Comus

“ THE MASQUE OF “COMUS” How prettily the lines must have sounded, not through wood and glade, but through the stately presence chamber of Ludlow Castle to the graceful tinkling music Lawes had written for them. The earl and countess sat, I have read, in all the state of the Marches Court in the front row, and were surrounded by neighbours and dependents. There is the grace of great things in “Comus,” and a grace and finished purity of soul that have seldom belonged to youth. ”

“ Ben Jonson, in his mask, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, played in 1619, presents a Comus as “the god of cheer, or the belly, riding in triumph, his head crowned with roses and other flowers, his hair curled.” The character and the name were the common property of mask-writers.
The great distinction of Comus is its beauty, maintained at height through a thousand lines of supremely perfect verse. Greatly dramatic it of course is not. It yields its meaning to the most cursory reading; it has no mystery. It is simply beautiful, with a sustained beauty elsewhere unparalleled. ”

“ Thyrsis lead on apace Ile follow thee,
And some good angell beare a sheild before us.
The Scene Changes to a stately palace set out with all
manner of delicionsnesse, soft musicke, tables spred
with all dainties. Comus appeares with his rabble,
and the Ladie set in an inchanted chaire to whom he
offers his glasse, which she puts by, and goes about
to rise.
Comus. Nay Ladie sit; if I but wave this wand,
Your nervs are all chain'd up in alablaster,
And you a statue ”

“ In Comus, his youthful imagination luxuriates amid the freshness of its own beautiful creations, amid the wealth which was destined to enrich the world. Upon the ground of a pure moral sentiment the flowers of poesy are distributed in the most free and graceful manner. There is no pandering to the baser passions of the human heart ”

“ Milton in his usual significant manner (comp. L’Allegro and Il Penseroso) , proceeds to invent a genealogy for Comus. The mask is designed to celebrate the victory of Purity and Reason over Desire and Enchantment. Comus, who represents the latter, must therefore spring from parents representing the pleasure of man’s lower nature and the misuse of man’s higher powers on behalf of falsehood and impurity. These parents are the wine-god Bacchus and the sorceress Circe. ”

“ Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human ant-hill Comus marvelled how missionary enthusiasts could labour hopefully at the work of transplanting their religion, with its homegrown accretions of fatherly parochial benevolence, in this heat-blistered, fever-scourged wilderness, where men lived like groundbait and died like flies. Demons one might believe in, if one did not hold one’s imagination in healthy check, but a kindly all-managing God, never. ”

“ Here in this dark grove dwells Comus, an evil spirit, who loves not the good. Here he finds the unlucky traveler and takes him to his court. There he offers [179] him food and a pleasant drink. But in the glass is a potion which drives memory from the mind and makes one forget home and friends. Then the unhappy traveler loses his human head and must have the head of some animal or bird. Comus enjoys seeing his victims act like wild and foolish animals or the forest.
In this dangerous wood the Lady Alice and her brothers are wandering, and my duty it is to protect them from the evil Comus. ”

“ For once in his life Comus appeared to have an idea of behaving sensibly and making some use of his opportunities, and almost at the same moment Courtenay Youghal arrived on the scene as a possible and very dangerous rival. Against the good looks and fitful powers of fascination that Comus could bring into the field, the young politician could match half-a-dozen dazzling qualities which would go far to recommend him in the eyes of a woman of the world, still more in those of a young girl in search of an ideal. ”

“ Indeed, it might rather have been called Castitas than Comus; for Comus has little justice done to his powers of temptation. Perhaps Fletcher’s failure in recommending chastity suggested the hope of surpassing him to Milton. His emulation of particular passages in the Faithful Shepherdess, particularly on that subject, has been noticed by the commentators. But Comus is a mask, not a pastoral. It can hardly even be called a pastoral mask; for the shepherd is the least person in it ”

“ He was the famous Cotte-Comus; he called himself the first physician of the world, and in traversing the country, had united his talents to those of the naturalist Garnier, the learned preceptor of general Jacquot, whom all Paris saw in the square of the Fountains before and after the revolution. These gentlemen had with them a troop of rope dancers, Comus, as soon as I appeared before him, asked me what I could do. "Nothing," said I. "In that case," said he, "they will teach you: there are greater fools than you, and then besides, you have not a clumsy appearance. ”

“ We fall in love with each goddess in turn, and find comfort for our varying moods from "grave to gay."
Burke said he was certain Milton composed the Penseroso in the aisle of a cloister, or in an ivy-grown abbey.
Comus is a noble poem, philosophic and tender, but neither pastoral nor dramatic, except in form; it presents the power of chastity in disarming Circe, Comus, and all the libidinous sirens. ”

“ Here a man simply made a unit in an unnumbered population, an inconsequent dot in a loosely-compiled deathroll. Even his own position as a white man exalted conspicuously above a horde of black natives did not save Comus from the depressing sense of nothingness which his first experience of fever had thrown over him. He was a lost, soulless body in this great uncaring land; if he died another would take his place, his few effects would be inventoried and sent down to the coast, someone else would finish off any tea or whisky that he left behind—that would be all. ”

“ But although, in many ways, Milton was sternly Puritan, these were only the better ways. He had no hatred of beauty, "God has instilled into me a vehement love of the beautiful," he says.
The masque of Comus was written for a great entertainment given by the Earl of Bridgewater, at Ludlow Castle, and three of his children took part in it. In a darksome wood, so the story runs, the enchanter, Comus, lived with his rabble rout, half brute, half man. ”

“ It is true that the Puritan element in the Horton series of poems becomes more patent as we pass from the two lyrics to the mask of Comus, and from Comus to the elegy of Lycidas, just as, in the corresponding periods of time, the evils connected with the reign of Charles I. and with Laud’s crusade against Puritanism were becoming more pronounced. But we can hardly regard Milton as having expressed any new decision in Comus: the decision is already made when “vain deluding Joys” are banished in Il Penseroso, and “loathed Melancholy” in L’Allegro. ”

“ But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre of things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded as an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring painfully about the world and shuts panthers up in narrow cages. ”

“ The Comus is framed on the model of the Italian Masque, as the Samson is framed on the model of the Greek Tragedy. It is certainly the noblest performance of the kind which exists in any language. It is as far superior to the Faithful Shepherdess, as the Faithful Shepherdess is to the Aminta, or the Aminta to the Pastor Fido. It was well for Milton that he had here no Euripides to mislead him. He understood and loved the literature of modern Italy. ”

“ At the very time, however, when this disorganisation of dramatic blank verse was at its worst, and when it had as yet only been used on the rarest occasions for any other purpose, its great restorer began, though he did not for a long time continue, the process of restoration.
Comus.
Milton's Comus (1634) exhibits him as a student, and consequently an imitator, of all the three preceding schools, excepting the contemporary degradation, which was impossible to such a born master of harmony. ”

“ The Attendant Spirit in Comus has something of Ariel's gayety, but his joy is deeper-seated; he serves not the magician Prospero but the Almighty, and comes gladly to earth in fulfilment of the divine promise, "He shall give His angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways." ”

“ Milton appears to have formed very early that system of diction, and mode of verse, which his maturer judgment approved, and from which he never endeavoured nor desired to deviate.
Nor does Comus afford only a specimen of his language; it exhibits, likewise, his power of description and his vigour of sentiment, employed in the praise and defence of virtue. A work more truly poetical is rarely found; allusions, images, and descriptive epithets, embellish almost every period with lavish decoration. ”

“ It is impossible that the comic playwrights, with the actors of tragedy ever before them, should never have thought of taking this step. Nevertheless, the main impulse seems to have come from another direction. We have seen (p. 36, above) that in the non-theatrical comus the phallus was borne on a pole in the ritual procession with which the comus was originally associated; it was not worn. Neither is it worn by the comus choreutae as represented on Attic vase paintings (Figs. 12-16) . But in Old Comedy it is clear that at least some of the characters wore the phallic emblem. ”

“ Within the navil of this hideous Wood, 520 Immur'd in cypress shades a Sorcerer dwels Of Bacchus, and of Circe born, great Comus, Deep skill'd in all his mothers witcheries, And here to every thirsty wanderer, By sly enticement gives his banefull cup, With many murmurs mixt, whose pleasing poison The visage quite transforms of him that drinks, And the inglorious likenes of a beast Fixes instead, unmoulding reasons mintage Character'd in the Face; ”

“ On the 1st October in that year, he was appointed to the Comus 22, Captain John Tailour, in which ship he proceeded to Africa, and was there very actively engaged in the suppression of the slave trade. The Comus appears to have been the first man-of-war that ever ascended the new Calabar river as high as Duke’s Town, where her boats captured seven Spanish and Portuguese vessels with 550 slaves embarked, after a determined resistance and much bloodshed. ”

“ It is true that Fletcher’s pastoral was being acted in London about the time Milton was writing his Comus, that the poem by the Dutch Professor was republished at Oxford in 1634, and that resemblances are evident between Milton’s poem and those named. But Professor Masson does well in warning us that “infinitely too much has been made of such coincidences. ”

“ By his very personality, his knowledge of affairs, his familiarity with ancient and mediæval history, and, above all, by his fluency in Latin invective, Milton thwarted attempts to disparage his countrymen as [xx] lawless barbarians. He helped to maintain the good name of his country as a land of intellectual light and of respect for ancient usage. Foreigners who attempted personal vilification found him ready to meet them with their own weapons. The poet of Comus now shows himself a controversialist of unbounded energy. ”

“ In this first edition, as will be seen, it is called simply "A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle," etc., and in the two collected editions of Milton's minor Poems published during his lifetime, the first in 1645 and the second in 1673, the title is the same. Comus, the name of one of the principal characters, was, it seems, given to the "Maske" by some later editor.
At the time Comus was written and acted, "1634, on Michaelmasse Night," the 29th of September, Milton was in his twenty-sixth year. ”

“ The want of what we may call personality, none of the characters having names, except Comus himself, who is a very indefinite being, and the absence of all positive attributes of time and place, enhance the ideality of the fiction by a certain indistinctness not unpleasing to the imagination.
Lycidas. 60. It has been said, I think very fairly, that Lycidas is a good test of a real feeling for what is peculiarly called poetry. Many, or perhaps we might say most readers do not taste its excellence; nor does it follow that they may not greatly admire Pope and Dryden, or even Virgil and Homer. ”

“ Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks,
Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,
But all to please and sate the curious taste?
And set to work millions of spinning worms,
That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk,
To deck her sons; and, that no corner might
Be vacant of her plenty, in her own loins
She hutched the all-worshipped ore and precious gems,
To store her children with. ”

“ Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. "But not the praise,"
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears:
"Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed."
O fountain Arethuse, and thou honoured flood,
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard was of a higher mood. ”

“ In this fray Commius had lost everything, his faithful warriors and his hatred. Satisfied with his vengeance, henceforth tranquil and content, he sent a messenger to Marcus Antonius. This messenger, having been admitted to the quæstor's tribunal, spoke thus:
"Marcus Antonius, King Commius promises to appear in any place which shall be indicated to him, to do all that thou shalt command and to give hostages. One thing only he asks—that he shall be spared the disgrace of ever appearing before a Roman." ”