MILTON AND MORUS--THE SECOND DEFENCE--THE DEFENCE FOR HIMSELF.
Civil history is largely a history of wars between states, and
literary history is no less the record of quarrels in print between
jealous authors. Poets and artists, more susceptible than practical
men, seem to live a life of perpetual wrangle. The history of these
petty feuds is not healthy intellectual food, it is at best amusing
scandal. But these quarrels of authors do not degrade the authors in
our eyes, they only show them to be, what we knew, as vain, irritable,
and opinionative as other men. Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Voltaire,
Rousseau, belabour their enemies, and we see nothing incongruous in
their doing so. It is not so when the awful majesty of Milton descends
from the empyrean throne of contemplation to use the language of the
gutter or the fish-market. The bathos is unthinkable. The universal
intellect of Bacon shrank to the paltry pursuit of place. The
disproportion between the intellectual capaciousness and the moral
aim jars upon the sense of fitness, and the name of Bacon, "wisest,
meanest," has passed into a proverb. Milton's fall is far worse. It is
not here a union of grasp of mind with an ignoble ambition, but the
plunge of the moral nature itself from the highest heights to that
despicable region of vulgar scurrility and libel, which is below the
level of average gentility and education. The name of Milton is a
synonym for sublimity. He has endowed our language with the loftiest
and noblest poetry it possesses, and the same man is found employing
speech for the most unworthy purpose to which it can be put, that of
defaming and vilifying a personal enemy, and an enemy so mean that
barely to have been mentioned by Milton had been an honour to him. In
Salmasius, Milton had at least been measuring his Latin against the
Latin of the first classicist of the age. In Alexander Morus he
wreaked august periods of Roman eloquence upon a vagabond preacher, of
chance fortunes and tarnished reputation, a _graeculus esuriens_,
who appeared against Milton by the turn of accidents, and not as the
representative of the opposite principle. In crushing Morus, Milton
could not beguile himself with the idea that he was serving a cause.
In 1652 our country began to reap the fruits of the costly efforts it
had made to obtain good government. A central authority was at last
established, stronger than any which had existed since Elisabeth,
and one which extended over Scotland and Ireland, no less than over
England. The ecclesiastical and dynastic aims of the Stuart monarchy
had been replaced by a national policy, in which the interests of
the people of Great Britain sprang to the first place. The immediate
consequence of this union of vigour and patriotism, in the government,
was the self-assertion of England as a commercial, and therefore as a
naval power. This awakened spirit of conscious strength meant war with
the Dutch, who while England was pursuing ecclesiastical ends, had
possessed themselves of the trade of the world. War accordingly broke
out early in 1652. Even before it came to real fighting, the war of
pamphlets had recommenced. The prohibition of Salmasius' _Defensio
regia_ annulled itself as a matter of course, and Salmasius was free
to prepare a second _Defensio_ in answer to Milton. For the most
vulnerable point of the new English Commonwealth, was through the
odium excited on the continent against regicide. And the quarter
from which the monarchical pamphlets were hurled against the English
republic, was the press of the republic of the United Provinces,
the country which had set the first example of successful rebellion
against its lawful prince.
Before Salmasius' reply was ready, there was launched from the Hague,
in March, 1652, a virulent royalist piece in Latin, under the title of
_Regii sanguinis clamor ad coelum_ (Cry of the King's blood to Heaven
against the English parricides). Its 160 pages contained the
usual royalist invective in a rather common style of hyperbolical
declamation, such as that "in comparison of the execution of Charles
I., the guilt of the Jews in crucifying Christ was as nothing."
Exaggerated praises of Salmasius were followed by scurrilous and rabid
abuse of Milton. In the style of the most shameless Jesuit lampoon,
the _Amphitheatrum_ or the _Scaliger hypobolimaeus_, and with Jesuit
tactics, every odious crime is imputed to the object of the satire,
without regard to truth or probability. Exiles are proverbially
credulous, and it is likely enough that the gossip of the English
refugees at the Hague was much employed in improving or inventing
stories about the man, who had dared to answer the royalist champion
in Latin as good as his own. Salmasius in his _Defensio_ had employed
these stories, distorting the events of Milton's life to discredit
him. But for the author of the _Clamor_ there was no such excuse, for
the book was composed in England, by an author living in Oxford and
London, who had every opportunity for informing himself accurately of
the facts about Milton's life and conversation. He chose rather to
heap up at random the traditional vocabulary of defamation, which the
Catholic theologians had employed for some generations past, as their
best weapon against their adversaries. In these infamous productions,
hatched by celibate pedants in the foul atmosphere of the Jesuit
colleges, the gamut of charges always ranges from bad grammar to
unnatural crime. The only circumstance which can be alleged in
mitigation of the excesses of the _Regii sanguinis clamor_ is that
Milton had provoked the onfall by his own violence. He who throws dirt
must expect that dirt will be thrown back at him, and when it comes to
mud-throwing, the blackguard has, as it is right that he should have,
the best of it.
The author of the _Clamor_ was Peter Du Moulin, a son of the
celebrated French Calvinist preacher of the same name. The author not
daring to entrust his pamphlet to an English press, had sent it over
to Holland, where it was printed under the supervision of Alexander
Morus. This Morus (More or Moir) was of Scottish parentage, but born
(1616) at Castres, where his father was principal of the Protestant
college. Morus fitted the _Clamor_ with a preface, in which Milton was
further reviled, and styled a "monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens,
cui lumen ademtum." The secret of the authorship was strictly kept,
and Morus having been known to be concerned in the publication, was
soon transformed in public belief into the author. So it was reported
to Milton, and so Milton believed. He nursed his wrath, and took
two years to meditate his blow. He caused inquiries to be made into
Morus's antecedents. It happened that Morus's conduct had been wanting
in discretion, especially in his relations with women. He had been
equally imprudent in his utterances on some of the certainties of
Calvinistic divinity. It was easy to collect any amount of evidence
under both these heads. The system of kirk discipline offered a
ready-made machinery of espionage and delation. The standing jest of
the fifteenth century on the "governante" of the curé was replaced, in
Calvinistic countries, by the anxiety of every minister to detect his
brother minister in any intimacy upon which a scandalous construction
could be put.
Morus endeavoured, through every channel at his command, to convince
Milton that he was not the author of the _Clamor_. He could have saved
himself by revealing the real author, who was lurking all the while
close to Milton's elbow, and whose safety depended on Morus' silence.
This high-minded respect for another's secret is more to Morus'
honour, than any of the petty gossip about him is to his discredit.
He had nothing to offer, therefore, but negative assurances, and mere
denial weighed nothing with Milton, who was fully convinced that Morus
lied from terror. Milton's _Defensio Secunda_ came out in May, 1654.
In this piece (written in Latin) Morus is throughout assumed to be the
author of the _Clamor_, and as such is pursued through many pages in
a strain of invective, in which banter is mingled with ferocity. The
Hague tittle-tattle about Morus's love-affairs is set forth in the
pomp of Milton's loftiest Latin. Sonorous periods could hardly be more
disproportioned to their material content. To have kissed a girl is
painted as the blackest of crimes. The sublime and the ridiculous are
here blended without the step between. Milton descends even to abuse
the publisher, Vlac, who had officially signed his name to Morus's
preface. The mixture of fanatical choler and grotesque jocularity, in
which he rolls forth his charges of incontinence against Morus, and of
petty knavery against Vlac, is only saved from being unseemly by being
ridiculous. The comedy is complete when we remember that Morus had not
written the _Clamor_, nor Vlac the preface. Milton's rage blinded him;
he is mad Ajax castigating innocent sheep instead of Achsaeans.
The Latin pamphlets are indispensable to a knowledge of Milton's
disposition. We see in them his grand disdain of his opponents,
reproducing the concentrated intellectual scorn of the Latin Persius;
his certainty of the absolute justice of his own cause, and the purity
of his own motives. This lofty cast of thought is combined with an
eagerness to answer the meanest taunts. The intense subjectivity
of the poet breaks out in these paragraphs, and while he should be
stating the case of the republic, he holds Europe listening to an
account of himself, his accomplishments, his studies and travels,
his stature, the colour of his eyes, his skill in fencing, &c. These
egoistic utterances must have seemed to Milton's contemporaries to be
intrusive and irrelevant vanity. _Paradise Lost_ was not as yet, and
to the Council of State Milton was, what he was to Whitelocke, "a
blind man who wrote Latin." But these paragraphs, in which he talks
of himself, are to us the only living fragments out of many hundred
worthless pages.
To the _Defensio Secunda_ there was of course a reply by Morus. It
was entitled _Fides Publica_, because it was largely composed of
testimonials to character. When one priest charges another with
unchastity, the world looks on and laughs. But it is no laughing
matter to the defendant in such an action. He can always bring
exculpatory evidence, and in spite of any evidence he is always
believed to be guilty. The effect of Milton's furious denunciation of
Morus had been to damage his credit in religious circles, and to make
mothers of families shy of allowing him to visit at their houses.
Milton might have been content with a victory which, as Gibbon said
of his own, "over such an antagonist was a sufficient humiliation."
Milton's magnanimity was no match for his irritation. He published
a rejoinder to Morus's _Fides Publica_, reiterating his belief that
Morus was author of the _Clamor_, but that it was no matter whether
he was or not, since by publishing the book, and furnishing it with a
recommendatory preface, he had made it his own. The charges against
Morus' character he reiterated, and strengthened by new "facts", which
Morus's enemies had hastened to contribute to the budget of
calumny. These imputations on character, mixed with insinuations of
unorthodoxy, such as are ever rife in clerical controversy, Milton
invests with the moral indignation of a prophet denouncing the enemies
of Jehovah. He expends a wealth of vituperative Latin which makes us
tremble, till we remember that it is put in motion to crush an insect.
This _Pro se defensio_ (Defence for himself), appeared in August,
1656. Morus met it by a supplementary _Fides Publica_, and Milton,
resolved to have the last word, met him by a _Supplement to the
Defence_. The reader will be glad to hear that this is the end of the
Morus controversy. We leave Milton's victim buried under the mountains
of opprobrious Latin here heaped upon him--this "circumforanens
pharmacopola, vanissimus circulator, propudium hominis et
prostibulum."