right touch of rococo elaborateness to the stage production. Comus, more than any other youthful work of Milton, and more than any work of his maturity except Samson Agonistes, shows his power as an artist. It has not the pure sweetness of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, nor does it anywhere rise to the lyric heights of Lycidas; but over its diverse and seemingly irreconcilable elements has gone the cool hand of the master, to build and subdue. There is in it a severity of tone, a chastity of ornament, a calm artistic vision, to which most poets, even the greatest, attain only by long purging of their eyes with euphrasy and rue. On the moral side, as has been said above, there is to many minds something not quite persuasive in Comus; its high doctrine comes at times a little priggishly and with a flavor of unripeness from a young man's lips. But its art is wholly admirable. Its blank verse, if it has not the thunders and the compelling wings of that of Paradise Lost, has all the later dignity of carriage. Its rhymed octosyllabics are in the purest pastoral mode. Its lyrics sing themselves, and shine with an unaccountable light. Above all, there presides over the poem from the first line to the last the fine economy of a mind that compels everything into the service of a dominant idea. ton never demonstrated his character, both as artist and as man, more signally than when he made the quaint vehicle of the masque, designed to carry no heavier freightage than an evening's careless amusement, bear the burden of a profound personal philosophy, and bear it, not as a burden, but as an essence. Sitting like a Goddess bright Might she the wise Latona be, Mil 20 |