Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/23

 HORTON PERIOD, 1632-1638 xv

��in state at the end of the historic avenue of elms known as the Queen's walk. The aged dowager had in her youth been Spenser's friend ; and it is pleasant to dwell, with Professor Masson, upon the possibility that the eyes which had seen the first saw now also the last of the great line of Elizabethan minstrels. In any case, Lawes was so well satisfied with Milton's words that three or four years later he applied for a more elaborate piece of work of the same sort, this time to celebrate the inauguration of the countess's son-in-law, the Earl of Bridgewater, into his duties as Lord President of Wales. Lawes had under his instruction the Lady Alice, youngest daughter of the earl, as well as her sister and two brothers ; he desired to put their accomplishments to service in the production of a masque gor- geous enough to suit the august occasion. The heartiness with which Milton threw himself into his part of the project is evidenced by the rich and rounded beauty of the result. He never gave his work a definite title, but it is named in modern editions from the chief dramatis persona, Comus, the god of revelry. All efforts to discover whether or not the young author was present when his masque was given in the banqueting-hall of the historic castle of Ludlow, on the Welsh border, have been futile.

The main motive of the poem, the power of chastity to subdue the forces of evil, is a conventional one in the literature of the time. It is only in occasional passages of deeper conviction that we can see the growth of Milton's mind away from the idyllicism of L 'Allegro and II Penseroso, toward the polemic sternness which, after announcing itself in golden adumbrations of melody in Lycidas, was to go on gathering intensity and losing beauty until its ugly culmination in the Reply to Salmasius. In the light of Milton's later development, the very fact of author- ship in the masque form shows the irony of events. These poem-pageants summed up all that was most gorgeous, extravagant, and pleasure-loving in the court life of the Tudors and the Stuarts. They had always constituted a covert protest against the Puritan barrenness and strictness of life, and shortly before Comus was written, this protest had become overt. The attack made by the Puritan barrister Prynne upon the stage, in his Histriomastix, had given offence to the court ; a passage of ponderous invective against women-players was interpreted as an insult to the Queen, who had shortly before taken part in a masque at Whitehall. The result was a revival of the masque by court sympathizers, on a scale of unprecedented splendor, and the masque became a kind of rallying point for cavalier feeling. Comus belongs certainly by date and probably by intention to this demonstration against the Puritan party. It is indicative of the quiescence of Milton's mind at this time with respect to the political situation, that he should have lent his powers unwittingly to such a task.

The next three years of Milton's life at Horton were unproductive. He con- tinued that elaborate course of intellectual and spiritual preparation which he had marked out for himself, fortifying himself in all ways for the greater task which vaguely beckoned. To Charles Diodati he writes, in response to an inquiry as to what he is thinking of, " Why, may God help me, of immortality ! I am growing

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