With saintly shout and solemn jubily; Where the bright Seraphim in burning row Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow, And the Cherubic host in thousand quires Touch their immortal harps of golden wires, With those just Spirits that wear victorious palms, Hymns devout and holy psalms That we on Earth, with undiscording voice, Broke the fair music that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motions swayed In perfect diapason, whilst they stood To his celestial consort us unite, To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light! UPON THE CIRCUMCISION (1634) YE flaming Powers, and winged Warriors bright, That erst with music, and triumphant song, I ARCADES AND COMUS In order to understand the task which Milton set himself in the Arcades and in Comus, it will be necessary to glance for a moment at the history of the dramatic form which it represents. The English masque, though it received modifications from native sources, was in the main an Italian product. The southern love of spectacle, united with the Renaissance enthusiasm for classical learning, developed in Italy during the sixteenth century a peculiar species of entertainment, the nearest analogue to which in our own time and country is perhaps the annual Mardi-gras procession at New Orleans. Sometimes the Italian pageants took this precise form of a procession of gorgeously decorated cars moving through the city streets, bearing groups of symbolic figures. Sometimes, on the temporary stage of a ducal ball-room, they took the form of a more coherent series of tableaux, a kind of masque-pageant enlivened by music and dumb-show. Sometimes a connected story was acted out, with elaborate stage devices, and choric and lyric interludes. All these entertainments shared alike the qualities of spectacular gorgeousness and pseudo-classic symbolism. The mythology of Greece and Rome was ransacked for stories which could be suggested by picturesque groups of figures without much action; and upon the devising and mounting of these groups were lavished all the devices of the poet, the sculptor, the engineer, and the costumer. Architects like Palladio did not disdain to design the stage-settings; masters of color like Tintoretto and Veronese painted the scenery; mechanicians like Brunelleschi arranged the machinery; distinguished musicians and choreographs took charge of the dances and songs which enriched the meagre action. All this of course made the masquepageant an expensive form of diversion, open only to rich municipalities, to great guilds or societies, and to courts. It was as an adjunct to courtly merrymakings that the masque proper chiefly flourished. Just as the masque-pageant added to the decorative and mimetic elements of the simple pageant the beguilement of music, instrumental and vocal, so the masque proper added to the masquepageant an element of spoken poetry or recitative, and also gave to the lyric ingredient a greater importance. The services of poets thus came into requisition, and it was at court that the Italian poets were apt to be found. Another reason for the popularity of the masque at court lay in the opportunity which it gave for lords and ladies, who had been blessed with little histrionic genius but with abundant physical beauty, to display themselves in decorative rôles as gods and goddesses, or as abstract virtues and passions. When the masque passed over into England in the sixteenth century, it found there some indigenous forms of entertainment with which it had affinities, such as the pageants of the London Trade Guilds, the Morality plays, and the “mummings' which still survive, if the testimony of Mr. Hardy's Return of the Native is to be taken, in parts of rural England. How far the foreign importation was affected by these native products is uncertain, but there is early noticeable some substantial differences between the English masque and its Italian prototype, due to the peculiar literary conditions of England at the time. Elizabethan drama was just beginning its wonderful career, and a crowd of playwrights stood ready to seize upon any outlet for their talents. It was not long, therefore, before the somewhat crude spectacular displays which marked, for example, the famous visit of Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth, developed in the hands of such dramatic poets as Dekker, Marston, Heywood, and Chapman into more chastened and coherent forms, with a substantial warp of poetry to hold the structure together. Ben Jonson, who as laureate to King James was expected to furnish one or two masques a year for the court, lifted the form out of the realm of the ephemeral, and made it a vehicle for literature. Somewhere in his burly make-up Ben Jonson hid a deposit of delicate fancy and exquisite song, and he fashioned the airy substance of his masques with love, lavishing upon them vast learning and invention. He was fortunate in having as his coadjutors two men of exceptional gifts, Ferrabosco, the King's musician, and Inigo Jones, the King's architect; but Jonson refused stoutly to subordinate his text to the music of the one or to the stage devices of the other. Jonson's example led other poets to give the masque a much more conscientious treatment than it had hitherto received. His work had only to be supplemented by the exquisite lyrical sense of John Fletcher, in his Faithful Shepherdess, and by the magic fancy of Shakespeare, in such masque-like creations as Midsummer Night's Dream and the Tempest, to prepare the instrument wholly for Milton's hand. II The Arcades is only a fragment, and if it had not been followed by Comus, would be of little interest except for the two or three lovely lyric touches which it contains. But as regards the circumstances of their production, the two poems are intimately connected, and any consideration of the one necessarily includes the other. What those circumstances were has already been briefly stated in the introductory biography. It is there assumed, in accordance with the general belief, that we owe the Arcades to Henry Lawes, the young musician whose name is otherwise imperishably bound up with the lyric poetry of the seventeenth century, since it was he who set to music the songs of Carew, Lovelace, Herrick, and other poets of his day. Biographers have attempted to prove, with partial success, that Milton was personally known to the Bridgewater family, and received the invitation to contribute to the Harefield masque directly from them. The matter is of small importance; certainly, from whatever source it came, the invitation cannot but have been welcome to the young poet, for several reasons. In the first place, the Countess Dowager of Derby, in whose honor the masque was performed, had been, in her youth, the friend of Milton's darling poet, Spenser, who indeed claimed kinship with her family, the Spencers of Althorpe. To her elder sisters Spenser had dedicated his Muiopotmos and his Mother Hubberd's Tale, and to herself his Tears of the Muses. Such a connection would have been enough to throw about the venerable lady to Milton's eyes a halo of romantic interest, even had not her subsequent relations with literary men made it possible for Warton to say that "the peerage-book of this lady is the literature of her age." At the fine old estate of Harefield, she and her second husband, Sir Thomas Egerton, had been visited by Queen Elizabeth, and the stately avenue of elms in which the Arcades was afterwards presented derived its name of the "Queen's Walk" from a masque of welcome which was presented there on that occasion. A widow since 1617, the Countess Dowager lived in stately retirement at Harefield, engaged in works of charity. Three groups of grandchildren surrounded her. One of these groups contained the young Lady Alice Egerton, and her boybrothers, 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 was 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 translation, 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: a description in which it is certainly difficult 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 introduction 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 Lycæus 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 Bridgewater's assumption of the Lord Presidency of Wales, at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, he was left unhampered to work out his conception, and to charge the delicate fabric of his dream with the weight of a personal philosophy. III In Comus Milton pushed much -further than Ben Jonson had done, the supremacy 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 beginning "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 invocation 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 episodes. 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 aside the sober blank verse line, and lead the little play to a close in rich and delicate pulsation of melody. This is so wide a departure from the traditions of masquewriting, that some critics have denied Comus 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 adoption of a simple human story for the central 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 Herefordshire; 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 almost 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, persons 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 presence of the Sister drawing near in the night woods, he hushes his crew, and approaches her alone, in the guise of a simple peasant, whom "thrift keeps up about his country gear." Under pretence of conducting her to a neighboring hut for shelter, he beguiles her across the threshold of his palace, builded faerily in the wilderness. Here he seats her on a throne in a room of state "set out with all manner of deliciousness," and casting aside his disguise, 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 developed. 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 corrupt 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 |