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,
Imbodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose
The divine property of her first being."

The uncouth crew that follows the enchanter in his nocturnal revels typify those human souls, which, after rendering up their inner purity, have gradually become imbodied and imbruted, and lost their divine property. But such loss and such transmogrification cannot be imposed from without; they are rather the inevitable result 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,

"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 priggishness, 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 Milton's. Some hints, it is true, gathered here and there, helped him to the conception. In the Elkoves, or Imagines, by Philostratus, a Greek author of the third century, he had seen Comus described as a winged god of revel and drunkenness. Ben Jonson had used the personification of the Greek noun Kuos, from which our word "comedy" is derived, as a personage in his masque of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, written in 1619. Milton had also doubtless read the Latin extravaganza, entitled, Comus, sive Phagesiposia Cimmeria: Somnium, 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 Comus, 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 dialogues 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

and thrilling. To oppose the promptings of the lady's chaste heart, he creates a nature as poignant in its way as the mightier incarnation of evil in the Lucifer of Paradise 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 remoteness from actuality which is proper to the masque. But he added two other dramatis persona deftly calculated at once to enrich the arabesque of spectacle, to increase the opportunities for lyric embellishment, and to deepen the philosophic symbolism of the poem. These are the Attendant Spirit and the river-nymph Sabrina.

Of these, the first is the more characteristic of Milton's mind. The idea of a guardian genius, assigned by divine benevolence to watch over an individual human life, comes out in his epigram upon Leonora Baroni, 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 allotted, 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. Nothing is more remarkable in Milton's handling of the materials of his intellectual world than his persistent linking of classic and pseudo-classic myth with what he conceived 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 Father 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 curious 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 Renaissance we can never be sure whether Olympus means the pagan or the Christian heaven, whether Pan is intended for a frolicsome 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 Attendant Spirit, is manifestly akin to the Ariel of the Tempest, and even reminds us in his closing song of the Puck of Midsummer Night's Dream. Yet this very song is a description, under a thin classic veil, of the bliss of the redeemed spirits in Heaven, and an exposition of Milton's mystic doctrine of paradisaic Love. In the magic herb Hæmony, by means of which Thyrsis is enabled to enter the palace of the enchanter 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 expression 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 recollection 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 waternymphs, in her gorgeous chariot, "Thickset with agate, and the azurn sheen Of turkis blue, and emerald green,' 29

must have combined with the descent of the Attendant Spirit from the clouds, the pageantry of Comus's palace, and the dancing of the bewitched monsters, to give just the right touch of rococo elaborateness to the stage production.

Comus, more than any other youthful work of Milton, and more than any work of his maturity except Samson Agonistes, shows his power as an artist. It has not the pure sweetness of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, nor does it anywhere rise to the lyric heights of Lycidas; but over its diverse and seemingly irreconcilable elements has gone the cool hand of the master, to build and subdue. There is in it a severity of tone, a chastity of ornament, a calm artistic vision, to which most poets, even the greatest, attain only by long purging of their eyes with euphrasy and rue. On the moral side, as has been said above, there is to many minds something not quite

persuasive in Comus; its high doctrine comes at times a little priggishly and with a flavor of unripeness from a young man's lips. But its art is wholly admirable. Its blank verse, if it has not the thunders and the compelling wings of that of Paradise Lost, has all the later dignity of carriage. Its rhymed octosyllabics are in the purest pastoral mode. Its lyrics sing themselves, and shine with an unaccountable light. Above all, there presides over the poem from the first line to the last the fine economy of a mind that compels everything into the service of a dominant idea. ton never demonstrated his character, both as artist and as man, more signally than when he made the quaint vehicle of the masque, designed to carry no heavier freightage than an evening's careless amusement, bear the burden of a profound personal philosophy, and bear it, not as a burden, but as an essence.

Sitting like a Goddess bright
In the centre of her light.

Might she the wise Latona be,
Or the towered Cybele,
Mother of a hunderd gods?
Juno dares not give her odds:

Who had thought this clime had held
A deity so unparalleled ?

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And keep unsteady Nature to her law, And the low world in measured motion draw

After the heavenly tune, which none can hear

Of human mould with gross unpurgèd ear.
And yet such music worthiest were to blaze
The peerless height of her immortal praise
Whose lustre leads us, and for her most fit,
If
my
inferior hand or voice could hit
Inimitable sounds. Yet, as we go,
Whate'er the skill of lesser gods can show
I will assay, her worth to celebrate,
And so attend ye toward her glittering
state;

Where ye may all, that are of noble stem, Approach, and kiss her sacred vesture's hem.