Page 11 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

an unnatural, fleshy, flamboyant-robed Lady. Prodicus’ Lady Virtue’s criticisms of vice are no different from Lady Chastity’s of Comus: vice seeks to be gratified instantly, to excite passions, to carouse by night and sleep by day. Non-heroic, ignoble, dubious and unworthy of praise, in a way, it reflects the Dionysian dithyramb.
Milton, in A Mask or Comus,13 juxtaposes Comus’ Dionysian spirit against Lady Virtue’s Apollonian one. Nietzsche, relentless philosopher, poet, musician and master of aphorisms, stresses in The Birth of Tragedy the contraposition and tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian will.14 To this contraposition, two series of oppositions are subordinated: light and darkness, dream and drunkenness, appearance and reality, resolution and irresolution, action and inaction. The second series is properly tragic. In fact, while the first one is manifested in the plastic arts in that it reveals the individual, beauty, the particular, the eternity of the phenomenon, reminiscent of Lady Chastity, the second is manifested in music, in the universal, in nature (in the Greek sense of the word, phusis), which,
13 Hughes, Merritt. Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Comus or A Mask. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1957. 86-114
14 Nietzsche affirms, based on Schopenhauer and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, that life and Grecian culture move between two artistic poles: the Apollonian (plastic arts) and Dionysian (music). In these arts, rupture and creative discord exists. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Edmund Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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