Miltons Comus | Page 3

from which Milton drew his materials for _Comus_, critics have referred to Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_ (1595); to Fletcher's pastoral, _The Faithful Shepherdess_, of which Charles Lamb has said that if all its parts 'had been in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric intermixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with _Comus_ or the _Arcadia_, to have been put into the hands of boys and virgins, to have made matter for young dreams, like the loves of Hermia and Lysander'; to Ben Jonson's mask of _Pleasure reconciled to Virtue_ (1619), in which Comus is "the god of cheer, or the Belly"; and to the _Comus_ of Erycius Puteanus (Henri du Puy), Professor of Eloquence at Louvain. 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. After all of them, even the most ideal and poetical, the feeling in reading _Comus_ is that all here is different, all peculiar." Whatever Milton borrowed, he borrowed, as he says himself, in order to better it.
It is interesting to consider the mutual relations of the poems written by Milton at Horton. Everything that Milton wrote is Miltonic; he had what has been called the power of transforming everything into himself, and these poems are, accordingly, evidences of the development of Milton's opinions and of his secret purpose. It has been said that _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ are to be regarded as "the pleadings, the decision on which is in Comus"--_L'Allegro_ representing the Cavalier, and _Il Penseroso_ the Puritan element. This is true only in a limited sense. 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_. The mask is an expansion and exaltation of the delights of the contemplative man, but there is still a place for the "unreproved pleasures" of the cheerful man. Unless it were so, _Comus_ could not have been written; there would have been no "sunshine holiday" for the rustics and no "victorious dance" for the gentle lady and her brothers. But in _Comus_ we realise the mutual relation of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_; we see their application to the joys and sorrows of the actual life of individuals; we observe human nature in contact with the "hard assays" of life. And, subsequently, in _Lycidas_ we are made to realise that this human nature is Milton's own, and to understand how it was that his Puritanism which, three years before, had permitted him to write a cavalier mask, should, three years after, lead him from the fresh fields of poetry into the barren plains of controversial prose.
The Mask was a favourite form of entertainment in England in Milton's youth, and had been so from the time of Henry VIII., in whose reign elaborate masked shows, introduced from Italy, first became popular. But they seem to have found their way into England, in a crude form, even earlier; and we read of court disguisings in the reign of Edward III. It is usually said that the Mask derives its name from the fact that the actors wore masks, and in Hall's Chronicle we read that, in 1512, "on the day of Epiphany at night, the king, with eleven others, was disguised after the manner of Italy, called a Mask, a thing not seen before in England; they were appareled in garments long and broad, wrought all with gold, with _visors_ and caps of gold." The truth, however, seems to be that the use of a visor was not essential in such entertainments, which, from the first, were called 'masks,' the word 'masker' being used sometimes of the players, and sometimes of their disguises. The word has come to us, through the French form _masque_, cognate with Spanish _mascarada_, a masquerade or assembly of maskers, otherwise called a mummery. Up to the time of Henry VIII. these entertainments were of the nature of dumb-show or _tableaux vivants_, and delighted the spectators chiefly by the splendour of the costumes and machinery employed in their representation; but, afterwards, the chief