Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/76

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��POEMS WRITTEN AT HORTON

��her. One of these groups contained the young Lady Alice Egerton, and her boy- brothers, Thomas Egerton and Viscount Brackley, who were to act the next year in Comus at their father's installation as Lord President of Wales. When the children and grandchildren of the aged countess proposed to honor her with a masque which should remind her of the glories surrounding her earlier womanhood, the project doubtless enlisted Milton's eager participation.

Some less accidental considerations also contributed to make the task a welcome one. That Milton's imagination w.as early excited by the stage, and that in his college days he had attended the London theatres assiduously, is proven by an interesting passage in the First Elegy (see transla- tion, p. 324). The Puritan hatred of the stage had not yet touched him. That he had seen masques performed before he was called upon to write one is suggested by a stanza of the Ode on the Nativity, noted by Symonds, describing the descent of " meek-eyed Peace " upon the Earth:

" She, crowned with olive green, came softly sliding

Down through the turning sphere, His ready harbinger,

With turtle wing the amorous clouds divid- ing;

And, waving wide her myrtle wand, She strikes a universal peace through sea and land,"

a description in which it is certainly dif- ficult not to recognize a nymph of King James's court, let down from the canvas clouds of the banqueting room at Whitehall by means of one of Inigo Jones's famous contrivances. Milton, besides, must surely have recognized the peculiar fitness of the masque form for the conveyance of moral and philosophic truth. The purely ideal realm in which the masque moves, and the wide latitude which it offers for the intro- duction of songs and speeches having only an ideal connection with the action in hand, made it a perfect instrument for the gracious conveyance of a serious abstract lesson.

��In the fragment of the Arcades which it fell to Milton's lot to compose, he was not free to put it to these high uses. He could only show, in a few exquisite touches, such as " branching elms star-proof," and

" By sandy Ladon's lilied banks, On old Lycaeus and Cyllene hoar, Trip no more in twilight ranks,"

that a poet was at hand with more than Ben Jonson's delicacy and more than Fletcher's sweetness. But when in the spring of the next year (if we accept the probable date of 1633 for the Arcades') he was called upon once more by Lawes for the text of a masque, this time to celebrate the Earl of Bridge water's assumption of the Lord Presidency of Wales, at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, he was left unham- pered to work out his conception, and to charge the delicate fabric of his dream with the weight of a personal philosophy.

Ill

In Comus Milton pushed much fur- ther than Ben Jonson had done, the su- premacy of the poet over the musician and the stage carpenter. Lawes, for purposes of scenic effectiveness, deftly transferred a portion of the lyric epilogue sung by the Attendant Spirit at the close, the line be- ginning " To the ocean now I fly," to serve as an entrance song for himself, changing " to the ocean " to " from the Heavens." In the masque as printed, however, there is no lyric element until the Sister's invo- cation to Echo. The bulk of the masque is dignified blank verse, unhurried by the necessity for spectacular effect, and with its serious mood unrelieved by lyrical epi- sodes. It is as if the poet had been bent upon showing that he could dispense not only with the trumpery devices of stage mechanism, but also with music, whether his own, in the form of lyrical strophes, or his friend's, in the form of accompanying airs. Not until near the end, when the lesson has been enforced and the action is practically complete, does Milton put

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