Another similar composition, headed 'The Rural Sports on the Birthday of the Nymph Oenone,' is printed together with the above. In it the strains of the polished pastoral are varied by the humours of the clown Hobbinall, the whole ending with a speech by Pan and a dance of satyrs.
One obvions omission from the above catalogue will have been noticed. The reason thereof is sufficiently obvious; and the following section will endeavour to repair it.
II
In Milton's contribution to the fashionable masque literature of his day we approach work the poetic supremacy of which has never been called in question, and whose other qualities, lying properly beyond the strict application of that term, critics have habitually vied with one another to extol. No one, indeed, for whom poetry has any meaning whatever, can turn from the work of Peele, Heywood, and Shirley, of Ben Jonson even, to the early works of Milton, to such comparatively immature works as Arcades and Comus, without being conscious that they belong to an altogether different level of poetical production. It was no mere conventional commendation, such as we may find prefixed to the works of any poetaster of the time, that Sir Henry Wotton addressed to the author of the Ludlow masque: 'I should much commend the Tragical [i.e. dramatic] part, if the Lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your Songs and Odes, wherunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our Language[[353]].'
The two poems we have now to consider were, in all probability, written within a short while of one another, and the second anticipated by more than three years the composition of Lycidas. But the connexion between the two is not one of date only, nor even of the spectacular demand it was the end of either to meet. It may, namely, in the absence of any definite evidence, be with much plausibility presumed that the impulse to the entertainment, of which as we are told Arcades formed a part, originated with that very Lady Alice Egerton and her two young brothers who, the following year probably, bore the chief parts in Comus. The entertainment was presented at Harefield in honour of their grandmother, the Countess Dowager of Derby. This lady, probably somewhat over seventy at the time, was the honoured head of a large family. The daughter of Sir John Spencer of Althorpe, born about 1560, she married first Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, afterwards Earl of Derby, patron of the company of actors with whom Shakespeare's name is associated; and secondly, after his early death in 1594, the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, who rose by rapid steps to be Viscount Brackley shortly before his death in 1617. The span of a human life appears strange when measured by the rapidly moving events of the English renaissance. The wife of Shakespeare's patron, who may have witnessed the early ventures of the Stratford lad at the time of his first appearance on the London stage--the 'Amarillis' of Colin Clout, with whom, and with her sisters 'Phillis' and 'Charillis,' Spenser claimed kinship, and to whom he dedicated his Tears of the Muses in 1591--lived to see her grandchildren perform for her amusement in the reign of the first Charles an entertainment for which their music-master Lawes had requisitioned the pen of the future author of Paradise Lost.
Arcades, or 'the Arcadians,' can hardly be dignified by the name of a masque; it is the mere embryo of the elaborate compositions which were at the time fashionable under that name, and of which Milton was to rival the constructional elaboration in his pastoral entertainment of the following year. It rather resembles such amoebean productions as we find introduced into the stage plays of the time; and was, no doubt, as the superscription explicitly informs us, but 'Part of an entertainment presented to the Countess Dowager of Darby.' Nevertheless it is complete and self-contained, and to speak of it, as Professer Masson does, as 'part, and part only, of a masque,' is to give a wholly false impression; for, whatever the rest of the entertainment may have been, there is not the least reason to suppose that it had any connexion or relation with the portion that has survived. This runs to a little over one hundred lines. A group of nymphs and shepherds, coming from among the trees of the garden, approach the 'seat of State' where sits the venerable Countess, whom they address in a song. As this ends their progress is barred by the Genius of the Wood, who delivers a long speech.[[354]] This is followed by a song introducing the dance, after which a third song brings the performance to a close. It cannot be honestly said that the bulk of this slender poem is of any very transcendent merit; but the final song stands apart from the rest, and deserves notice both on its own account and for the sake of that to which it served as herald:
Nymphs and Shepherds dance no more
By sandy Ladons Lillied banks;
On old Lycaeus or Cyllene hoar
Trip no more in twilight ranks;
Though Erymanth your loss deplore
A better soyl shall give ye thanks.
From the stony Maenalus
Bring your Flocks, and live with us;
Here ye shall have greater grace
To serve the Lady of this place,
Though Syrinx your Pans Mistres were,
Yet Syrinx well might wait on her.
Such a rural Queen
All Arcadia hath not seen.
Here we have, if nothing else, promise at least of the melodies to be, as also of that harmonious interweaving of classical names which long years after was to lend weight and dignity to the 'full and heightened style' of the epic. One other point in connexion with the poem is noteworthy, the quality, namely, in virtue of which it claims our attention here. It is, indeed, not a little curious that on the only two occasions on which Milton was called upon to produce something of the order of the masque, he cast his work into a more or less pastoral form; and this in spite of the fact that, as we have seen, the form was by no means a prevalent one among the more popular and experienced writers. It would appear as though his mind turned, through some natural bent or early association, to the employment of this form; an idea which suggests itself all the more forcibly when we find him, a few years later, setting about the composition of a conventional lament in this mode on a young college acquaintance, and producing, through his power of alchemical transmutation, one of the greatest works of art in the English language.
It was, no doubt, in the earlier months of 1634, while his friend Lawes was engaged on the gorgeous and complicated staging and orchestration of the Triumph of Peace and the Coelum Britannicum, that Milton composed the poem which perhaps more than any other has made readers of to-day familiar with the term 'masque.' In the second of the elaborate productions just named--a poem, be it incidentally remarked, which does no particular credit to the pen of its sometimes unsurpassed author, Tom Carew, but in the presentation of which the king and many of his chief nobles deigned to bear a part--minor rôles had been assigned to the two sons of the Earl of Bridgewater, namely, the Viscount Brackley and Master Thomas Egerton. When the earl shortly afterwards went to assume the Presidency of the Welsh Marches, it was these two who, together with their sister the Lady Alice, bore the central parts in the masque performed before the assembled worthies of the West in the great hall of Ludlow Castle. The ages of the three performers ranged from eleven to thirteen, the girl, who was the eighth daughter of the marriage, being the eldest.
It must have been a gay and imposing sight that greeted the spectators in the grim old border fortress, the gaunt ruins of which may yet be seen, but which had at that date already rubbed off some of its medieval ruggedness as a place of defence. Though necessarily less elaborate and costly than the performances in London, no pains were spared to make the spectacle worthy of the occasion, and it must have appeared all the more splendid in contrast to its surroundings, presented as it was in the great hall in which met the Council of the Western Marches in the distant town upon the Welsh border. Nor did the occasion lack the heightening glamour and dramatic contrast of historical association, for in this very hall just a century and a half before, if tradition is to be credited, the unfortunate Prince Edward, son of Edward IV, was crowned before setting out with his young brother on the fatal journey which was to terminate under a forgotten flagstone in the Tower of London.