Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/77

 ARCADES AND COMUS

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��aside the sober blank verse line, and lead the little play to a close in rich and deli- cate pulsation of melody. This is so wide a departure from the traditions of masque- writing, that some critics have denied Co- mus 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 adop- tion of a simple human story for the cen- tral 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, near Ludlow, while returning by night from a visit to some relatives in Hereford- shire; 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 al- most 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, per- sons 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 pre- sence of the Sister drawing near in the night woods, he hushes his crew, and ap- proaches her alone, in the guise of a simple peasant, whom " thrift keeps up about his country gear." Under pretence of con- ducting her to a neighboring hut for shel- ter, he beguiles her across the threshold of his palace, builded faerily in the wilder- ness. Here he seats her on a throne in a room of state " set out with all manner of deliciousness," and casting aside his dis- guise, 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 devel- oped. 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 cor- rupt 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 That, when a soul is found sincerely so, A thousand liveried angels lackey her, Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt, And in clear dream and solemn vision Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear ; Till oft converse with heavenly habitants Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape, The unpolluted temple of the mind,

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