Few poems have been more variously designated than _Comus_. Milton
himself describes it simply as "A Mask"; by others it has been
criticised and estimated as a lyrical drama, a drama in the epic style,
a lyric poem in the _form_ of a play, a phantasy, an allegory, a
philosophical poem, a suite of speeches or majestic soliloquies, and
even a didactic poem. Such variety in the description of the poem is
explained partly by its complex charm and many-sided interest, and
partly by the desire to describe it from that point of view which should
best reconcile its literary form with what we know of the genius and
powers of its author. Those who, like Dr. Johnson, have blamed it as a
drama, have admired it "as a series of lines," or as a lyric; one
writer, who has found that its characters are nothing, its sentiments
tedious, its story uninteresting, has nevertheless "doubted whether
there will ever be any similar poem which gives so true a conception of
the capacity and the dignity of the mind by which it was produced"
(Bagehot's _Literary Studies_). Some who have praised it as an allegory
see in it a satire on the evils both of the Church and of the State,
while others regard it as alluding to the vices of the Court alone. Some
have found its lyrical parts the best, while others, charmed with its
"divine philosophy," have commended those deep conceits which place it
alongside of the _Faerie Queen_, as shadowing forth an episode in the
education of a noble soul and as a poet's lesson against intemperance
and impurity. But no one can refuse to admit that, more than any other
of Milton's shorter poems, it gives us an insight into the peculiar
genius and character of its author: it was, in the opinion of Hallam,
"sufficient to convince any one of taste and feeling that a great poet
had arisen in England, and one partly formed in a different school from
his contemporaries." It is true that in the early poems we do not find
the whole of Milton, for he had yet to pass through many years of
trouble and controversy; but _Comus_, in a special degree, reveals or
foreshadows much of the Milton of _Paradise Lost_. Whether we regard its
place in Milton's life, in the series of his works, or in English
literature as a whole, the poem is full of significance: it is worth
while, therefore, to consider how its form was determined by the
external circumstances and previous training of the poet; by his
favourite studies in poetry, philosophy, history, and music; and by his
noble theory of life in general, and of a poet's life in particular.
The mask was represented at Ludlow Castle on September 29th, 1634; it
was probably composed early in that year. It belongs, therefore, to that
group of poems (_L'Allegro_, _Il Penseroso_, _Arcades_, _Comus_, and
_Lycidas_) written by Milton while living in his father's house at
Horton, near Windsor, after having left the University of Cambridge in
July, 1632. As he was born in 1608, he would be twenty-five years of age
when this poem was composed. During his stay at Horton (1632-39), which
was broken only by a journey to Italy in 1638-9, he was chiefly occupied
with the study of the Greek, Roman, Italian, and English literatures,
each of which has left its impress on _Comus_. He read widely and
carefully, and it has been said that his great and original imagination
was almost entirely nourished, or at least stimulated, by books: his
residence at Horton was, accordingly, pre-eminently what he intended it
to be, and what his father wisely and gladly permitted it to be--a time
of preparation and ripening for the work to which he had dedicated
himself. We are reminded of his own words in _Comus_:
And Wisdom's self
Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude,
Where, with her best nurse, Contemplation,
She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings,
That, in the various bustle of resort,
Were all to-ruffled, and sometimes impaired.
We find in _Comus_ abundant reminiscences of Milton's study of the
literature of antiquity. "It would not be too much to say that the
literature of antiquity was to Milton's genius what soil and light are
to a plant. It nourished, it coloured, it developed it. It determined
not merely his character as an artist, but it exercised an influence on
his intellect and temper scarcely less powerful than hereditary
instincts and contemporary history. It at once animated and chastened
his imagination; it modified his fancy; it furnished him with his
models. On it his taste was formed; on it his style was moulded. From it
his diction and his method derived their peculiarities. It transformed
what would in all probability have been the mere counterpart of
Caedmon's Paraphrase or Langland's Vision into Paradise Lost; and what
would have been the mere counterpart of Corydon's Doleful Knell and the
satire of the Three Estates, into Lycidas and Comus." (_Quarterly
Review_, No. 326.)
But Milton has also told us that Spenser was his master, and the full
charm of _Comus_ cannot be realised without reference to the artistic
and philosophical spirit of the author of the _Faerie Queene_. Both
poems deal with the war between the body and the soul--between the lower
and the higher nature. In an essay on 'Spenser as a philosophic poet,'
De Vere says: "The perils and degradations of an animalised life are
shown under the allegory of Sir Guyon's sea voyage with its successive
storms and whirlpools, its 'rock of Reproach' strewn with wrecks and
dead men's bones, its 'wandering islands,' its 'quicksands of
Unthriftihead,' its 'whirlepoole of Decay,' its 'sea-monsters,' and
lastly, its 'bower of Bliss,' and the doom which overtakes it, together
with the deliverance of Acrasia's victims, transformed by that witch's
spells into beasts. Still more powerful is the allegory of worldly
ambition, illustrated under the name of 'the cave of Mammon.' The Legend
of Holiness delineates with not less insight those enemies which wage
war upon the spiritual life." All this Milton had studied in the _Faerie
Queene_, and had understood it; and, like Sir Guyon, he felt himself to
be a knight enrolled under the banner of Parity and Self-Control. So
that, in _Comus_, we find the sovereign value of Temperance or
Self-Regulation--what the Greeks called +sôphrosynê+--set forth
no less clearly than in Spenser's poem: in Milton's mask it becomes
almost identical with Virtue itself. The enchantments of Acrasia in her
Bower of Bliss become the spells of Comus; the armour of Belphoebe
becomes the "complete steel" of Chastity; while the supremacy of
Conscience, the bounty of Nature and man's ingratitude, the unloveliness
of Mammon and of Excess, the blossom of Courtesy oft found on lowly
stalk, and the final triumph of Virtue through striving and temptation,
all are dwelt upon.
It is the mind that maketh good or ill,
That maketh wretch or happie, rich or poore:
so speaks Spenser; and Milton similarly--
He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit i' the centre, and enjoy bright day:
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
Himself is his own dungeon.
In endeavouring still further to trace, by means of verbal or structural
resemblances, the sources from which Milton drew his materials for
_Comus_, critics have referred to Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_ (1595); to
Fletcher's pastoral, _The Faithful Shepherdess_, of which Charles Lamb
has said that if all its parts 'had been in unison with its many
innocent scenes and sweet lyric intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to
vie with _Comus_ or the _Arcadia_, to have been put into the hands of
boys and virgins, to have made matter for young dreams, like the loves
of Hermia and Lysander'; to Ben Jonson's mask of _Pleasure reconciled to
Virtue_ (1619), in which Comus is "the god of cheer, or the Belly"; and
to the _Comus_ of Erycius Puteanus (Henri du Puy), Professor of
Eloquence at Louvain. It is true that Fletcher's pastoral was being
acted in London about the time Milton was writing his _Comus_, that the
poem by the Dutch Professor was republished at Oxford in 1634, and that
resemblances are evident between Milton's poem and those named. But
Professor Masson does well in warning us that "infinitely too much has
been made of such coincidences. After all of them, even the most ideal
and poetical, the feeling in reading _Comus_ is that all here is
different, all peculiar." Whatever Milton borrowed, he borrowed, as he
says himself, in order to better it.
It is interesting to consider the mutual relations of the poems written
by Milton at Horton. Everything that Milton wrote is Miltonic; he had
what has been called the power of transforming everything into himself,
and these poems are, accordingly, evidences of the development of
Milton's opinions and of his secret purpose. It has been said that
_L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ are to be regarded as "the pleadings, the
decision on which is in Comus"--_L'Allegro_ representing the Cavalier,
and _Il Penseroso_ the Puritan element. This is true only in a limited
sense. It is true that the Puritan element in the Horton series of poems
becomes more patent as we pass from the two lyrics to the mask of
_Comus_, and from _Comus_ to the elegy of _Lycidas_, just as, in the
corresponding periods of time, the evils connected with the reign of
Charles I. and with Laud's crusade against Puritanism were becoming more
pronounced. But we can hardly regard Milton as having expressed any new
decision in _Comus_: the decision is already made when "vain deluding
Joys" are banished in _Il Penseroso_, and "loathed Melancholy" in
_L'Allegro_. The mask is an expansion and exaltation of the delights of
the contemplative man, but there is still a place for the "unreproved
pleasures" of the cheerful man. Unless it were so, _Comus_ could not
have been written; there would have been no "sunshine holiday" for the
rustics and no "victorious dance" for the gentle lady and her brothers.
But in _Comus_ we realise the mutual relation of _L'Allegro_ and _Il
Penseroso_; we see their application to the joys and sorrows of the
actual life of individuals; we observe human nature in contact with the
"hard assays" of life. And, subsequently, in _Lycidas_ we are made to
realise that this human nature is Milton's own, and to understand how it
was that his Puritanism which, three years before, had permitted him to
write a cavalier mask, should, three years after, lead him from the
fresh fields of poetry into the barren plains of controversial prose.
The Mask was a favourite form of entertainment in England in Milton's
youth, and had been so from the time of Henry VIII., in whose reign
elaborate masked shows, introduced from Italy, first became popular. But
they seem to have found their way into England, in a crude form, even
earlier; and we read of court disguisings in the reign of Edward III. It
is usually said that the Mask derives its name from the fact that the
actors wore masks, and in Hall's Chronicle we read that, in 1512, "on
the day of Epiphany at night, the king, with eleven others, was
disguised after the manner of Italy, called a Mask, a thing not seen
before in England; they were appareled in garments long and broad,
wrought all with gold, with _visors_ and caps of gold." The truth,
however, seems to be that the use of a visor was not essential in such
entertainments, which, from the first, were called 'masks,' the word
'masker' being used sometimes of the players, and sometimes of their
disguises. The word has come to us, through the French form _masque_,
cognate with Spanish _mascarada_, a masquerade or assembly of maskers,
otherwise called a mummery. Up to the time of Henry VIII. these
entertainments were of the nature of dumb-show or _tableaux vivants_,
and delighted the spectators chiefly by the splendour of the costumes
and machinery employed in their representation; but, afterwards, the
chief actors spoke their parts, singing and dancing were introduced, and
the composition of masks for royal and other courtly patrons became an
occupation worthy of a poet. They were frequently combined with other
forms of amusement, all of which were, in the case of the Court, placed
under the management of a Master of Revels, whose official title was
Magister Jocorum, Revellorum et _Mascorum_; in the first printed English
tragedy, _Gorboduc_ (1565), each act opens with what is called a
dumb-show or mask. But the more elaborate form of the Mask soon grew to
be an entertainment complete in itself, and the demand for such became
so great in the time of James I. and Charles I. that the history of
these reigns might almost be traced in the succession of masks then
written. Ben Jonson, who thoroughly established the Mask in English
literature, wrote many Court Masks, and made them a vehicle less for the
display of 'painting and carpentry' than for the expression of the
intellectual and social life of his time. His masks are excelled only
by _Comus_, and possess in a high degree that 'Doric delicacy' in their
songs and odes which Sir Henry Wotton found so ravishing in Milton's
mask. Jonson, in his lifetime, declared that, next himself, only
Fletcher and Chapman could write a mask; and apart from the compositions
of these writers and of William Browne (_Inner Temple Masque_), there
are few specimens worthy to be named along with Jonson's until we come
to Milton's _Arcades_. Other mask-writers were Middleton, Dekker,
Shirley, Carew, and Davenant; and it is interesting to note that in
Carew's _Coelum Brittanicum_ (1633-4), for which Lawes composed the
music, the two boys who afterwards acted in _Comus_ had juvenile parts.
It has been pointed out that the popularity of the Mask in Milton's
youth received a stimulus from the Puritan hatred of the theatre which
found expression at that time, and drove non-Puritans to welcome the
Mask as a protest against that spirit which saw nothing but evil in
every form of dramatic entertainment. Milton, who enjoyed the
theatre--both "Jonson's learned sock" and what "ennobled hath the
buskined stage"--was led, through his friendship with the musician
Lawes, to compose a mask to celebrate the entry of the Earl of
Bridgewater upon his office of "Lord President of the Council in the
Principality of Wales and the Marches of the same." He had already
written, also at the request of Lawes, a mask, or portion of a mask,
called _Arcades_, and the success of this may have stimulated him to
higher effort. The result was _Comus_, in which the Mask reached its
highest level, and after which it practically faded out of our
literature.
Milton's two masks, _Arcades_ and _Comus_, were written for members of
the same noble family, the former in honour of the Countess Dowager of
Derby, and the latter in honour of John, first Earl of Bridgewater, who
was both her stepson and son-in-law. This two-fold relation arose from
the fact that the Earl was the son of Viscount Brackley, the Countess's
second husband, and had himself married Lady Frances Stanley, a daughter
of the Countess by her first husband, the fifth Earl of Derby. Amongst
the children of the Earl of Bridgewater were three who took important
parts in the representation of _Comus_--Alice, the youngest daughter,
then about fourteen years of age, who appeared as _The Lady_; John,
Viscount Brackley, who took the part of the _Elder Brother_, and Thomas
Egerton, who appeared as the _Second Brother_. We do not know who acted
the parts of _Comus_ and _Sabrina_, but the part of the _Attendant
Spirit_ was taken by Henry Lawes, "gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and
one of His Majesty's private musicians." The Earl's children were his
pupils, and the mask was naturally produced under his direction.
Milton's friendship with Lawes is shown by the sonnet which the poet
addressed to the musician:
Harry, whose tuneful and well measur'd song
First taught our English music how to span
Words with just note and accent, not to scan
With Midas' ears, committing short and long;
Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng,
With praise enough for Envy to look wan;
To after age thou shalt be writ the man,
That with smooth air could'st humour best our tongue.
Thou honour'st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing
To honour thee, the priest of Phoebus' quire,
That tun'st their happiest lines in hymn, or story.
Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher
Than his Casella, who he woo'd to sing,
Met in the milder shades of Purgatory.
We must remember also that it was to Lawes that Milton's _Comus_ owed
its first publication, and, as we see from the dedication prefixed to
the text, that he was justly proud of his share in its first
representation.
Such were the persons who appeared in Milton's mask; they are few in
number, and the plan of the piece is correspondingly simple. There are
three scenes which may be briefly characterised thus:
I. The Tempter and the Tempted: lines 1-658.
_Scene_: A wild wood.
II. The Temptation and the Rescue: lines 659-958.
_Scene_: The Palace of Comus.
III. The Triumph: lines 959-1023.
_Scene_: The President's Castle.
In the first scene, after a kind of prologue (lines 1-92), the interest
rises as we are introduced first to Comus and his rout, then to the Lady
alone and "night-foundered," and finally to Comus and the Lady in
company. At the same time the nature of the Lady's trial and her
subsequent victory are foreshadowed in a conversation between the
brothers and the attendant Spirit. This is one of the more Miltonic
parts of the mask: in the philosophical reasoning of the elder brother,
as opposed to the matter-of-fact arguments of the younger, we trace the
young poet fresh from the study of the divine volume of Plato, and
filled with a noble trust in God. In the second scene we breathe the
unhallowed air of the abode of the wily tempter, who endeavours, "under
fair pretence of friendly ends," to wind himself into the pure heart of
the Lady. But his "gay rhetoric" is futile against the "sun-clad power
of chastity"; and he is driven off the scene by the two brothers, who
are led and instructed by the Spirit disguised as the shepherd Thyrsis.
But the Lady, having been lured into the haunt of impurity, is left
spell-bound, and appeal is made to the pure nymph Sabrina, who is "swift
to aid a virgin, such as was herself, in hard-besetting need." It is in
the contention between Comus and the Lady in this scene that the
interest of the mask may be said to culminate, for here its purpose
stands revealed: "it is a song to Temperance as the ground of Freedom,
to temperance as the guard of all the virtues, to beauty as secured by
temperance, and its central point and climax is in the pleading of these
motives by the Lady against their opposites in the mouth of the Lord of
sensual Revel." _Milton: Classical Writers_. In the third scene the Lady
Alice and her brothers are presented by the Spirit to their noble father
and mother as triumphing "in victorious dance o'er sensual folly and
intemperance." The Spirit then speaks the epilogue, calling upon mortals
who love true freedom to strive after virtue:
Love Virtue; she alone is free.
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or, if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.
The last couplet Milton afterwards, on his Italian journey, entered in
an album belonging to an Italian named Cerdogni, and underneath it the
words, _Coelum non animum muto dum trans mare curro_, and his
signature, Joannes Miltonius, Anglus. The juxtaposition of these verses
is significant: though he had left his own land Milton had not become
what, fifty or sixty years before, Roger Ascham had condemned as an
"Italianated Englishman." He was one of those "worthy Gentlemen of
England, whom all the Siren tongues of Italy could never untwine from
the mast of God's word; nor no enchantment of vanity overturn them from
the fear of God and love of honesty" (Ascham's _Scholemaster_). And one
might almost infer that Milton, in his account of the sovereign plant
Haemony which was to foil the wiles of _Comus_, had remembered not only
Homer's description of the root Moly "that Hermes once to wise Ulysses
gave,"{16:A} but also Ascham's remarks thereupon: "The true medicine
against the enchantments of Circe, the vanity of licentious pleasure,
the enticements of all sin, is, in Homer, the herb Moly, with the black
root and white flower, sour at first, but sweet in the end; which Hesiod
termeth the study of Virtue, hard and irksome in the beginning, but in
the end easy and pleasant. And that which is most to be marvelled at,
the divine poet Homer saith plainly that this medicine against sin and
vanity is not found out by man, but given and taught by God." Milton's
_Comus_, like his last great poems, is a poetical expression of the same
belief. "His poetical works, the outcome of his inner life, his life of
artistic contemplation, are," in the words of Prof. Dowden, "various
renderings of one dominant idea--that the struggle for mastery between
good and evil is the prime fact of life; and that a final victory of the
righteous cause is assured by the existence of a divine order of the
universe, which Milton knew by the name of 'Providence.'"