MILTON AND SALMASIUS.--BLINDNESS.
The mystery which long surrounded the authorship of _Eikon Basilike_
lends a literary interest to Milton's share in that controversy,
which does not belong to his next appearance in print. Besides, his
pamphlets against Salmasius and Morus are written in Latin, and to
the general reader in this country and in America inaccessible in
consequence. In Milton's day it was otherwise; the widest circle of
readers could only be reached through Latin. For this reason, when
Charles II. wanted a public vindication of his father's memory, it was
indispensable that it should be composed in that language. The _Eikon_
was accordingly turned into Latin, by one of the royal chaplains,
Earle, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. But this was not enough; a
defence in form was necessary, an _Apologia Socratis_, such as Plato
composed for his master after his death. It must not only be written
in Latin, but in such Latin as to ensure its being read.
In 1649 Charles II. was living at the Hague, and it so happened that
the man, who was in the highest repute in all Europe as a Latinist,
was professor at the neighbouring university of Leyden. Salmasius
(Claude de Saumaise) was commissioned to prepare a manifesto, which
should be at once a vindication of Charles's memory, and an indictment
against the regicide government. Salmasius was a man of enormous
reading and no judgment. He says of himself that he wrote Latin more
easily than his mother-tongue (French). And his Latin was all the
more readable because it was not classical or idiomatic. With all his
reading--and Isaac Casaubon had said of him when in his teens that he
had incredible erudition--he was still, at sixty, quite unacquainted
with public affairs, and had neither the politician's tact necessary
to draw a state paper as Clarendon would have drawn it, nor the
literary tact which had enabled Erasmus to command the ear of the
public. Salmasius undertook his task as a professional advocate,
though without pay, and Milton accepted the duty of replying as
advocate for the Parliament, also without reward; he was fighting for
a cause which was not another's but his own.
Salmasius' _Defensio regia_--that was the title of his book--reached
this country before the end of 1649. The Council of State, in very
unnecessary alarm, issued a prohibition. On 8th January, 1650, the
Council ordered "that Mr. Milton do prepare something in answer to the
book of Salmasius." Early in March, 1651, Milton's answer, entitled
_Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio_, was out.
Milton was as much above Salmasius in mental power as he was inferior
to him in extent of book knowledge. But the conditions of retort which
he had chosen to accept neutralised this superiority. His greater
power was spent in a greater force of invective. Instead of setting
out the case of the Parliament in all the strength of which it was
capable, Milton is intent upon tripping up Salmasius, contradicting
him, and making him odious or ridiculous. He called his book a
_Defence of the People of England_; but when he should have been
justifying his clients from the charges of rebellion and regicide
before the bar of Europe, Milton is bending all his invention upon
personalities. He exaggerates the foibles of Salmasius, his vanity,
and the vanity of Madame de Saumaise, her ascendancy over her husband,
his narrow pedantry, his ignorance of everything but grammar and
words. He exhausts the Latin vocabulary of abuse to pile up every
epithet of contumely and execration on the head of his adversary. It
but amounts to calling Salmasius fool and knave through a couple of
hundred pages, till the exaggeration of the style defeats the orator's
purpose, and we end by regarding the whole, not as a serious pleading,
but as an epideictic display. Hobbes said truly that the two books
were "like two declamations, for and against, made by one and the same
man as a rhetorical exercise" (_Behemoth_).
Milton's _Defensio_ was not calculated to advance the cause of the
Parliament, and there is no evidence that it produced any effect upon
the public, beyond that of raising Milton's personal credit. That
England, and Puritan England, where humane studies were swamped in a
biblical brawl, should produce a man who could write Latin as well
as Salmasius, was a great surprise to the learned world in Holland.
Salmasius was unpopular at Leyden, and there was therefore a
predisposition to regard Milton's book with favour. Salmasius was
twenty years older than Milton, and in these literary digladiations
readers are always ready to side with a new writer. The contending
interests of the two great English parties, the wider issue between
republic and absolutism, the speculative inquiry into the right of
resistance, were lost sight of by the spectators of this literary
duel. The only question was whether Salmasius could beat the new
champion, or the new man beat Salmasius, at a match of vituperation.
Salmasius of course put in a rejoinder. His rapid pen found no
difficulty in turning off 300 pages of fluent Latin. It was his
last occupation. He died at Spa, where he was taking the waters, in
September, 1653, and his reply was not published till 1660, after the
Restoration, when all interest had died out of the controversy. If it
be true that the work was written at Spa, without books at hand, it
is certainly a miraculous effort of memory. It does no credit to
Salmasius. He had raked together, after the example of Scioppius
against Scaliger, all the tittle-tattle which the English exiles had
to retail about Milton and his antecedents. Bramhall, who bore Milton
a special grudge, was the channel of some of this scandal, and
Bramhall's source was possibly Chappell, the tutor with whom Milton
had had the early misunderstanding. (See above p. 6). If any one
thinks that classical studies of themselves cultivate the taste and
the sentiments, let him look into Salmasius's _Responsio_. There he
will see the first scholar of his age not thinking it unbecoming to
taunt Milton with his blindness, in such language as this: "a puppy,
once my pretty little man, now blear-eyed, or rather a blindling;
having never had any mental vision, he has now lost his bodily sight;
a silly coxcomb, fancying himself a beauty; an unclean beast, with
nothing more human about him than his guttering eyelids; the fittest
doom for him would be to hang him on the highest gallows, and set his
head on the Tower of London." These are some of the incivilities, not
by any means the most revolting, but such as I dare reproduce, of this
literary warfare.
Salmasius's taunt about Milton's venal pen is no less false than his
other gibes. The places of those who served the Commonwealth, were
places of "hard work and short rations." Milton never received for his
_Defensio_ a sixpence beyond his official salary. It has indeed been
asserted that he was paid 1000 l.. for it by order of Parliament,
and this falsehood having been adopted by Johnson--himself a
pensioner--has passed into all the biographies, and will no doubt
continue to be repeated to the end of time. This is a just nemesis
upon Milton, who on his part had twitted Salmasius with having been
complimented by the exiled King with a purse of 100 Jacobuses for his
performance. The one insinuation was as false as the other. Charles
II. was too poor to offer more than thanks. Milton was too proud to
receive for defending his country what the Parliament was willing to
pay. Sir Peter Wentworth, of Lillingston Lovell, in Oxfordshire, left
in his will 100 l. to Milton for his book against Salmasius. But this
was long after the Restoration, and Milton did not live to receive the
legacy.
Instead of receiving an honorarium for his _Defence of the English
People_, Milton had paid for it a sacrifice for which money could not
compensate him. His eyesight, though quick, as he was a proficient
with the rapier, had never been strong. His constant headaches, his
late study, and (thinks Phillips) his perpetual tampering with physic
to preserve his sight, concurred to bring the calamity upon him. It
had been steadily coming on for a dozen years before, and about 1650
the sight of the left eye was gone. He was warned by his doctor that
if he persisted in using the remaining eye for book-work, he would
lose that too. "The choice lay before me," Milton writes in the
_Second Defence_, "between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of
eyesight; in such a case I could not listen to the physician, not if
Aesculapius himself had spoken from his sanctuary; I could not but
obey that inward monitor, I know not what, that spake to me from
heaven. I considered with myself that many had purchased less good
with worse ill, as they who give their lives to reap only glory, and I
thereupon concluded to employ the little remaining eyesight I was to
enjoy in doing this, the greatest service to the common weal it was in
my power to render."
It was about the early part of the year 1652 that the calamity was
consummated. At the age of forty-three he was in total darkness.
The deprivation of sight, one of the severest afflictions of which
humanity is capable, falls more heavily on the man whose occupation
lies among books, than upon others. He who has most to lose, loses
most. To most persons books are but an amusement, an interlude between
the hours of serious occupation. The scholar is he who has found the
key to knowledge, and knows his way about in the world of printed
books. To find this key, to learn the map of this country, requires a
long apprenticeship. This is a point few men can hope to reach much
before the age of forty. Milton had attained it only to find fruition
snatched from him. He had barely time to spell one line in the book of
wisdom, before, like the wizard's volume in romance, it was hopelessly
closed against him for ever. Any human being is shut out by loss
of sight from accustomed pleasures, the scholar is shut out from
knowledge. Shut out at forty-three, when his great work was not even
begun! He consoles himself with the fancy that in his pamphlet, the
_Defensio_, he had done a great work (_quanta maxima quivi_) for
his country. This poor delusion helped him doubtless to support his
calamity. He could not foresee that, in less than ten years, the great
work would he totally annihilated, his pamphlet would he merged in the
obsolete mass of civil war tracts, and the _Defensio_, on which he had
expended his last year of eyesight, only mentioned because it had been
written by the author of _Paradise Lost_.
The nature of Milton's disease is not ascertainable from the account
he has given of it. In the well-known passage of _Paradise Lost_,
iii. 25, he hesitates between amaurosis (drop serene) and cataract
(suffusion)
So thick a drop serene hath quench'd their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veil'd.
A medical friend referred to by Professor Alfred Stern, tells him that
some of the symptoms are more like glaucoma. Milton himself has left
such an account as a patient ignorant of the anatomy of the organ
could give. It throws no light on the nature of the malady. But it is
characteristic of Milton that even his affliction does not destroy his
solicitude about his personal appearance. The taunts of his enemies
about "the lack-lustre eye, guttering with prevalent rheum" did not
pass unfelt. In his _Second Defence_ Milton informs the world that his
eyes "are externally uninjured. They shine with an unclouded light,
just like the eyes of one whose vision is perfect. This is the only
point in which I am, against my will, a hypocrite." The vindication
appears again in Sonnet xix. "These eyes, though clear To outward view
of blemish or of spot." In later years, when the exordium of Book
iii. of _Paradise Lost_ was composed, in the pathetic story of
his blindness, this little touch of vanity has disappeared, as
incompatible with the solemn dignity of the occasion.