by C. S. Lewis
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),2 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 spirits3 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.
ADDITIONAL EDITORIAL NOTES
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page 5, line 12. George Herbert, The Elixir, 9–12.
page 7, line 23. By John Skelton.
page 10, line 28. By Thomas Dekker.
page 12, line 28. An Old High German lay sometimes spelt Hildebrandslied or Hildebrand.
page 21, line 17. Lewis’s fullest and most interesting discussion of the Jungian archetypes is found in his essay ‘Psycho-analysis and Literary Criticism’, Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXVII (1942), pp. 7–21.
page 28, n. 6. Laʒamon’s Brut is extant in two manuscripts, Cotton Caligula A ix and Cotton Otho C xiii, both of which are printed in Madden’s edition. Lewis is following Cotton Caligula A ix and writes two half-lines as one. Lewis, obviously, wanted the text to be as readable as possible and, besides departing from a few scribal conventions (such as expanding the contractions), supplies his own punctuation of the text. Because of this, I have followed the present-day usage of beginning each new sentence with a capital letter.
page 44, line 3. This word added by Lewis.
page 44, line 19. Lewis is here correcting Madden’s edition, which reads al se cunes.
page 47, n. 42. Wilson’s edition contains three separate texts of Sawles Warde, MSS Bodley 34, Royal and Cotton. Lewis’s references are to MS Bodley 34. Printed in this same volume are the corresponding chapters (XIII, XIV, XV) of Hugo of St Victor’s De Anima. The entire De Anima is found in Migne’s Patrologia Latina (1854), vol. 177.
page 55, line 17. Laʒamon, 15774–9 (Madden’s edition).
page 56, line 18. Guillaume Deguileville, Pèlerinage de l’Homme. In Lydgate’s trans. (E.E.T.S., Extra Series LXXVII, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 1899), 3415 seq.
page 56, line 30. De Gen. Animalium, 778a; Polit. 1255b.
page 62, line 1. Metaphysics, 1072b; cf. Paradiso, XXVIII, 41–2.
page 62, line 28. Giacomo Leopardi, ‘L’Infinito’, Canti, ed. Giuseppe de Robertis (Firenze, 1960), p. 124, l. 15.
page 65, line 15. Il Penseroso, 69–70.
page 67, line 19. Metaphysics, 1072b.
page 69, line 3. ‘The silence of those eternal spaces frightens me’ is a translation of Pascal’s pensée: ‘Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie’: Brunschvicg No. 206 (II, p. 127).
The indirect quotation, ‘that though we are small and transitory as dew-drops, still we are dew-drops that can think’, does, I feel, require a comment. Lewis has confused (or is it an inspired misreading?) Pascal’s original roseau (reed) with rosée (dew). Although Pascal really compares man to a reed, I feel that I should preserve what Lewis wrote. This is because his image of the ‘dew-drop’ strikes me as th
e superior image, and it quite obviously serves his purpose best. The complete text of the pensée to which he is referring is: ‘L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c’est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l’univers entier s’arme pour l’écraser: une vapeur, une goutte d’eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mais, quand l’univers l’écraserait, l’homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu’il sait qu’il meurt, et l’avantage que l’univers a sur lui; l’univers n’en sait rien. Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée. C’est de là qu’il faut nous relever et non de l’espace et de la durée, que nous ne saurions remplir. Travaillons donc à bien penser: voilà le principe de la morale’: Brunschvicg No. 347 (II, pp. 261–3).
page 70, line 13. Comus, 976–8.
page 74, line 9. Cf. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford, 1943), chapter III, p. 52, especially: ‘The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.’
page 75, line 28. The Extasie, 57–8.
page 76, line 15. Sancti Dionysii . . . opera omnia . . . studio Petri Lanselli . . . Lutetiae Parisiorum (MDCXV).
page 81, line 2. De Caelo, 279a.
page 86, line 8. William Kinglake, ‘The Troad’, Eōthen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (London, 1844), p. 58.
page 88, line 28. ‘Milton’, The Edinburgh Review, XLII (August 1825), p. 316.
page 93, line 26. ‘Light’, Symbolism and Belief (London, 1938), pp. 125–50.
page 101, line 17. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells us (Cambridge, 1935).
page 110, line 19. Lewis was quoting from memory. Patmore says in The Wedding Sermon, X, 87–9:
Spirit is heavy nature’s wing,
And is not rightly anything
Without its burthen, etc.
page 115, line 12. The Faerie Queene, I, i, 6.
page 137, line 19. Lewis wrote an article on Sir Ector’s lament in which he says ‘The ideal embodied in Launcelot is “escapism” in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable’. ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, XXI (17 August 1940), p. 841.
page 141, line 16. Paradise Regained, II, 359–60.
page 142, line 6. For Lewis’s own criticism of Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars, see Arthurian Torso: Containing the Posthumous Fragment of ‘The Figure of Arthur’ by Charles Williams and a Commentary on the Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams by C. S. Lewis (1948); see also Lewis’s reviews of Taliessin through Logres in Theology, XXXVIII (April 1939), pp. 268–76, and The Oxford Magazine, LXIV (14 March 1946), pp. 248–50.
page 145, line 8. See also Lewis’s essay on ‘The English Prose Morte’ in Essays on Malory, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford, 1963), pp. 7–28. In this essay Lewis expands some of the paradoxes—touched on in ‘The Morte Darthur’ of this volume—which, as he says, ‘have been thrown up by the remarkable discoveries made in the last fifty years about Malory and the book (or books) which he translated, with modifications, from the French and which Caxton printed in 1485’. ‘The English Prose Morte’ is followed, in the same volume, by ‘On Art and Nature: A letter to C. S. Lewis’ by Professor Vinaver.
page 147, line 7. Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913), p. 168.
page 147, line 8. In A Preface, or rather a Brief Apologie of Poetrie prefixed to the translation of Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591).
page 149, line 3. Sir William Davenant in his preface to Gondibert (1650).
page 149, line 19. All the quotations from Thomas Rymer come from his preface to the translation of R. Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie (1674).
page 149, line 23. In his dedication to King Arthur: or, the British Worthy. A dramatick Opera (1691), Dryden speaks of ‘that Fairy kind of writing, which depends only upon the Force of Imagination’. It may be that Addison is misquoting Dryden when, in The Spectator (1 July 1712), no. 419, he says ‘This Mr Dryden calls the Fairy Way of Writing’.
page 151, line 7. Vernon Lee (pseudonym for Violet Paget), ‘The School of Boiardo’, Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance, 11 (London, 1884), p. 113.
page 152, line 19. Professor J. R. R. Tolkien’s Andrew Lang Lecture was delivered at St Andrews in 1940. It was expanded and published under the title ‘On Fairy-Stories’ in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford, 1947). Lewis is thinking of a passage in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ in which Professor Tolkien says (p. 79): ‘It is part of the essential malady of such days—producing the desire to escape, not indeed from life, but from our present time and self-made misery—that we are acutely conscious both of the ugliness of our works, and of their evil. So that to us evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied. We find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together. The fear of the beautiful fay that ran through the elder ages almost eludes our grasp. Even more alarming: goodness is itself bereft of its proper beauty. In Faerie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle hideous as a nightmare (for the evil of the ogre wills it so), but one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose—an inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king—that is yet sickeningly ugly. At the present day it would be rash to hope to see one that was not—unless it was built before our time.’
page 153, line 20. Gerusalemme Liberata, XVI, ix, 7–8.
page 155, line 7. ‘Milton and Poussin’, Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford, 1938), p. 195.
page 156, line 5. Paradise Lost, I, 16.
page 156, line 7. Orlando Furioso, I, ii, 2.
page 200, line 29. Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘Spenser’s Garden of Adonis’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, XLVII (1932), pp. 46–80.
page 218, line 23. For Lewis’s other studies in Spenser see: ‘Spenser’s Irish Experiences and The Faerie Queene’, The Review of English Studies, VII (Jan. 1931), pp. 83–5; chapter VII, ‘The Faerie Queene’, in The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), pp. 297–360; Book III, chapter I, ‘Sidney and Spenser’, in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama, The Completion of ‘The Clark Lectures’, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1944 (The Oxford History of English Literature, vol. III; Oxford, 1954), pp. 318–93.
page 222, line 15. Thomas Warton, Observations on the ‘Faerie Queene’ of Spenser (London, 1754), section III, pp. 57–60.
page 227, line 3. After comparing Lewis’s quotations from William Aldis Wright’s facsimile of the Trinity MS, I have needed to correct a number of scribal errors which appeared in the original issue of this essay.
page 235, n. 3. Cf. C. S. Lewis, ‘Above the Smoke and Stir’, The Times Literary Supplement (14 July 1
945), p. 331; B. A. Wright, ibid. (4 August 1945), p. 367; C. S. Lewis, ibid. (29 September 1945), p. 463; B. A. Wright, ibid. (27 October 1945), p. 511.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS (1898-1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over one hundred million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures.
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Books by C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition
The Screwtape Letters "(with "Screwtape Proposes a Toast")"
The Great Divorce
The Problem of Pain
Miracles
A Grief Observed
The Abolition of Man
The Weight of Glory
George MacDonald: An Anthology
Pilgrim's Regress