Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

senior objected to his son writing anything so courtly as a masque, and that Ad Patrem is the poet’s self-defence and attempt to convince his father of the propriety of this kind of poetry.¹ If we had any real evidence of paternal hostility, this would be plausible: but we have none. Another suggestion is that between 1634 and 1637 some breach had occurred between Milton and the Egertons. It has even been argued from the passages added in 1637 that Milton had perhaps fallen in love with the Lady Alice and got a little above his station.² Again this is not impossible: but a great many bricks have to be made with very little straw. Certainly the Egertons never again patronized Milton,³ though the fact that the masque was published suggests that it had not dissatisfied them. John Egerton, the younger brother in Comus, subsequently wrote on his copy of Milton’s Defensio ‘the book should be burnt, the author hanged.’ But that was after a civil war, in which the Egertons had been Royalists, and after the execution of their King, which Milton’s book was defending. It looks as though some disagreement occurred: perhaps Milton was snubbed, though not necessarily for raising his eyes to the Lady Alice. He would not be likely to take kindly to the role of hired hack writer, which is no doubt how his patrons saw him. But Milton would not have published the masque with his other poems in 1645 if he had changed his mind about the genre.

      Comus is in one respect like Satan in the earlier books of Paradise Lost: his character is so well drawn that he steals the show from the Lady in a way that Milton may not have intended. The Lady is almost as unexciting as God in Paradise Lost. But we must not break butterflies on wheels. Whoever played Comus was almost certainly the best actor in the masque: the Lady and her brothers were amateurs, and children at that. Comus is a dramatic dialogue, recalling the debates in which Milton was accustomed to take part at Cambridge. In such a debate, as in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, one gave the best arguments one could find to both protagonists – as the prim Samuel Richardson was to make out a surprisingly good case for his Lovelace. Certainly Milton had conversed with libertines. ‘What hath night to do with sleep?’ ‘‘Tis only daylight that makes sin’ (lines 122, 126) are as accurately epigrammatic as anything Bunyan put into the mouth of his Mr. Badman, a recollection of the days when he moved in Ranter circles.

      It may be right to hear some political overtones, provided we do not assert them too confidently. The suggestion that there is a covert attack on the courtly cult of Platonic love¹ may be reinforced by the Castlehaven connection; Milton and his patrons would be anxious to differentiate their position from papist worship of the Virgin Mary or of Henrietta Maria, as well as from the practices of the papist Castlehaven. There is indeed a certain class-consciousness in Comus. The Lady’s aristocratic assumptions about the morals and manners of the ‘loose unlettered hinds’ (173) are rebuked by the subsequent action. Courtesy ‘oft is sooner found in lowly sheds … than … courts of princes’ (321–4). She ultimately goes out of her way to plead for greater economic equality:

      If every just man that now pines with want

      Had but a moderate and beseeming share

      Of that which lewdly-pampered Luxury

      Now heaps upon some few with vast excess …

      The giver would be better thanked.

      (767–74)

      A masque is a light-hearted entertainment. Critics who warn us against over-reading the text, against worrying about pseudo-problems, may well be right.² We should accept the magic as magic, and not try to press too deep allegorical meanings. We may be encouraged in this by the divergences among those scholars who think they have a key to the details of the allegory.³ But some things may be said about the spirit which informs the poem. It is, in James Maxwell’s words, about virtue rather than specifically about virginity.

      Virtue may be assailed but never lost,

      Surprised by unjust force but not enthralled.

      That was the Elder Brother. The Lady herself tells Comus:

      Fool, do not boast,

      Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind.

      ‘Love virtue, she alone is free’ is the conclusion. When the poem was published in 1637, Milton drew special attention (line 996) to the addition glorifying marriage. This new passage (999–1011) celebrates both the earthly love of Venus and Adonis and the heavenly love of Christ for his eternal bride, who is both the church and the individual soul, Psyche. Together she and Cupid beget Youth and Joy. Pleasure is illusory without this freedom, is self-enthralled. The Lady’s apparently negative attitude was essential to the preservation of her freedom. In the eternal conflict of good and evil good must win.

      If this fail

      The pillared firmament is rottenness,

      And earth’s base built on stubble.

      (592–7)¹

      The true church cannot fail, and God will come to the help of men and women when they have done all they can to resist evil. This is a recurrent Miltonic theme. Christ on the pinnacle of the temple, Samson clutching the pillars, both receive a miraculous accession of power. They illustrate the conclusion of Comus:

      Or if virtue feeble were

      Heaven itself would stoop to her.²

      In the masque there is no problem of moral choice, only confidence and exultation in being on the right side. Haller rightly links the theme of the Masque with the preachers’ exhortation to spiritual wayfaring and warfaring.³ The Lady in Comus never seems in the least likely to succumb to the wiles of the tempter; very different from Eve in Paradise Lost.⁴ Milton was not ready to write Paradise Lost in 1634. He too had been called ‘the Lady’ at Christ’s; and his mind was still filled with ideas of romantic chivalry, of knightly gallantry: his epic aspirations long circled round King Arthur. And yet there is continuity, for all the greater sadness of Milton’s later poetry: Paradise Regained lacks the gorgeous plenitude of Comus, the sense of the pulsing richness of nature; but its theme is analogous, the serene rejection of temptation, not a negative attitude but a sense of the irrelevance, the emptiness, of pleasure that is separated from virtue.⁵

      In Comus Milton creates what I have called the Robinson Crusoe situation. The hero – or heroine – is isolated from society, to face an ordeal alone.¹ This is characteristic of the Puritan-individualist tradition, from Milton to Clarissa Harlowe. Adam and Eve in Paradise, Jesus in the wilderness, Samson isolated by blindness and finally alone in the temple, Bunyan’s Christian deserting wife and children: all face their destiny alone with God. They are as solitary as Hobbist man before Leviathan set up a law-abiding community.

      Milton used the occasion of Comus to try to bring order into what he saw as the moral chaos that court and papists were bringing upon England. As against the Inns of Court wits, who combined acceptance of sexual promiscuity with social sneers against the bourgeoisie, Milton aligned himself with the Puritan middle class, on aesthetic as well as moral grounds. It is this, rather than mere controversial opportunism, that made Milton in 1642 criticize Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem because it offered no vision of a better world in which evil would be eradicated: Milton specifically contrasted Utopia and New Atlantis with Hall’s book. Milton’s anti-episcopal tracts contain elements of his own Utopian ideals, which Haller has described as ‘a society ruled by public opinion, enlightened not only by preachers but by intellectual and moral leaders of all sorts, lay and cleric, above all by poet-prophets like himself’.²

III Lycidas

      Social concern is even more apparent in Lycidas. Its occasion was the death by drowning of Edward King on his way to Ireland in 1637. There is no reason to suppose that Milton was particularly fond of King, who had been made a Fellow of Christ’s in 1630 – the Fellowship which Milton might have hoped for. But Milton was by this time well known in Cambridge, and especially in his own college, as a poet: whilst still in residence