SOURCE: Baruch, Franklin R. “Milton's Comus: Skill, Virtue, and Henry Lawes.” Milton Studies 5 (1973): 289-308.

[In the following essay, Baruch argues that in his masque Comus Milton characterizes Lawes, who plays the role of the Attendant Spirit, as the teacher and dramatic guide for the Egerton children.]

Much of the attention given to Milton's Comus has sprung from a concern with the pairings seen as operative in the poem. Virginity and profligacy, natural and religious virtue, celibacy and marriage, order and disorder—the list is an abundant one, with results often richly suggestive.¹ It is perhaps inevitable that this focus in Comus scholarship should have come about. By the very nature of the form, one looks for contending or, at least, separated elements to be in union at the close. If that union is not possible, we find one alternative to have lost. Thus, the universe of the masque is one of solutions produced by the viewer's or reader's perception of true relationships. It is a universe, too, in which a chief delight consists in the delicacy and appropriateness of compliment offered to those involved with the piece. In their turn, these courtly gestures and decorations at their best become fused with the intellectual and spiritual levels of the work.

I should like to suggest that Comus draws upon two commonplaces of rhetorical, ethical, and religious tradition as it accomplishes these masquing functions. They are a pair of concepts central to the assumptions of the age. The first is that the attainment of both virtue and skill is necessary in order to become a good orator, a good teacher, or, indeed, a good man. The second point Milton uses both to comment upon and complete the first. It is that certain areas of knowledge are the province only of God, though He lends such knowledge to certain beings in order to permit virtue to be tried through temptation. In Milton's masque, these recipients of God's allowance are the divinely good Attendant Spirit and the essentially Satanic Comus.²

In this connection, we must notice how the poet restricts the possession of both virtue and the skilled control of nature to the Attendant Spirit and to Sabrina. She, however, is an extension and amplification of his image at the close of the masque. This uniqueness provides a delightful compliment to Henry Lawes within the circumstances of the masque: the musician, who was probably responsible for Milton's commission for the work, played the role of the Attendant Spirit. Thus we have an early example in Milton's career of his linking matter to the power afforded by genre itself. In this way complex purposes are achieved. Later, the poet was to use the might of the pagan epic to sing his Christian song of man's weakness and God's mercy. He was to use the elements of classical tragedy to suggest both the tragic hero and the Hebraeo-Christian exemplum. Here, the process emerges in a slighter shape, but with entertaining effect. The features of the masque are made to compliment Lawes. In addition, Milton uses Lawes's actual and masquing roles as the teacher of the Egerton children in order to provide all three offspring, not just the daughter alone, with thematically and aesthetically important roles.

It is not possible to overestimate the importance of our having a sense of unfolding occasion, in order to see these accomplishments in Comus. No other art form is as intricately and specifically concerned with a moment in time, as is the masque with that of its birth and performance. Part of the pleasure was derived from the relationship existing among the masquers, the audience, and the occasion of the production.³ To be sure, we shall never know the little jokes and understandings that may have been clear to those at Ludlow. On the other hand, we may be certain that Comus, like so many masques, derived some of its vitality from the fact that it was in part a family affair. It was thus responsive to those factors commonly surrounding children, their parents, and, in this case, their teacher. We shall miss a great deal of the poem's magic, if we pay intellectual and emotional heed only to the story of the Lady's plight, or focus exclusively on her moral superiority to Comus. We shall similarly lose out if we restrict ourselves to finding the allegorical meanings attached to the instruments of protection and release. And we shall err because, although such matters are in the foreground, Milton's audience and early readers would have been responding to others as well. I suggest that their delight may well have been enhanced by their perception of the compliment to Lawes. Perhaps more important, this pleasure may have grown as the compliment itself was then observed to perform a number of functions both simultaneously and gracefully. It pointed a familiar and appropriate lesson. It focused on the children as children, thus amplifying the qualities of the occasion. It implied good, pertinent things about the Earl himself. Finally, the gesture to Lawes brought the story to a delicate and suggestive close. As both master musician and composer, Lawes could appropriately be made to represent the combination of virtue and skill so familiar to the age. But, as I shall seek to show, this masquing compliment is also pointing to the qualities inherent in the office of Lord President. It is also showing the new incumbent's children to be part of an age-old story of learning and growth. And the masquing compliment does these things while, on another level, the work is carrying forward its tale of virtue against vice.

One of the most convincing reasons for feeling that Milton did have these effects in mind is that some supposed difficulties in the piece vanish when they are examined in this light. In particular, we come to a clearer understanding of the roles played by the brothers. They share with their sister a vital and, under the circumstances of the Ludlow performance, a charming function in the masque. This importance Milton would certainly have wished to give to the male heirs of the Earl. In my opinion, he fulfilled that purpose. For too many readers of Milton's poem, the boys' philosophical discourse, their awkwardness, and their ineffectiveness have been strange, accidental, and unfortunate side effects in what is the story solely of the Lady.⁴ Milton was not so careless: if his main story concerns the triumph of virtue over evil, the brothers and their sister are also part of another design. This other framework is structured on the fact that the children's instructor has that role in both the masque and in actual life, and that he is the sole repository of virtue and inclusive skill in the piece. The Egerton offspring are thus pointed out as excellent young ones, but young nevertheless. They are still in need of teaching. And on another level, delightful allegorical figure is given to the intrinsic limitations imposed upon all humans by a hierarchical universe.

In order to recapture something of what would have impinged on the minds of the first viewers and readers of Comus, the direct, chronological approach to the text is most helpful. It is the one that permits the factors I have mentioned to emerge in the relationships I believe Milton wished them to have.⁵ To this end, we must consider the poem with a special deliberateness. It is a method made necessary because we are no longer in both conscious and unconscious touch with rhetorical, ethical, and religious precepts taken as assumptions by Milton's era. We must for the moment try to join an age in which the figures suggestive of virtue and skill would have been instantly obvious, convincing, and entertaining.

The first section of the poem (lines 1-169) is a process of identification in which the Attendant Spirit and Comus, the allegorical poles of the masque, make known their attributes and their natures. The first of these proclamations is structured so that the Attendant Spirit and his mission emerge from a network of virtue aided by skills. And they are skills both spiritual and physical. Indeed, Milton here focuses on the creature as a link between those two realms of being. It is as if the entire universe is formed so that virtuous, divine power may come naturally to the aid of the virtuous human who is also humanly weak.

Milton actually creates four clusters of statement for Lawes. First (1-17), there is the Attendant Spirit's delineation of the major difference between a pure, serenely untroubled heaven and an impure earth. The passage ends with the main point: there are some humans who seek to join the two realms “by due steps,” and his skills are being sent to labor in their behalf. Next (18-42), this universe of “Jove” is extended through the ordered image of the Neptune myth. The emphasis here is on Bridgewater's reflection of a kind of divine rightness. This quality is seen in the Earl's skillful use of “temper'd awe to guide / An old and haughty Nation proud in Arms.” It is thus part of a vision, traditional enough at the time, in which royal rule is made part of the workings of the harmoniously moving universe itself. To help celebrate this glory, the Earl's children are moving through that ancient symbol of error, a wood. We note that they are “fair offspring nurs't in Princely lore.” It is a nursing that the play itself will continue and perfect. Following this (43-77), the Attendant Spirit sets up the opposing myth, that of the Circe-Bacchus union that produced Comus. There is very special emphasis on the absolute perfection of Comus' performance as the skilled master of physical phenomena. The evil one is a genius at his craft. He even surpasses “his mother at her mighty Art.” Furthermore, the efficacy of his crystal glass is demonstrated when we feel the encompassing solidity of the victims' enchantment. We glimpse them as they “roll with pleasure in a sensual sty.” It is a kinesthetic pinpointing of nature overturned for evil purposes by an enormous skill. Finally (78-92), the Attendant Spirit's introductory revelations are used to juxtapose Comus' amoral skill and his own. “As now I do” really sums up the situation. The actively virtuous human, limited in ability within the realm of nature, must be given aid in Comus' wood. To help accomplish this task, the Attendant Spirit at once uses his own transformational powers. He changes himself into a shepherd, an opposing allegorical force too obvious to require comment.

The values are swiftly altered in the universe that takes over the stage with the appearance of Comus and his crew. If, as we have seen, the Attendant Spirit's skills are part of the virtuous context of his being, then a polar effect enters with Comus. Indeed, his entire initial passage is based on the idea of how well he operates within the cosmos of his own perverted values. The Attendant Spirit has already described those powers having to do with seduction and enchantment. Now we must pay attention to the stage direction preceding Cosmus' entrance (between 92 and 93): it reveals the prominence that Milton wishes to give to the insignia of the enchanter's abilities, the charming rod and the glass, and to the evidence supplied by the grotesquely headed victims who accompany him. We must take this care because the energy of Milton's masque depends very strongly on the degree to which the other characters and we, the beholders and readers, are aware of how artful Comus' performance really is. We need, that is, to sense the very polish of his craft. That skill is the cause of the events, as well as the source of much of the decorative contrast demanded by the genre. In terms of our particular interest here, it is one of the poles of skill and moral identity that give generative force to the unfolding of Milton's tale.

But Milton's subtlety is what is so compelling. The invocation to revelry that falls from Comus' lips establishes more than the topsy-turvy value of this very strange new world we see before us. It simultaneously enshrines the consummate art of the leader of the revels as that art celebrates itself (93-144) through inversions of values basic to Milton's era. Perhaps most important is the use of the dance itself. Comus' pulsating, increasingly insistent rhythms suggest how music and dance, the ancient symbols of order and even of God, can with appalling skill be put to the creation of disorder when the musician is evil.⁶ The passage ends with “Come, knit hands, and beat the ground, / In a light fantastic round”: Milton, I think, wants the response not only of the victims, but of the viewer and reader as well. It is we, finally, who must know the power of the skilled villain now before us. And it is the rhythms that teach us.

With this oblique presentation of Comus' skills accomplished, Milton closes in on them by having them respond directly to the approach of the Lady (145-69). Comus' perfect physical art is now clarified through his own overt reference to it, as well as his almost mustache-twirling delight in its use. In this, his manner imitates that of Edmund and Iago, who, in good Machiavellian fashion, achieve their nearest approach to joy when they are lost in admiration of their own evil; it is, too, a pattern that Milton's own Satan will later follow. On the level of the main allegorical meanings of the masque, Comus obviously thus becomes the false shepherd-teacher-priest. In keeping with the antiphonal demands of the genre, his disguise is also a polar response to the pastoral covering the Attendant Spirit has assumed for worthy purposes. We must, however, see the vitality of the means and acts that Comus uses, and must see them in our special framework. We shall then understand that these deeds are part of Milton's fusion of masquing compliment and appropriate lesson. That is, the poet is figuring forth the need for combined virtue and skill, as well as the precept that both completes and adorns it: the control of nature is reserved to supernatural agencies, both heavenly and infernal.

Masques demanded opposing responses that hinted at hidden meanings. These figurative motions are frequently taking place in Comus. Here, we may note the way in which Comus, responding to the antiphonal force of the Lady, goes into hiding, just as the Attendant Spirit had done when the enchanter himself approached. These responsive patterns are of course central to the masquing design. I should like to stress, however, that we are dealing with more than the allegorical differentiation of opposite natures. As the early viewers and readers of the masque most surely did, we need to become progressively aware of the function assigned to the idea of skill itself in the poet's plans. Our perceptions must respond to the way Milton uses the very perfection of performance by the diametrically opposed Attendant Spirit and Comus. Those two arts advance the intellectual and decorative content of the masque, and give a very special sense of occasion to it as well.

Yet another universe of skills and moral identity takes over with the soliloquy and song of the Lady (170-243). It is a world immediately suggested with the phrase “if mine ear be true.” We are now on the human level. Skill is now clearly finite. The Lady is surrounded by the dark wood, which represents the normal workings of natural law. We find that here simple physical cause leads to predictable and equally simple physical effect. The Lady, caught in the darkness, is dependent largely on her hearing. Now, this initial presentation of her skills is rather different from the ones we have seen in the Attendant Spirit and Comus. One can almost feel the core of inability that Milton places at the center of the blank verse. He surrounds the Lady and her perceptions with a galaxy of large, threatening images having to do with darkness and entrapment. But her fears are of man on the natural level, and of the dangers posed by nature itself. She knows her limitations, this girl, and they all have to do with threat on the material, natural plane. In particular, this is the area where female youth would be most intensely in peril. Lines 170-209 may be said, I think, to be an incrementally structured vision of alarm. But it is alarm that is quite justified under the circumstances Milton has provided for the Lady's thoughts.

It will be noticed, however, that lines 210-20 are correspondingly and responsively indebted to the idea of skill. When the Lady is speaking of nonphysical contexts of combat, the realm of the spirit, the conclusion is different. It is not a blue-nosed smugness that emerges. Instead, as an antiphonal contrast, we have a sureness born of the fact that her thoughts are now focused on the area of moral conflict. Here her skills are the powerful ones that human virtue can supply. They are skills that include the knowledge of one's final dependence on God's grace to achieve victory over Satan and his representatives. This is, of course, a basic truth of Christianity obviously being used on the primary allegorical levels of the masque. But, for our special interests here, we may note that Milton also transforms the religious truth into the delightful dramatic irony that follows. The Lady is confident that “a glist'ring Guardian, if need were” would be sent. Lawes is thus kept central to Milton's scheme. In him alone virtue and complete skill reside. Without her knowledge, then, the Lady's words announce to all that the teacher has been made available to the student in circumstances that demand a master touch.

And it is to emphasize the gap between the Lady's skills on the natural level and on the spiritual that Milton then returns her (221-43) to the frame of physical darkness. Her corresponding weakness in it leads to the magically evocative power of her song to Echo. In Milton's desire to develop the concept of skill itself, he uses this song to stress his point in an appropriately feminine, mythological frame. He will use Sabrina for a similar reason. The Lady's soliloquy has already indicated her awareness of her limited physical powers. Now Milton reinforces the concept. Painful though it is to ignore the loveliness of the verse, we should focus on what the song really says: Echo has a power that the Lady would like to call upon for help; she needs this help because she is in the realm of nature, a nature that at times physically hides one person from another. Her own human skills in the physical world are normally limited, and she knows it.

Comus' response to the song (244-64) touches significantly on his memory of his mother and her attendants “culling their Potent herbs and baleful drugs.” It is a reference that not only puts forward an anticipatory allegorical opposition to haemony: it also shows again in full measure how superbly skillful the evil clan is in their dealings with nature. How easily they move and succeed amid the workings of the physical universe! Simultaneously, the passage serves to introduce the first conversation between Comus and the Lady (265-330). She is completely fooled, as we would expect her to be. Comus' disguise as a shepherd is, after all, a perfect one. It is a further testimonial to his skills in the area of physical being. I believe Milton uses the stychomythia of the scene (277-90) to present an antiphonal response of the differing souls involved in the encounter. Her absolute and innocent truth is repeatedly framed by his lies. And the effect is expanded in lines 291-330. Here, again, his false offering of help and shelter, along with her trust and acceptance, figures forth material skill devoid of virtue, and virtue antiphonally without material skill.

Now we see the Lady's brothers and hear their conversation. It is a dialogue not beside the point and almost madly inappropriate, as has at times been assumed. Instead, it is at the very heart of Milton's expanding configuration for skill and virtue. What the poet does, I think, is to use the brothers' long discussion (331-489) both to clarify the skill-virtue polarization we have seen, and to assign the boys their vital and appealing roles in the masque. Like their sister, they are the victims of a dark, threatening natural world. Like her, too, they can offer no real control over that world. Milton is to use their bravery in this cosmos to touch them with their own compliment: especially under the circumstances of the Ludlow performance, the audience would be willing enough to be delighted by the boys' valor, even if imperfectly supported by learning. But the poet will also use that valor to reinforce one of his principal points: human beings are ultimately dependent in an encounter involving an overthrown natural order.

I am sure Milton used the scene to charm his audience, probably by poking gentle fun at the Egerton boys' qualities of mind or speech. Possibly some particular use was made of their real-life performances as Lawes's pupils. We cannot know with certainty. But we may be more sure that the scene is shaped so that the Elder Brother's words (414-75) afford strong clarification of the qualities that belong to skill and virtue. It seems to me that the principal framework Milton uses here is that of a constantly reverberating world of natural image and material threat. But that world is brought forward in order to be rejected. In the Second Brother's view, of course, all is very unpromising for their sister. He can focus only on the fact that physical, female beauty is singularly subject to physical threat (especially 393-403), even though the Elder Brother, in speaking of Wisdom (375-85), has used the natural bird image, as well as that of the earth itself, to suggest the true power of the mind and soul. In his climactic response, intended both to comfort and to teach, the Elder Brother makes a decisive split between material and spiritual powers. He points to the ultimate strength of the individual soul, which under the pressures of the plot would be calling particularly upon the powers of chastity for support. It is typical of Milton that he should summon physical details of both folklore and pagan myth to give substance to the Christian-Platonic vision of the passage. Here, as always, the poet is implying that the natural world, rightly understood (a proviso that cannot be overemphasized), can be used to grasp the spiritual. Man must see that in the true relationships of the universe, the two realms are in essential harmony. They are harmonious, that is, when natural laws are left to their natural workings: the Elder Brother's vision is antiphonal to the activities of a Comus.

Yet neither boy has a balanced, pragmatically helpful view. That, too, is far from accidental. Both boys are brave and virtuous. Could the Egerton brothers be anything else? However, if the younger lacks philosophical distance and understanding almost completely, the elder has an intellectual awareness that is not dependable in an extraordinary situation calling for greater powers residing in a more experienced head. What is needed is a teacher in the fullest sense. They must look to one who combines virtue and comprehensive skills. So it is that the Attendant Spirit now appears to them. His entry at this point thus fuses the masquing and the actual relationships of the three figures on the stage: it does so through the ideal of the virtuously skilled teacher so familiar to the seventeenth century.

The Attendant Spirit does not speak the truth to the boys any more than Comus had to their sister. Yet his lies, offered partly for reasons of pedagogy, are both good and necessary. In the story, he is the brothers' “defense and guard” (41) as well as the Lady's. Within the private dimensions of the performance, he is their teacher as well. (Thyrsis is, of course, identified with the music of the Egerton household at 493-96.) As a good Renaissance teacher, he wants practical experience to help the process of learning succeed. Under the circumstances, that lesson involves the children's awareness of their own incapacities in a supernatural confrontation. With that focus in their training, no object lesson would be possible, were the boys to be aware of the special aid given them to combat a danger no human could adequately meet alone.⁷

We are not concerned with the identification of haemony, or with the passage (617-47) that presents it. Our interest is in haemony as part of a teaching method. We focus on the lovely myth as it is linked to the difference between moral and physical skills. Especially interesting are the Attendant Spirit's painstaking, explicit instructions to his male charges. Haemony (644-49) can help only to cut through evil disguise; it can offer protection against spells only before they are made. That is what he tells the boys, though perhaps we should more often wonder whether he is telling the truth, or whether, like his disguise, his account of haemony is a lie offered in a good cause. For this teacher, individual virtue must also learn some lessons about the nonmoral sphere. The basically good must become aware of the hierarchical limitations placed on man in dealing with the overthrow of natural law. The Attendant Spirit's instructions (650-56) are similarly framed to give the boys a detailed lesson in how fruitless human attempts may be in areas beyond rightful human undertaking. In the context of the masque, they must see that no amount of learning will help them to conquer the physical powers of a Comus, who practices the things that rightly belong to God. I am sure it is true that Milton intends Christian symbolism for the boys' failure and their need for Sabrina: perhaps he means to indicate man's basic need for grace on both the natural and religious planes of his existence. But there is another meaning connected with the masquing compliment to Lawes. As a bit of private fun so much at home in the genre, the poet wants to indicate that you do not send a boy to do a man's job; that the pupils are both good and valiant, but young and inexperienced; and that, as a result, they still need a teacher, who will therefore step in and resolve all through his extension, Sabrina. In addition to some factors determining Milton's use of Sabrina that will be mentioned later, a basic dramaturgic point may be made here: having allowed his charges to discover through experience that they need their teacher's aid, the Attendant Spirit as a dramatic character could hardly admit that he himself could have released their sister at any time.

The stage direction (between lines 658 and 659) that introduces the scene in Comus' palace is very important. It suggests a kind of dumb show illustrating, in the fashion of Gorboduc, one of the main points of the piece, and one central to our concern. The Lady's skills are precisely able to cope with a “Palace set out with all manner of deliciousness; soft Music, Tables spread with all dainties,” as well as Comus, his “rabble,” and his glass. Gone is the magical subterfuge, the transmutation of physical being symbolized by Comus' now abandoned pastoral disguise. With its departure, the Lady's incapacity has fled as well. She cannot be fooled by an intemperance no longer made to appear innocent through supernatural upsetting of physical identity. Physical ease and comfort she can and does at once refuse (“he offers his Glass, which she puts by”) when the moral nature attached to them is out in the open. And it is upon this interaction of skills that Milton now builds the great scene between Comus and his prisoner. The absolute, consummate art of evil is revealed as it seeks to use the universe for its own purposes. Antiphonally, we see the quite insufficient art of the virtuous human in the face of physical entrapment. But the insufficiency is that of a human who has another skill as polished in her realm of values as Comus' power is in his.

The opposition is announced in the first spoken exchange of the pair (659-65): Comus is rejoicing in the control of physical property symbolized by his wand. We can feel the completeness with which his disguise has been removed when he says, “Nay Lady, sit; if I but wave this wand, / Your nerves are all chain'd up in Alabaster.” The Lady's response, equally abrupt and self-identifying, is

Fool, do not boast,
Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind
With all thy charms, although this corporal rind
Thou hast immanacl'd, while Heav'n sees good.

Her scorn for him as a fool is central for us. It is much more than mere angry name-calling. What the Lady is declaring is that her would-be seducer is completely without knowledge, understanding, or discrimination in the realm of truth and spiritual value. In short, he is totally unskilled in that context of being where she is herself so fine an artist.

We are not interested in their debate primarily with respect to their moral positions themselves. Instead, we should see the way in which everything that Comus says in his two great speeches (666-90 and 706-55) is part of the vision of one who must see the world in a particular way in order to control it. As he seeks to convince the Lady that she is out of step with the rest of creation, he evokes a natural world that is filled with pressing, demanding loveliness. His approach is due to his need to produce all the components of the material world in a particular distortion. The list extends from the delicate “April buds in Primrose-season,” through the “spinning Worms” in their “green shops” and the “wing'd air dark't with plumes,” to the vibrating, insinuating beauty of “What need a vermeil-tinctur'd lip for that, / Love-darting eyes, or tresses like the Morn?” It is as if for Comus there is a great scale of being of a peculiar kind. It is one that omits the spiritual qualities that traditionally gave meaning to the concept and the figure. It is not only that Milton is characteristically drawing on the Spenserian mode in which evil at its worst is allied with physical beauty, so that both the temptation and the rejection of it may be meaningful. He wants us to feel something else in compelling detail: we must sense the sheer joy of the evil artist as he contemplates the puppets over which he has, on one level, such masterful control. The images pour forth in a profusion of material delineation and celebration, perversely and exquisitely arranged in order to achieve the effects desired by the magician summoning them. From stones to man, the scale is present—but there is no spirit, no soul. The omission is, of course, part of Comus' art. It is also the very seal of his being. These speeches of the son of Circe thus provide a rich figuring-forth of virtueless skill, a self-condemning vision. Comus' powers can operate only when the things of the spirit are suppressed.

And it is on this axis of skill and virtue that the Lady's responses are made partly to move. Her tone is sharp and her attitude absolute. Yet it would be an error (as I think it so often has been) to be put off by this quality in her.⁸ We need to experience her lines as, I believe, Milton intended. They are not only the setting forth of a spiritual opposite to the essentially Satanic position embodied in Comus' libertine naturalism. They are the quintessential demonstration of the Lady's own skills, which lie in exactly those areas in which Comus is an utter stranger. With stroke after stroke (690-705, 756-99), she cuts through physical deception that is not buttressed by a magic that places it beyond the hierarchically determined sphere of human competency. It was that sorcery that had made his pastoral covering so effective. The point is brought forward when she herself calls attention to the “credulous innocence” that characterizes her area of inability. On the level of the masque's moral lesson, to be sure, her impassioned references to temperance, chastity, and virginity place her at the allegorical pole from Comus. She thus assumes an antiphonal relationship in keeping with Milton's concepts and in appropriate conformity with a masque's demands for responsively contrasting elements. But her statements do something else. They create the universe of the Lady's own powers. If Comus' vision of things excluded the spiritual, the Lady's (756-99) all but omits the physical. And when the material world does appear in her vision, it is to demonstrate how it is perceived by the “well-govern'd and wise appetite” of which she had spoken a bit earlier (705). We now have a Lady very different from the one whom we have seen to be weak in a physical context. Now she rejoices in her powers and her skills, just as Comus rejoiced in his own mastery of physical law. “Shall I go on? / Or have I said enough?” she asks. There is something basic in this question, as well as in the repeatedly established tone of superior ability in this passage. Milton intends us not only to consider the Lady a far better moral creature than Comus. He uses the interplay of concepts we have been considering to accomplish another purpose as well: we are to realize that the Lady has finally become Comus' teacher, the superior to him in art, now that circumstances have permitted the moral dimension to become the center of concern. In this area, the formerly skillful Comus has “nor Ear nor Soul to apprehend.” Similarly, we must understand Milton to be placing Comus in polar separation from the classical Renaissance ideal of fused virtue and skill, when he has the Lady deride the enchanter's “dear Wit and gay Rhetoric / That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence.” Skill is both empty and evil without virtue, a lesson taught by Comus' every word and deed. Later in the poet's career, the concept will be given epic life in the figure of Belial, as Milton singles him out for special scorn in the horrors of Pandemonium.

But Comus' response (800-13) to the Lady's skillful lesson does double duty. Primarily, of course, it shows the validity of the Lady's point, namely, that Comus' soul puts him beyond the appeal of truth. However, it also calls further attention to the Lady's physical need. What interests us directly here is Milton's use of that need as part of the compliment to Lawes. The lessons of the poem increasingly become answers to the needs of the genre: for if the Lady has shown herself to have the skills appropriate for the virtuous, it is nevertheless true that she and all humans exist in the physical realm as well. The “corporal rind” that Comus has managed to affect is the symbol of that plane. And since her physical troubles result from the powers of one able to overturn divinely set natural order, an antiphonal supernatural agency must be used to cure them. Comus is a moral idiot, a truth made almost palpable with his last words to the Lady and to us: “Be wise, and taste.” But he has been all too skillful at his own specialty. The physical enchanter's success must be overcome. Otherwise, there can be no fully happy ending based on masquing polarities in final resolution. On the moral level, of course, a happy ending for the Lady was never in question.

Once again, stage directions (between lines 813 and 814) are of great significance. It is the brothers who come in first, and they do so for several reasons. Lawes-Attendant Spirit-Thyrsis gives his charges the chance to demonstrate their bravery. But they also show how poorly they have learned their lesson from their instructor: “What, have you let the false enchanter scape? / O ye mistook” (814-15). The teacher is scolding his students as part of the masquing fun at Ludlow, of course, but they are learning through experience. In the hierarchical nature of things, their material failure was certain-as sure as their sister's moral success.

The closing fifth of the masque is structured to focus on Lawes, and thus keeps building the sense of masquing compliment. By having allowed Comus to escape, the boys have had an object lesson in their need for the great powers of their teacher. In the fable, he offers the resolving fusion of virtue with a skill that embraces both the spiritual and the physical levels of being.

Sabrina, the “other means” to which the Attendant Spirit refers (821), seems clearly to be an appropriate masquing device for the Attendant Spirit himself. Through the Severn references, she provides a compliment to the locale of the performance and the region of the Earl's authority. Milton also surely wished to have another instance of feminine grace and virginal purity in his story, for reasons of balanced coloration.⁹ But I think Sabrina is substituted for the Attendant Spirit for another reason, too. It is not only a question of dramatic need, the factor mentioned earlier. By having the final liberation performed by a female character, Milton is able to stress what we have been feeling about the Lady. We sense all the more deeply, that is, the lesson of the Lady's story as it has been blended with her brothers': the physical controls all three children lack, it is right that they lack. Those skills belong to divinity, though they may be usurped by the ungodly. And the concept of a power that is more than human is given greater potency by having it issue from one who in her physical self is so clearly delicate and gentle. The Lady, too, is delicate and gentle, but she is human.

To achieve this effect, Milton joins two great images in the Sabrina episode (820-937). They concern the helplessness of Sabrina's original, human life, and the consummate art and power of her present state. When Nereus' pity led to Sabrina's apotheosis, it did more than save the girl and preserve her forever. It placed her in that realm of being in which girls do indeed control nature and its forces. Furthermore, they do so legitimately: they are allied with the forces of goodness and mercy figured forth in Nereus. They have nothing to do with so dark a supernatural being as Circe, perhaps the greatest classical symbol of disorder and spiritual ruination for the Renaissance.¹⁰ It is far more than only a desire for delightful pastoral decoration that leads Milton to associate Sabrina with a grouping of shepherds and flowers, and especially to praise the help she offers (844-51). She is, let it be remembered, a “Goddess dear,” one with a “powerful hand” (902-03). Here, in one of the closing resolutions of the piece, the virtuous, delicate being is also the skilled practitioner in the material world. She is able to overcome the physical impairments wrought by a Comus. She can combat an evil that God has permitted to have power over the workings of nature itself, in order to further His desire for testing in the world. Unlike mere mortals, Sabrina is entitled to such abilities. And so, in the very act of her assistance, she also provides a lesson in hierarchical identity to those she helps.

We are, once again, not concerned with the main thematic and allegorical function of Milton's lines. It seems clear enough, for instance, that he intended the matter and manner of Sabrina's ministrations (910-21) to be suggestive of Christian ritual. We must rather concentrate on this new character as she consciously demonstrates her skills. For the tonal and dramatic reasons I have suggested, Sabrina's performance is made into the purest evocation of fused virtue and physical skill in the masque. In a sense her performance completes the confrontation we witnessed in Comus' palace. There the two antagonists could display their individual powers. Yet there could have been no joining of the Lady's moral skills, her purity, with the supernatural physical controls possessed by Comus. In Sabrina, the extension of the Attendant Spirit, that union takes place. The passage may be Christian ritual in allegorical guise. It may be the poet's delight in providing the formulaic patterns beloved by those given to masquing. But Sabrina's method is also the implicit, warm, and touching reminder that the children's teacher has helped them. He has summoned a goddess, who can aid them in a context of threat in which no humans can physically triumph. It is a lesson given its solid application as each easy and unhesitating step is taken, each confident motion is made. The enchantment is lifted because Sabrina is who she is.

But Milton gets rid of Sabrina as soon as her tonal magic has been injected into the proceedings. Lawes, after all, must have the center of the stage, in a quite literal sense. He may have called upon the nymph temporarily, but it is he who is the real repository of both moral and physical skills in the masque. And it is he who is the object of the masquing compliment. In the final moments of the work the gesture is refined as Milton restricts all verbal activity to Lawes. The musician now moves from the role of guide to the children to that of graceful lecturer to all those assembled. With respect to Milton's deeper lessons in the poem, he is attaching the children's adventures to universal human experience. He is giving the application of the moral. But that is not our concern. The closing lines are also part of the great image of virtue, skill, and of man's hierarchically imposed limitations to which we have been paying attention. And this section also expands the compliment: Milton is careful to shape the end of his masque so that the audience's final memory is filled with the Egertons' tutor.

We may note again that the Attendant Spirit is the “faithful guide” of all three children. It is the trio that he guides out of the wood and presents to their parents (938-75). He identifies the Ludlow setting to which they now come as “holier ground,” a place he explicitly (939-43) identifies as one where the skills of a Comus would be hard-pressed to succeed.¹¹ Now, the ideal fulfillment of the Earl's royal office was of course the nearest earthly approximation of divine order. Many centuries had seen the throne in that way. Or, using the point of view we have been adopting here, it combined the virtue and goodness, justice and mercy, of God, with the practical working out of those qualities on the earthly plane. Milton's artistry thus links the compliment to Lawes and the quite necessary bow to the Earl. Both men are finally joined in the virtue-skill context. The Lord President of Wales might not expect to run into a Comus or other supernatural destroyer of natural order. He would nevertheless, by the quality of his rule, provide the skills that help the virtuous. And they are skills that have been suggested in the figures of the Attendant Spirit and his masquing extension, Sabrina. We need to recall the opening speech of the Attendant Spirit, especially its references (18-36) to the new government in terms of universal law and power. In addition, we must remember how that body of belief was joined to the journey of the children and the mission of the Attendant Spirit himself (36-42). In this way we shall feel the point all the more strongly. We shall hopefully experience something of what the earliest viewers and readers of Comus were able to sense in Milton's organic, expansive masquing compliment.

Whatever else it may be felt to accomplish, the Attendant Spirit's epilogue (976-1023) is the final teaching opportunity for Lawes and the last chance for the poet to offer him a compliment. The latter, a demanding pressure from the genre itself, ends and perfects the song of virtue and skill. It is, I think, precisely Milton's extraordinary barrage of natural imagery here that helps us to sense the final unfolding of his gesture to Lawes. And the gesture simultaneously crystallizes the lesson of which it is a part. Finally, these closing evocations of virtue and skill touch upon the new Lord President as well. For one thing, they follow immediately after the introduction of governmental dimensions of which I have spoken. For another, his ordered government and virtuous strength would naturally seem linked to the heavenly realms to which the Attendant Spirit now declares he is returning.

The Attendant Spirit makes clear at once that this ideal level of existence permits free and easy movement in both classical natural loveliness (981-96) and in the warm coloration of British landscape (1013-18). Indeed, his powers are part of the harmonious working of natural beauty. That loveliness, rightly understood and used, is part of goodness (heaven) itself, a union that could not have been part of Comus' libertine understandings. Milton now again turns to water, fertility, and enveloping fragrances. They had been presented as part of Comus' universe of corrupt perceptions. Then, they had been shown to be essentially good by being associated with Sabrina (923-37). Now, with climactic joy, they glow about the Attendant Spirit, who mentions the Venus-Adonis and Cupid-Psyche myths (998-1011). However many other meanings this material may have for the reader, I think it offers a kind of mythological proof of what the Attendant Spirit has been trying to teach all along. The lines concern the need that the virtuous may have for superior kinds of aid when they are faced with extraordinary troubles. These mythological figures, too, have physical griefs requiring intervention by those entitled to correct the interruptions of natural law. To understand this, I believe we must see how Milton presents both Adonis and Psyche as being on the mend. Adonis is, after all, “waxing well” (1000). Similarly, Psyche can, through divine help, look forward to a brighter future (1007-11), with her and Cupid's “blissful twins,” Youth and Joy, lending exactly the right coloration at this point. Here, the jubilant result of heavenly aid, as it is given to virtuous mortals, is made one with the extraordinary results produced by an extraordinary teacher. In the process, both become part of the demands of the genre and the happiness of the occasion.

In keeping with his principal meanings, Milton has the Attendant Spirit point, of course, to virtue as the greatest teacher in spiritual matters. But the frame of reference is significant for us. With his last breath in the masque, he is dealing with the process as well as the subject matter. He indicates the need for the master to intercede when the going becomes particularly hard. The difficulty may arise because in the nature of the situation no human could do well on all levels, or else because students cannot rightly be expected to do as well as their teachers. The dual possibility is part of the evening's pleasure. That Milton and his age saw such an approach to divinity in the powers of music, the art of Lawes, is an old story. That this body of belief helped to shape the second of the poet's masques is a concept having its own powers to refine our perceptions of the work.

Notes

1. Although my own study is not directed to these matters, one of these previous treatments should be mentioned. Even though one may not agree with all its assertions, it may be said to have been seminal in Comus criticism and to have made Milton's masque perceivable in some of its original terms. The greatness of the study is thus indispensable in one's preparation for dealing with the poem: certainly it has been so in my own. I refer to A. S. P. Woodhouse's “The Argument of Milton's Comus,” University of Toronto Quarterly, XI (1941), 46-71. I share generations of readers' rejection of the awkward A Mask as the title for Milton's drama. Throughout my discussion, I shall use the more familiar, if less authentic, designation.

2. The traditions are so widespread in the period that they seem to be part of the very fabric of the age. In particular, however, see Harris Fletcher's illuminating account of the vital importance of Quintilian, who, in Milton's elementary and university training, offered the strongest emphasis on the combination of skill and virtue needed in the ideal orator-teacher: The Intellectual Development of John Milton, I (Urbana, 1956), pp. 113-14; II (1961), pp. 205-06. The tradition is that which Quintilian himself had absorbed, that of the vir bonus dicendi peritus. With respect to the feelings of Milton's age concerning man's propensity for looking into things beyond his rightful place in the universal scheme, see Howard Schultz, Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York, 1955), esp. pp. 43-47, which places stress on the linking of such probings to witchcraft—a connection of special importance in dealing with the deeds of Circe's son.

3. Rosemond Tuve's study of Comus is constantly helpful and corrective in its insistence that we must read the poem in the light of the genre to which its creator assigned it: see Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 112-61. There are also interesting suggestions in C. L. Barber's “A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle: The Masque as a Masque” in The Lyric and Dramatic Milton, ed. Joseph H. Summers (New York, 1965), pp. 35-63.

4. As part of his rather inclusive rejections of Milton's poem, Don Cameron Allen is particularly bothered by its intellectual content, finding it in conflict with other aspects of the work. This is a view, of course, quite different from my own. See “Milton's Comus as a Failure in Artistic Compromise,” ELH, XVI (1949), 104-19.

5. My references to the text of Comus are from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957). In my opinion, the differences between the 1634 version and the printed text are not great enough to affect my assertions concerning the unfolding of the masque at Ludlow. They therefore also permit us to consider the early viewers and readers together as a body of original perception and reaction.

6. Note may here be taken of the possibility that Milton intended Comus' perversion of dancing, part of the antimasque provided by him and his transformed victims, to be antiphonally corrected by the more traditional, ordered associations figured forth in the good music of Lawes as the Attendant Spirit and Thyrsis.

7. There were many classical and Renaissance precedents for Milton's devotion to the practical as the end of education, and for the precept that the good teacher must allow his charges to learn through experience—considerations that figure in the shaping of the Attendant Spirit's efforts. But perhaps Milton's own Of Education is the best commentary on the direct pedagogical relationship between the Attendant Spirit and the boys at this juncture.

8. For an example of this reaction to the Lady, see Allen, “Milton's Comus,” p. 116.

9. As an example of views that see Sabrina as quite separated from the Attendant Spirit in symbolic function, see Richard Neuse, “Metamorphosis and Symbolic Action in Comus,” ELH, XXXIV (1967), 54-57.

10. The classic and indispensable account of the matter remains that found in Merritt Y. Hughes, “Spenser's Acrasia and the Circe of the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas, IV (1943), 381-99.

11. The final setting of the masque receives perceptive and suggestive treatment in Woodhouse's discussion of the three environments Milton provides for his characters. See his “Comus Once More,” University of Toronto Quarterly, XIX (1950), 218-23.