That looks forward to Paradise Lost, not backward to the masks of the previous generation of poets. The "loud uplifted angel-trumpet" is sounded in it, and we know that we have travelled a long way from the trivial, superficial and often coarse entertainments which would have been the models of Comus if Milton had been the man to accept models of any kind, least of all of such a kind. Like them his mask was an aristocratic entertainment, played to a noble {114} audience by the scions of a great house. But the resemblance scarcely goes further. The older masks were mainly spectacles; magnificent spectacles indeed, designed sometimes, as one may see in the Chatsworth Library, by such artists as Inigo Jones and produced at immense expense; but just for that reason addressed to the eye much more than to the ear, and scarcely at all to the mind. Even when written by such a man as Ben Jonson, the words, except in the lyrics, are of almost no importance. The business was to show a number of pretty scenes, and noble ladies, and to give them a chance of exhibiting their clothes, and their voices. The last gave Jonson his chance; the fine Horatian workman that he was could always produce a lyric that would fit any situation and give some dignity to any trivial personage. But the taint of vanity and fashion, pomp and externality, inevitably clung to the whole thing. Too many personages were introduced, probably because in such plays there were always a great many applicants for parts; and the inevitable result was that in a short piece none of them had space to develop any character or life. But Milton knew, as the Greeks knew and Shakspeare did not always, that in the few hours of a {115} stage performance only a very few characters have time to develop themselves in such a way as to interest and convince the hearer's imagination, and that if there are many they never become more than a list of names. So he, who could not touch anything without giving it character, limits his personages to four or five that they may at least be human beings and not mere singers of songs or allegorical abstractions. And, like some of his predecessors, he takes an ethical theme, the praise and power of Chastity. Fletcher in The Faithful Shepherdess had taken the same; as Jonson had taken the praise of Temperance, which is also partly Milton's subject, in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, in which a grosser Comus is one of the characters. But to get any parallel to the power of conviction with which Milton handles it one has to go behind Jonson, whose mask is an entirely superficial performance, and even behind Fletcher, in whose Shepherdess the many beautiful and moving touches are lost in a crowd of characters and a wilderness of artificial intrigue; one has to go back to the man whom Milton once called his "original," to the author of the Faerie Queen. No one but Spenser could have anticipated the scene between Comus and the Lady, where indeed {116} Milton, like Spenser in the bower of Acrasia, has lavished such wealth upon his sinner that he has hardly been able to give a due over-balance to his saint. Yet she is no lay figure, and one is not surprised that Comus should twice show his consciousness that she has within her some holy, some more than mortal power. Milton has given her a song of such astonishing music that one wonders whether the composer Lawes, for whom the whole was written, could touch it without injury—
"Sweet Echo, sweetest Nymph, that liv'st unseen
Within thy airy shell
By slow Meander's margent green,
And in the violet-embroidered vale
Where the love-lorn nightingale
Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well;
Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair
That likest thy Narcissus are?
O, if thou have
Hid them in some flowery cave,
Tell me but where,
Sweet Queen of Parley, Daughter of the Sphere!
So mayst thou be translated to the skies,
And give resounding grace to all Heaven's harmonies."
The lyrics were the chief beauty of the old masks, but the best of them sink into {117} insignificance before such a masterpiece of art as this. Perhaps nothing in a modern language comes nearer to giving the peculiar effect which is the glory of Pindar. Of course there is in it more of the fanciful, and more of the romantic, than there was in Pindar; and its style is tenderer, prettier and perhaps altogether smaller than his. But the elaborate and intricate perfection of its art and language, the way in which the intellect in it serves the imagination, is exactly Pindar. In any case it is certainly one of the most entirely beautiful of English lyrics. One listens with delight to the musician working out his intricately beautiful theme; or is it nearer the impression we get to say that we watch the skilful dancer executing his elaborate figure? In either case we await with sure confidence the triumphant close. The final couplet, by the way, and particularly the great Alexandrine, is a curious anticipation of Dryden's finest manner. But the rest is a music Dryden's ear never heard. No wonder Comus cries—
"Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould
Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment?
Sure something holy lodges in that breast,
And with these raptures moves the vocal air
To testify his hidden residence.
{118}
How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled!"
The last lines show that Milton has not yet outgrown the Jacobean taste for conceits. So a little later on we find him writing that—
"Silence
Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might
Deny her nature, and be never more
Still to be so displaced";
a piece of intellectual trickery such as Shakspeare too often played with, and Donne laboured at; and one of a special interest because we see it again later transformed and purified in the famous passage of Paradise Lost, in which "Silence was pleased" not only with the stillness of evening, but also with the song of the bird whose "amorous descant" alone interrupts it. Yet even that seemed to Warton, the best of Milton's early critics, a conceit unworthy of the poet. So difficult it is for "rational" criticism to see the distinction between an intellectual extravagance and a flight of the imagination.
There are other things in Comus beside conceits which recall Shakspeare. What can {119} be more exactly in his freshest youngest manner than such a line as—
"Love-darting eyes and tresses like the morn"?
And what can be closer to the note of the great Histories and Tragedies than the Elder Brother's outburst of faith—