Chapter 14 - A Note on Comus
The history of Comus may be briefly recapitulated as follows. It was written out by Milton—possibly without a previous rough copy—in the book known to us as the Trinity MS, some time before Michaelmas night 1634. This version may be conveniently called Trinity α. From Trinity a copy was made, probably by Henry Lawes, still before Michaelmas night 1634. The copying was not very accurately carried out, as the new MS contains fifteen blunders. Some of these show misunderstanding of the text; thus, in 12 (Yet som there be that by due steps aspire), where Lawes reads with due steps, it seems probable that he took steps to mean ‘paces’ or ‘strides’, where Milton was thinking of degrees in a stair or rungs in a ladder (cf. P.L. VIII, 591). Other errors affect the metre, as, for example, the unfortunate enthroned (for enthron’d) in 11, which has penetrated into too many modern editions. From both these considerations it would appear that the copy—which we call the Bridgewater MS—was made without any careful supervision by the poet. Besides its errors, Bridgewater presents many variations which are intentional: these have long since been explained, and no doubt rightly, as a ‘producer’s’ surgery—the familiar process by which a great poem is whittled into an ‘acting version’. The production took place on Michaelmas night 1634: and the first edition appeared in 1637. Before 1637, however, Milton went over his old MS (Trinity α) and introduced several new readings, thus producing Trinity β. The intermediate position of Bridgewater between Trinity α and Trinity β can easily be shown by the many passages in which Bridgewater preserves a reading, still visible in Trinity, but now erased or marginally corrected. Thus, in 349 Trinity gives lone dungeon with lone altered in favour of sad, which in its turn gives way to close; Bridgewater reads lone. In 384 Trinity originally read:
walks in black vapours, though the noontyde brand
blaze in the summer solstice.
This is then erased, and in the left-hand margin Milton substitutes
benighted walks under ye midday sun
himselfe is his owne dungeon.
Bridgewater preserves the older reading. There are fifteen examples of the same state of affairs; so that in 242, where the words preceding to all heav’ns harmonies are (to me) illegibly erased, we can confidently restore them from Bridgewater’s and hold a counterpointe. The edition of 1637, besides several errors (ll. 20, 73, 131, 417, 443), introduces important novelties. But though Milton did not trouble to copy these novelties into his old, and now very ‘un-fair’, Trinity MS, he kept this MS by him, and made certain further alterations in it after he had sent to the press the new version made for the edition of 1637. Thus, in 214, the old Trinity reading, thou flittering angel, is marginally altered to read hovering; but this alteration was made after the edition of 1637, which preserves flittering. The same phenomenon occurs in 956, where the change from are to grow appears marginally in Trinity, but not in 1637. Thus, in addition to Trinity α and β, we have a third stratum in the MS—Trinity γ, represented by two corrections only. In 1645 Comus was again printed in the Poems both English and Latin. The period of serious alterations is now over, but some novelties appear. In 1673 the mask appeared, practically unchanged, in the Poems upon Several Occasions.
In Comus, therefore, we can watch the growth of a poem through the stages:
Trinity α
Trinity β
1637
Trinity γ
1645.
I neglect Bridgewater, whose omissions and rearrangements tell us more of the poet’s patience than of his poethood. Confining myself to the remainder, I propose to draw attention to a certain general characteristic of the revision. It will be best to proceed inductively.
242. Trin. α. Bridg. and hold a counterpointe.
Trin. β. 1637. 1645. 1673. and give resounding grace.
Whether the change here is, or is not, from worse to better, it is certainly from the more striking and remarkable to the more ordinary. The rejected reading is more unexpected: it has that species of ‘originality’, that power of drawing attention to itself, which would attract a ‘metaphysical’, or a modern, poet. For the moment I will confine myself to reminding the reader that this is almost the one rejected reading in Trinity which Milton took the trouble to scratch out illegibly—one might almost say vindictively.
359 et seq. Trin. Bridg.
Peace brother peace
I doe not thinke my sister so to seeke etc.
1637. 1645. 1673.
Peace Brother, be not over-exquisite
To cast the fashion of uncertain evils;
For grant they be so, while they rest unknown,
What need a man forestall his date of grief,
And run to meet what he would most avoid?
Or if they be but false alarms of Fear,
How bitter is such self-delusion?
I do not think my sister so to seek, etc.
Here there can be no question that the alteration is undramatic. The passage on the self-sufficiency of virtue which follows is, in any case, a long and improbable suspension of action; but in Trinity and Bridgewater at least we hasten to it, and, if the main action is delayed, the temperamental conflict between the brothers is given some liveliness by the impatient repetition ‘peace brother peace’. In 1637 even this semblance of drama has disappeared; the Elder Brother lectures rather than argues. Milton is altering his poem so as to make it even less dramatic and more gnomic than it was before.
384. Trin. α. Bridg.
walks in black vapours, though the noontyde brand
blaze in the summer solstice
Trin. β. 1637. 1645. 1673.
Benighted walks under the mid-day Sun;
Himself is his own dungeon.
Both readings appear to me excellent, but with different kinds of excellence. Neither, of course, is a close copy of the speech of real men; but the earlier, with its natural syntax, and its more highly-coloured pictorial quality—which could be made to seem as if it grew while the brother spoke—might well be thrown off by a good actor with an appearance of realism. The second reading is, from the actor’s point of view, vastly inferior. The Latin syntax of ‘benighted walks’ removes it at once to a different plane. ‘Himself is his own dungeon’ is imaginative, but with the moral imagination; there is no picture in it to compare with the blaze of the solstice. Again, the contrast, which the earlier reading makes audible in a ‘though’-clause, is purely intellectual in the later. Milton is moving further from naturalism; exchanging a sweeter for a drier flavour; becoming (in one of the senses of that word) more classical.
409 et seq. Trin. α. Bridg.
secure wthout all doubt or question, no
I could be willing though now i’th darke to trie
a tough encounter wth the shaggiest ruffian
that lurks by hedge or lane of this dead circuit
to have her by my side, though I were sure
she might be free from perill where she is
but where an equall poise of hope & fear, etc.
1637. 1645. 1673.
Secure without all doubt, or controversie:
Yet where an equal poise of hope and fear, etc.
In this passage Trinity α itself is already the correction of a pre-α stage which read Beshrew me but I would instead of I could be willing, and passado instead of encounter. The two most racy, and least Miltonic, expressions, had therefore gone the way of counterpointe in 242, before Lawes made his copy: something of energy and facile ‘point’ had already been sacrificed to the unity of Milton’s style. What remained, however, was still good theatre; the boyish and noble actor, waving his little sword, with his colloquial i’th darke and his picturesque shaggy ruffians and dead circuits, all to be faced in defence of his sister, would to this day be snatched at by any producer anxious to ‘brighten up’ the dialogue at this point. But Milton, as is becoming apparent, did not desire, though he could provide, good theatre. He drops the whole passage. One concession to drama remained: an actor could still make something lively out of without all doubt or question—No! And Milton could have kept this consistently with the omission of the shaggy ruffians. But he did not; once again the final version, secure without all doubt, or controversy, gives the Elder Brother the purely didactic tone. Instead of the dramatic break we have the purely metrical break of a feminine ending.
605. Trin. Bridg. 1637.
monstrous buggs.
1645. 1673.
monstrous forms.
We must naturally remove from our minds the ludicrous associations which the earlier form has for a modern reader. These are the ‘bugs to frighten babes withal’ of Spenser. When this has been done, the passage falls into line with the general trend of the alterations. The more forcible, native word, the word that draws attention to itself, is erased in favour of the comparatively colourless loan word. Not so would Donne or D. H. Lawrence have chosen.
608. Trin. Bridg. 1637.
by the curls & cleave his scalpe
downe to the hips
1645. 1673.
by the curls, to a foul death,
Curs’d as his life.
There is no question which reading has the more ‘punch’ in it. Both are full of energy; but the one is physical energy, demonstrable by the actor, the other is moral. Again Milton moves away from the theatre.
779 et seq. In this passage, which is too long to quote in full, the whole of the Lady’s exposition of the sage and serious doctrine of virginity appears for the first time in 1637, with a consequent addition to Comus’s reply. The original version read
cramms & blasphems his feeder. Co. Come no more
This constitutes the most important single addition made in the composition of Comus, and it is one without which the tone of the mask would be different. Characteristically, it is an alteration not in the dramatic, but in the gnomic and ethical direction.
847. Trin. α. and often takes our cattell wth strange pinches
Ceteri omit.
The first version might have come out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It belongs to the fairy world of real popular superstition; it breathes a rusticity which has not been filtered through Theocritus and Virgil, and a supernatural which is homely—half comic, half feared—rather than romantic. But Milton has gone as near that world as he chooses to go, in the preceding lines; anything more would be out of the convention in which he is writing. He can just venture on the ‘urchin blasts’; ‘pinches’ oversteps the line drawn by literary decorum. He therefore cancels the verse.
975 et seq. The alterations in the concluding song are probably familiar to most readers and need not be dealt with in detail. It is enough to say that Trinity α and Bridgewater both lack what Trinity β gives; the contrast, beautifully emphasized by a change of metre (Celestial Cupid her fam’d son advanc’t), between terrestrial and celestial love. The new passage, addressed to ‘mortals’ only if their ‘ears be true’ (like its counterpart in the Apology for Smectymnuus), falls in naturally with the change at ll. 779 et seq. and sums up the increasing gravity of the work in its progress towards the final text. It throws light, moreover, on the famous excised passage which Trinity gives us in the prologue. It is true that a sensitive reader can find ample justification for that excision without looking beyond the prologue itself. In the present text we begin with six of the most impressive verses in English poetry; impressive because we pass in a single verse from the cold, tingling, almost unbreathable, region of the aerial spirits to the smoak and stirr of this dim spot. Each level, by itself, is a masterly representation: in their juxtaposition (‘Either other sweetly gracing’) they are irresistible. The intrusion of an intermediate realm, as serene as the air and as warmly inviting as the earth, ruins this effect and therefore justly perished. But its erasure becomes all the more necessary when the poet, with his Platonic stair of earthly and heavenly love, has found the real philosophical intermediary and, with it, the real use for his Hesperian imagery. Having found the true reconciliation he knows that it must come at the end; we must begin with the contrast. Nothing that blurs the distinction between the region of the Spirit and the region of Comus must be admitted until we have passed the ‘hard assays’; then, and not till then, the more delicious imagery, which had been mere decoration in the opening speech, may be resumed and called into significant life.
In tenui labor. It may seem rash, on the strength of a few alterations, and those minute ones, to speak of a general characteristic in Milton’s revision. Yet it is just on such apparent minutiae that the total effect of a poem depends; and that there is a common tendency in the alterations I have discussed, few readers will probably dispute. The tendency is one easier, no doubt, to feel than to define. The poet cuts away technical terms and colloquialisms; he will have nothing ebullient; he increases the gnomic element at the expense of the dramatic. In general, he subdues; and he does so in the interests of unity in tone. The process is one of conventionalization, in this sense only—that the poet, having determined on what plane of convention (at what distance from real life and violent emotion) he is to work, brings everything on to that plane; how many individual beauties he must thereby lose is to him a matter of indifference. As a result we have that dearly bought singleness of quality—
smooth and full as if one gush
Of life had washed it—
which sets Comus, for all its lack of human interest, in a place apart and unapproachable.
Whether Milton’s aim was a good one—whether he paid too high a price for it and sacrificed better things for its sake—these are questions that each will answer according to his philosophy. But if we blame Comus for its lack of dramatic quality, it is, at least, relevant to remember that Milton could have made it—nay, originally had made it—more lively than it is; that he laboured to produce the quality we condemn and knowingly jettisoned something of that whose absence we deplore. It is arguable that he chose wrongly; but the example of what may be called poetic chastity—an example ‘set the first in English’—deserves attention.