nterblast to the attack
of Prynne and the Puritans on all stage performances. But that only
strengthens the proof of Milton's own leaning to a grave and temperate
mode of life. Even when he writes a mask he will insist that it shall
be a thing of noble art and serious moral. He was no narrow-minded
fanatic and will write a piece for great ladies to perform when asked
by his accomplished friend Lawes: but he is already {120} the man who
was later to denounce "court amours, Mix'd dance and wanton masque";
and if he writes a mask himself it will be to take the old "high-flown
commonplace" of the magic power of chastity and give it an entirely new
seriousness and beauty. The notion of Mr. Newbolt that there were two
Miltons, one before and the other after the Civil War, and that the one
was "sincerely engaged on the side of liberal manners" while the other
was an ill-tempered enemy of civilization and the arts of life, is a
complete delusion. The "Lady of Christ's" who was unpopular on account
of his severe chastity, was already a strict Puritan of the only sort
he ever became; and the author of _Paradise Lost_, as all the evidence
shows, was no morbid sectary but a lover of learning and music and
society. Of course, no man goes unchanged through a great struggle
such as that to which Milton gave twenty years of life. There is a
development, or a difference, call it what you will, between the Dante
who wrote the _Vita Nuova_ and him who wrote the _Divina Commedia_.
That could not but be; a body that had gone into exile and a soul that
had visited hell must leave their traces on a man. But the essential
Dante remains one and the same all the while. And {121} so does
Milton. Nothing can be more certain than that the grave boy whose
gravity impressed all Cambridge, and had taken immortal shape in the
_Nativity Ode_ and the sonnet of the "great Taskmaster's eye" before he
was much past twenty, did not mean to hold up a drunken sensualist like
Comus as a model for youth. He was not an ascetic, then or later; and
he was writing a dramatic poem; and, of course, had no difficulty in
giving Comus a fine speech about the follies of total abstinence which,
indeed, he loved no better than other monkeries. The Lady, in reply,
as she is dramatically bound, over-exalts her "sage and serious
doctrine of Virginity" as Comus had overstated the case against it; but
what she praises is Temperance, not Abstinence. Her virginity is th