Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/79

 ARCADES AND COMUS

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��and thrilling. To oppose the promptings of the lady's chaste heart, he creates a na- ture as poignant in its way as the mightier incarnation of evil in the Lucifer of Para- dise Lost, and as far removed as that from the imagery of popular moral terrorism.

Upon the character of Comus and his enchanted crew Milton chiefly depended for that spectacular interest and that re- moteness from actuality which is proper to the masque. But he added two other dramatis personce deftly calculated at once to enrich the arabesque of spectacle, to increase the opportunities for lyric embel- lishment, and to deepen the philosophic symbolism of the poem. These are the Attendant Spirit and the river-nymph Sa- brina.

Of these, the first is the more character- istic of Milton's mind. The idea of a guar- dian genius, assigned by divine benevolence to watch over an individual human life, comes out in his epigram upon Leonora Ba- roni, the Neapolitan singer, by whose voice he was fascinated during his second visit to Rome (See Epigrams, page 344). There he says, " To every man his angel is al- lotted, his winged angel from the ethereal hierarchies." This conception of a " good angel " is doubtless pagan in origin, but it has been so thoroughly assimilated by Christian thought as to belong now entirely to the region of Christian imagery. No- thing is more remarkable in Milton's han- dling of the materials of his intellectual world than his persistent linking of classic and pseudo^classic myth with what he con- ceived to be permanent religious truth. The best known examples of this are to be found in Lycidas, where St. Peter appears in the same procession with Triton and Fa- ther Camus (a personification of the river Cam at Cambridge), and in the famous identification in Paradise Lost of the heathen gods with the fallen angels. But this cu- rious blending of two divergent systems of thought and imagery appears throughout his work. He had, it is true, ample prece-

��dent for such a use of classical material; for throughout the pastoral poetry of the Re- naissance we can never be sure whether Olympus means the pagan or the Christian heaven, whether Pan is intended for a frol- icsome nature - god or for Jehovah. But of all the pastoralists Milton accomplishes this interfusion with least effort, and draws into the synthesis the greatest number of divergent associations. Thyrsis, the At- tendant Spirit, is manifestly akin to the Ariel of the Tempest, and even reminds us in his closing song of the Puck of Midsum- mer Night's Dream. Yet this very song is a description, under a thin classic veil, of the bliss of the redeemed spirits in Hea- ven, and an exposition of Milton's mystic doctrine of paradisaic Love. In the magic herb Hfemony, by means of which Thyrsis is enabled to enter the palace of the en- chanter and restore the captive lady, there is a recollection of the herb Moly, which saved Odysseus from the spells of Circe. Yet there can be little doubt that the plant symbolizes Christian grace; and that when the poet declares that the golden flower which it bears under better skies cannot come to blossom in the harsh soil where the shepherd found it, he is brooding over the corruptions of the English Church, in a spirit only less intense than that which three years later found such surprising ex- pression within the fantastic framework of Lycidas.

Sabrina, the nymph of the river Severn, who is called up from her watery depths by the Attendant Spirit to release the lady from the marble spell cast over her by Comus, is conceived more purely in the masque spirit. She is perhaps a recollec- tion from Fletcher's pastoral play, The Faithful Shepherdess certainly the lyric music which companions her shows the influence of that beautiful work. The entrance of the goddess and her water- nymphs, in her gorgeous chariot,

" Thickset with agate, and the azuni sheen Of turkis blue, and emerald green,"

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