Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/78

 POEMS WRITTEN AT HORTON

��And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence, Till all be made immortal. But when lust, By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul

talk,

But most by lewd and lavish act of sin, Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion, I m bodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose The divine property of her first being."

The uncouth crew that follows the enchan- ter in his nocturnal revels typify those human souls, which, after rendering up their inner purity, have gradually become inibodied and imbruted, and lost their di- vine property. But such loss and such transmogrification cannot be imposed from without; they are rather the inevitable re- sult 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,

41 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. But evil on itself shall back recoil, And mix no more with goodness. If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness And earth's base built on stubble."

Comus, no vulgar incarnation of sensuality, is subtle enough to understand this, and in the famous dialogue which takes place be- tween him and the lady he seeks to melt her resolution by all the devices of sophis- try and beguiling suggestion. Into the rebuttal which she makes, as well as into the speeches of the Elder Brother, Milton has put a profound moral conviction, a con- viction which gave to his whole life from the time when his college-mates, half in mockery, half in admiration, of his scrupu- lous purity, nicknamed him the " Lady of Christ's," to the time when he pictured Samson undone by the idolatry of sense a singular crystalline glow. It is easy for us to underestimate the beauty and value of this " sage and serious doctrine of vir- ginity " as it is set forth in the pages of

��Comus ; for to a nineteenth century moral sense, mellowed by a larger humanism than seventeenth century England knew, there is a suggestion of prudery, not to say prig- gishness, in some of the utterances. To be just, we must hold in mind the fact, too little taken account of in popular estimates of Milton's character, that he achieved this ideal only by severe struggle, and in the face of a nature uncommonly exposed to passion.

The character of Comus may fairly be regarded as an authentic creation of Mil- ton's. Some hints, it is true, gathered here and there, helped him to the conception. In the Elxoves, 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 Kw/uos, from which our word " 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 der 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,

" Devourer of boiled, baked, roasted, or sod ; An emptier of cups, be they even or odd."

Such a deity would have had little power over the heroine of Milton's masque. As his nature was finer than Jonson's, so his conception of sensuousness is more subtle

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