"If this fail,
The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth's base built on stubble"?
I see no reason whatever to doubt, in spite of what has lately been said by a modern critic and poet, that these speeches of the Brothers and the Lady, rather than those of Comus, represent Milton's own conception of life. It is true, of course, that Comus was one of several masks performed as an aristocratic counterblast to the attack of Prynne and the Puritans on all stage performances. But that only strengthens the proof of Milton's own leaning to a grave and temperate mode of life. Even when he writes a mask he will insist that it shall be a thing of noble art and serious moral. He was no narrow-minded fanatic and will write a piece for great ladies to perform when asked by his accomplished friend Lawes: but he is already {120} the man who was later to denounce "court amours, Mix'd dance and wanton masque"; and if he writes a mask himself it will be to take the old "high-flown commonplace" of the magic power of chastity and give it an entirely new seriousness and beauty. The notion of Mr. Newbolt that there were two Miltons, one before and the other after the Civil War, and that the one was "sincerely engaged on the side of liberal manners" while the other was an ill-tempered enemy of civilization and the arts of life, is a complete delusion. The "Lady of Christ's" who was unpopular on account of his severe chastity, was already a strict Puritan of the only sort he ever became; and the author of Paradise Lost, as all the evidence shows, was no morbid sectary but a lover of learning and music and society. Of course, no man goes unchanged through a great struggle such as that to which Milton gave twenty years of life. There is a development, or a difference, call it what you will, between the Dante who wrote the Vita Nuova and him who wrote the Divina Commedia. That could not but be; a body that had gone into exile and a soul that had visited hell must leave their traces on a man. But the essential Dante remains one and the same all the while. And {121} so does Milton. Nothing can be more certain than that the grave boy whose gravity impressed all Cambridge, and had taken immortal shape in the Nativity Ode and the sonnet of the "great Taskmaster's eye" before he was much past twenty, did not mean to hold up a drunken sensualist like Comus as a model for youth. He was not an ascetic, then or later; and he was writing a dramatic poem; and, of course, had no difficulty in giving Comus a fine speech about the follies of total abstinence which, indeed, he loved no better than other monkeries. The Lady, in reply, as she is dramatically bound, over-exalts her "sage and serious doctrine of Virginity" as Comus had overstated the case against it; but what she praises is Temperance, not Abstinence. Her virginity is that of a free maiden, not that of a vowed nun, and there is nothing in it to unfit her to play the part which, when Eve plays it, gives Milton occasion for his well-known apostrophe to true love. Nor is there any inconsistency between his denunciation of "wanton masks" in that passage, and his being the author of Comus. His own mask was as different as possible from those others, the common sort, in which he saw the purveyors of "adulterous lust," and with which, now as then, he would have nothing whatever {122} to do. His "Lady" alone, even without her brothers, makes that clear. What she says may not be so poetically attractive as the speech of Comus; but it has just the note of exaltation which is heard in all Milton's great ethical and spiritual outbursts, and plainly utters the other and stronger side of his convictions. The truth is that from the very beginning to the very end of his life Milton had all the intensity of Puritanism, more than all its angry contempt of vice, but nothing whatever of its uncivilized narrow-mindedness. A large part of the peculiar interest of his character lies in the fact that he, almost alone of Englishmen, managed to unite the strength of the Reformation with the breadth of the Renaissance. We have both in the lovely verses which are the Epilogue of Comus; and if it begins with—
"the gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree:"
and the—
"Beds of hyacinth and roses
Where young Adonis oft reposes,
Waxing well of his deep wound
In slumber soft, and on the ground
Sadly sits the Assyrian queen";
{123} it ends with the Stoic Puritan motto, "Love Virtue, she alone is free." And that these last six lines were no formal compliment to the conventions is proved by the fact that Milton chose the final couplet—
"if Virtue feeble were Heaven itself would stoop to her,"
as the motto he appended to his signature in the album of an Italian Protestant at Geneva in 1639, adding the significant Latin which claims the sentiment as utterly his own—
"Caelum, non animum, muto dum trans mare curro."
These words we, looking back on his whole life, may fitly translate: "I am always the same John Milton, whether in Rome, Geneva, or London, whether I write Comus or Allegro or Paradise Lost." For never were unity and continuity of personality more complete than in Milton.