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'Tis chastity, my brother, chastity:

She that has that, is clad in complete steel,
And like a quiver'd nymph with arrows keen
May trace huge forests, and unharbour'd heaths,
Infamous hills, and sandy perilous wilds,
Where, through the sacred rays of chastity,
No savage fierce, bandit, or mountaineer
Will dare to soil her virgin purity;

Yea, there where very desolation dwells,

By grots, and caverns shagg'd with horrid shades,
She may pass on with unblench'd majesty,
Be it not done in pride, or in presumption.
Some say no evil thing that walks by night,
In fog, or fire, by lake, or moorish fen,
Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost,
That breaks his magic chains at curfew time,
No goblin, or swart faery of the mine,

Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity.25

Curious as this passage is, the following, woven round a few sentences of Plato's Phado, is more important still, as showing the beginnings of some of Milton's later and most original conceptions:

So dear to heav'n is saintly chastity,

That when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried angels lacky her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream, and solemn vision,
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till oft converse with heav'nly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on th' outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,

And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal: but when lust,
By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk,
But most by lewd and lavish act of sin,
Lets in defilement to the inward parts,
The soul grows clotted by contagion,

25 Comus, ll. 420-37.

Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose
The divine property of her first being.
Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp
Oft seen in charnel vaults, and sepulchres,
Ling'ring and sitting by a new-made grave,
As loath to leave the body that it loved,
And linked itself by carnal sensualty
To a degenerate and degraded state.20

As yet the poet is only playing with Platonic conceptions. But here is the idea that in certain circumstances the body becomes soul,

And turns by degrees to the soul's essence,

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What is here an exception in favor of chastity will become later, in the poet's mind, the normal rule: body and spirit will become one, will all become immortal; all distinction between them will disappear. Here already the essential distinction is weakened: the body can become spirit through chastity; the soul materializes itself through lust. No impassable barrier separates the two orders. It is typical of Milton's mind and temperament that it is through meditation on sensual desire that he comes to the conception of the fundamental unity between body and soul, no doubt because of the intensity of desire he felt in himself, possessing him. We shall see how the passionate introspection which followed his unhappy marriage made the idea grow in him, and how one of the most important conceptions of his philosophy thus came inevitably from his temperament.

But this high appreciation of chastity was to remain with him to the end. The fall, in a certain sense, was always to be lust, "the deed of darkness." Only, when 26 Ibid., 11. 453-75.

Milton ceased to believe in a separate soul, the body became sacred, and its instincts also. His hymn to chastity became a hymn to wedded love, and the horror and degradation of sensuality came to attach only to illegitimate love.27

Milton's personal experience thus worked upon his early conceptions, but the philosophical working of his mind molded these first materials, which were only halfpoetical fancies, in harmony with the poet's character. In Lycidas, in Comus, can be found already the essential principle of Milton's ethics:

To triumph in victorious dance

O'er sensual Folly, and Intemperance.28

Such is the lesson of Comus: the triumph of reason over passion, the inner freedom of man, secured by virtue:

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The chief passion to be conquered is sensuality, in Comus as later in Paradise Lost. The theme of Comus is no artificial choice; it corresponds to one of the deepest needs in the poet: the need to triumph over sensuality, which in itself implies sensuality. These two feelings, passion and the desire to conquer it, produced in the end two of the most important ideas of Milton's philosophy: first, the legitimacy of passion, since Milton felt it in himself, normal and powerful; then the necessity of keeping harmony between passion and reason, for passion is only legitimate when its ends are approved by the intellect. Thus we find in Comus the germs of Milton's conception of good. One phrase in the invective in Lycidas gives us similarly the aptest expression of his conception of evil. 27 See below, pp. 155-59. 28 Comus, 11. 974-75. 29 Ibid., 1. 1019.

Never did Milton express more powerfully what evil was for him than in the celebrated words "blind mouths": 99. 30 "blind," that is to say, without intelligence; "mouths," that is to say, full of avidity; men whose passions only live in them, and whose reason is blind. For it is the domination of passion in man that is the evil and creates slaves as well as tyrants.

source of all

These ideas were elaborated and systematized during the passionate struggles from 1641 to 1658, under the Long Parliament and Commonwealth; they were applied to politics and to theology, and became the center of an explanation of the Cosmos. But they existed from 1637 onwards, growing unavoidably from the deeper strata of Milton's character, amid the interplay of his fundamental tendencies- a passionate sensibility and pride of intellect.

When Milton returned from Italy, in August, 1639, he was ready to face the problems of public life. All his powers were about to be tested in furious action, in real experience-tested and broken. In his trials and failures, the Miltonic conception of life was definitely molded.

80 Line 119.

CHAPTER II

THE MAN OF ACTION AND OF PASSION

T

I. MILTON, MAN OF ACTION

HE religious situation in England had called Milton back from his travels. Two great parties divided the country.

The Puritan party had been gradually developing since the time of Elizabeth. At the Reformation, the Bible had spread through all classes, and a new culture had thus been acquired by part of the English people. Englishmen had learned that all men were equals before God and that every man had a right to think for himself, with the sole help of the Holy Word. They had acquired a passion for discussing religious questions, and a horror of the Roman Catholic Church, which was to them as the bondage of Egypt, from which they had just escaped. Their external appearance had hardened, but their inner life had grown tenfold. Family life had become dearer to them than before, and had taken on a sacred character: the head of the family was a priest who read and explained the Book. The expression "holy wedlock" came to have a real meaning. The great Puritan ideal was the domination of the soul over the flesh, the mastery of one's self, and, in public life, Justice inexorable.

Such were the best among the Puritans, and many of their traits are in Milton. But in inferior minds, and largely among the masses that came, more or less, to the

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