Next to my Johnsoniana are my Gibbons—two editions, if you please, for
my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could not
resist getting a set of Bury’s new six-volume presentment of the
History. In reading that book you don’t want to be handicapped in any
way. You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume. You are not
to read it lightly, but with some earnestness of purpose and keenness
for knowledge, with a classical atlas at your elbow and a note-book
hard by, taking easy stages and harking back every now and then to keep
your grip of the past and to link it up with what follows. There are no
thrills in it. You won’t be kept out of your bed at night, nor will you
forget your appointments during the day, but you will feel a certain
sedate pleasure in the doing of it, and when it is done you will have
gained something which you can never lose—something solid, something
definite, something that will make you broader and deeper than before.
Were I condemned to spend a year upon a desert island and allowed only
one book for my companion, it is certainly that which I should choose.
For consider how enormous is its scope, and what food for thought is
contained within those volumes. It covers a thousand years of the
world’s history, it is full and good and accurate, its standpoint is
broadly philosophic, its style dignified. With our more elastic methods
we may consider his manner pompous, but he lived in an age when
Johnson’s turgid periods had corrupted our literature. For my own part
I do not dislike Gibbon’s pomposity. A paragraph should be measured and
sonorous if it ventures to describe the advance of a Roman legion, or
the debate of a Greek Senate. You are wafted upwards, with this lucid
and just spirit by your side upholding and instructing you. Beneath you
are warring nations, the clash of races, the rise and fall of
dynasties, the conflict of creeds. Serene you float above them all, and
ever as the panorama flows past, the weighty measured unemotional voice
whispers the true meaning of the scene into your ear.
It is a most mighty story that is told. You begin with a description of
the state of the Roman Empire when the early Caesars were on the
throne, and when it was undisputed mistress of the world. You pass down
the line of the Emperors with their strange alternations of greatness
and profligacy, descending occasionally to criminal lunacy. When the
Empire went rotten it began at the top, and it took centuries to
corrupt the man behind the spear. Neither did a religion of peace
affect him much, for, in spite of the adoption of Christianity, Roman
history was still written in blood. The new creed had only added a
fresh cause of quarrel and violence to the many which already existed,
and the wars of angry nations were mild compared to those of excited
sectaries.
Then came the mighty rushing wind from without, blowing from the waste
places of the world, destroying, confounding, whirling madly through
the old order, leaving broken chaos behind it, but finally cleansing
and purifying that which was stale and corrupt. A storm-centre
somewhere in the north of China did suddenly what it may very well do
again. The human volcano blew its top off, and Europe was covered by
the destructive debris. The absurd point is that it was not the
conquerors who overran the Roman Empire, but it was the terrified
fugitives, who, like a drove of stampeded cattle, blundered over
everything which barred their way. It was a wild, dramatic time—the
time of the formation of the modern races of Europe. The nations came
whirling in out of the north and east like dust-storms, and amid the
seeming chaos each was blended with its neighbour so as to toughen the
fibre of the whole. The fickle Gaul got his steadying from the Franks,
the steady Saxon got his touch of refinement from the Norman, the
Italian got a fresh lease of life from the Lombard and the Ostrogoth,
the corrupt Greek made way for the manly and earnest Mahommedan.
Everywhere one seems to see a great hand blending the seeds. And so one
can now, save only that emigration has taken the place of war. It does
not, for example, take much prophetic power to say that something very
great is being built up on the other side of the Atlantic. When on an
Anglo-Celtic basis you see the Italian, the Hun, and the Scandinavian
being added, you feel that there is no human quality which may not be
thereby evolved.
But to revert to Gibbon: the next stage is the flight of Empire from
Rome to Byzantium, even as the Anglo-Celtic power might find its centre
some day not in London but in Chicago or Toronto. There is the whole
strange story of the tidal wave of Mahommedanism from the south,
submerging all North Africa, spreading right and left to India on the
one side and to Spain on the other, finally washing right over the
walls of Byzantium until it, the bulwark of Christianity, became what
it is now, the advanced European fortress of the Moslem. Such is the
tremendous narrative covering half the world’s known history, which can
all be acquired and made part of yourself by the aid of that humble
atlas, pencil, and note-book already recommended.
When all is so interesting it is hard to pick examples, but to me there
has always seemed to be something peculiarly impressive in the first
entrance of a new race on to the stage of history. It has something of
the glamour which hangs round the early youth of a great man. You
remember how the Russians made their debut—came down the great rivers
and appeared at the Bosphorus in two hundred canoes, from which they
endeavoured to board the Imperial galleys. Singular that a thousand
years have passed and that the ambition of the Russians is still to
carry out the task at which their skin-clad ancestors failed. Or the
Turks again; you may recall the characteristic ferocity with which they
opened their career. A handful of them were on some mission to the
Emperor. The town was besieged from the landward side by the
barbarians, and the Asiatics obtained leave to take part in a skirmish.
The first Turk galloped out, shot a barbarian with his arrow, and then,
lying down beside him, proceeded to suck his blood, which so horrified
the man’s comrades that they could not be brought to face such uncanny
adversaries. So, from opposite sides, those two great races arrived at
the city which was to be the stronghold of the one and the ambition of
the other for so many centuries.
And then, even more interesting than the races which arrive are those
that disappear. There is something there which appeals most powerfully
to the imagination. Take, for example, the fate of those Vandals who
conquered the north of Africa. They were a German tribe, blue-eyed and
flaxen-haired, from somewhere in the Elbe country. Suddenly they, too,
were seized with the strange wandering madness which was epidemic at
the time. Away they went on the line of least resistance, which is
always from north to south and from east to west. South-west was the
course of the Vandals—a course which must have been continued through
pure love of adventure, since in the thousands of miles which they
traversed there were many fair resting-places, if that were only their
quest.
They crossed the south of France, conquered Spain, and, finally, the
more adventurous passed over into Africa, where they occupied the old
Roman province. For two or three generations they held it, much as the
English hold India, and their numbers were at the least some hundreds
of thousands. Presently the Roman Empire gave one of those flickers
which showed that there was still some fire among the ashes. Belisarius
landed in Africa and reconquered the province. The Vandals were cut off
from the sea and fled inland. Whither did they carry those blue eyes
and that flaxen hair? Were they exterminated by the negroes, or did
they amalgamate with them? Travellers have brought back stories from
the Mountains of the Moon of a Negroid race with light eyes and hair.
Is it possible that here we have some trace of the vanished Germans?
It recalls the parallel case of the lost settlements in Greenland. That
also has always seemed to me to be one of the most romantic questions
in history—the more so, perhaps, as I have strained my eyes to see
across the ice-floes the Greenland coast at the point (or near it)
where the old “Eyrbyggia” must have stood. That was the Scandinavian
city, founded by colonists from Iceland, which grew to be a
considerable place, so much so that they sent to Denmark for a bishop.
That would be in the fourteenth century. The bishop, coming out to his
see, found that he was unable to reach it on account of a climatic
change which had brought down the ice and filled the strait between
Iceland and Greenland. From that day to this no one has been able to
say what has become of these old Scandinavians, who were at the time,
be it remembered, the most civilized and advanced race in Europe. They
may have been overwhelmed by the Esquimaux, the despised Skroeling—or
they may have amalgamated with them—or conceivably they might have held
their own. Very little is known yet of that portion of the coast. It
would be strange if some Nansen or Peary were to stumble upon the
remains of the old colony, and find possibly in that antiseptic
atmosphere a complete mummy of some bygone civilization.
But once more to return to Gibbon. What a mind it must have been which
first planned, and then, with the incessant labour of twenty years,
carried out that enormous work! There was no classical author so little
known, no Byzantine historian so diffuse, no monkish chronicle so
crabbed, that they were not assimilated and worked into their
appropriate place in the huge framework. Great application, great
perseverance, great attention to detail was needed in all this, but the
coral polyp has all those qualities, and somehow in the heart of his
own creation the individuality of the man himself becomes as
insignificant and as much overlooked as that of the little creature
that builds the reef. A thousand know Gibbon’s work for one who cares
anything for Gibbon.
And on the whole this is justified by the facts. Some men are greater
than their work. Their work only represents one facet of their
character, and there may be a dozen others, all remarkable, and uniting
to make one complex and unique creature. It was not so with Gibbon. He
was a cold-blooded man, with a brain which seemed to have grown at the
expense of his heart. I cannot recall in his life one generous impulse,
one ardent enthusiasm, save for the Classics. His excellent judgment
was never clouded by the haze of human emotion—or, at least, it was
such an emotion as was well under the control of his will. Could
anything be more laudable—or less lovable? He abandons his girl at the
order of his father, and sums it up that he “sighs as a lover but obeys
as a son.” The father dies, and he records the fact with the remark
that “the tears of a son are seldom lasting.” The terrible spectacle of
the French Revolution excited in his mind only a feeling of self-pity
because his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the unhappy refugees,
just as a grumpy country gentleman in England might complain that he
was annoyed by the trippers. There is a touch of dislike in all the
allusions which Boswell makes to Gibbon—often without even mentioning
his name—and one cannot read the great historian’s life without
understanding why.
I should think that few men have been born with the material for
self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward
Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an
insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry, a
retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which
enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial
critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked upon
as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but his
views are familiar to modern philosophy, and would shock no
susceptibilities in these more liberal (and more virtuous) days. Turn
him up in that Encyclopedia, and see what the latest word is upon his
contentions. “Upon the famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters it is
not necessary to dwell,” says the biographer, “because at this time of
day no Christian apologist dreams of denying the substantial truth of
any of the more important allegations of Gibbon. Christians may
complain of the suppression of some circumstances which might influence
the general result, and they must remonstrate against the unfair
construction of their case. But they no longer refuse to hear any
reasonable evidence tending to show that persecution was less severe
than had been once believed, and they have slowly learned that they can
afford to concede the validity of all the secondary causes assigned by
Gibbon and even of others still more discreditable. The fact is, as the
historian has again and again admitted, that his account of the
secondary causes which contributed to the progress and establishment of
Christianity leaves the question as to the natural or supernatural
origin of Christianity practically untouched.” This is all very well,
but in that case how about the century of abuse which has been showered
upon the historian? Some posthumous apology would seem to be called
for.
Physically, Gibbon was as small as Johnson was large, but there was a
curious affinity in their bodily ailments. Johnson, as a youth, was
ulcerated and tortured by the king’s evil, in spite of the Royal touch.
Gibbon gives us a concise but lurid account of his own boyhood.
“I was successively afflicted by lethargies and fevers, by opposite
tendencies to a consumptive and dropsical habit, by a contraction of my
nerves, a fistula in my eye, and the bite of a dog, most vehemently
suspected of madness. Every practitioner was called to my aid, the fees
of the doctors were swelled by the bills of the apothecaries and
surgeons. There was a time when I swallowed more physic than food, and
my body is still marked by the indelible scars of lancets, issues, and
caustics.”
Such is his melancholy report. The fact is that the England of that day
seems to have been very full of that hereditary form of chronic
ill-health which we call by the general name of struma. How far the
hard-drinking habits in vogue for a century or so before had anything
to do with it I cannot say, nor can I trace a connection between struma
and learning; but one has only to compare this account of Gibbon with
Johnson’s nervous twitches, his scarred face and his St. Vitus’ dance,
to realize that these, the two most solid English writers of their
generation, were each heir to the same gruesome inheritance.
I wonder if there is any picture extant of Gibbon in the character of
subaltern in the South Hampshire Militia? With his small frame, his
huge head, his round, chubby face, and the pretentious uniform, he must
have looked a most extraordinary figure. Never was there so round a peg
in a square hole! His father, a man of a very different type, held a
commission, and this led to poor Gibbon becoming a soldier in spite of
himself. War had broken out, the regiment was mustered, and the
unfortunate student, to his own utter dismay, was kept under arms until
the conclusion of hostilities. For three years he was divorced from his
books, and loudly and bitterly did he resent it. The South Hampshire
Militia never saw the enemy, which is perhaps as well for them. Even
Gibbon himself pokes fun at them; but after three years under canvas it
is probable that his men had more cause to smile at their book-worm
captain than he at his men. His hand closed much more readily on a
pen-handle than on a sword-hilt. In his lament, one of the items is
that his colonel’s example encouraged the daily practice of hard and
even excessive drinking, which gave him the gout. “The loss of so many
busy and idle hours were not compensated for by any elegant pleasure,”
says he; “and my temper was insensibly soured by the society of rustic
officers, who were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the
manners of gentlemen.” The picture of Gibbon flushed with wine at the
mess-table, with these hard-drinking squires around him, must certainly
have been a curious one. He admits, however, that he found consolations
as well as hardships in his spell of soldiering. It made him an
Englishman once more, it improved his health, it changed the current of
his thoughts. It was even useful to him as an historian. In a
celebrated and characteristic sentence, he says, “The discipline and
evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the
Phalanx and the Legions, and the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers
has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.”
If we don’t know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote no
fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from the
other, and all equally bad. A man must have more heart and soul than
Gibbon to write a good autobiography. It is the most difficult of all
human compositions, calling for a mixture of tact, discretion, and
frankness which make an almost impossible blend. Gibbon, in spite of
his foreign education, was a very typical Englishman in many ways, with
the reticence, self-respect, and self-consciousness of the race. No
British autobiography has ever been frank, and consequently no British
autobiography has ever been good. Trollope’s, perhaps, is as good as
any that I know, but of all forms of literature it is the one least
adapted to the national genius. You could not imagine a British
Rousseau, still less a British Benvenuto Cellini. In one way it is to
the credit of the race that it should be so. If we do as much evil as
our neighbours we at least have grace enough to be ashamed of it and to
suppress its publication.
There on the left of Gibbon is my fine edition (Lord Braybrooke’s) of
Pepys’ Diary. That is, in truth, the greatest autobiography in our
language, and yet it was not deliberately written as such. When Mr.
Pepys jotted down from day to day every quaint or mean thought which
came into his head he would have been very much surprised had any one
told him that he was doing a work quite unique in our literature. Yet
his involuntary autobiography, compiled for some obscure reason or for
private reference, but certainly never meant for publication, is as
much the first in that line of literature as Boswell’s book among
biographies or Gibbon’s among histories.
As a race we are too afraid of giving ourselves away ever to produce a
good autobiography. We resent the charge of national hypocrisy, and yet
of all nations we are the least frank as to our own emotions—especially
on certain sides of them. Those affairs of the heart, for example,
which are such an index to a man’s character, and so profoundly modify
his life—what space do they fill in any man’s autobiography? Perhaps in
Gibbon’s case the omission matters little, for, save in the instance of
his well-controlled passion for the future Madame Neckar, his heart was
never an organ which gave him much trouble. The fact is that when the
British author tells his own story he tries to make himself
respectable, and the more respectable a man is the less interesting
does he become. Rousseau may prove himself a maudlin degenerate.
Cellini may stand self-convicted as an amorous ruffian. If they are not
respectable they are thoroughly human and interesting all the same.
The wonderful thing about Mr. Pepys is that a man should succeed in
making himself seem so insignificant when really he must have been a
man of considerable character and attainments. Who would guess it who
read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for
dinner, these inane domestic confidences—all the more interesting for
their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque
character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women,
timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in
religion, a garrulous gossip immersed always in trifles. And yet,
though this was the day-by-day man, the year-by-year man was a very
different person, a devoted civil servant, an eloquent orator, an
excellent writer, a capable musician, and a ripe scholar who
accumulated 3000 volumes—a large private library in those days—and had
the public spirit to leave them all to his University. You can forgive
old Pepys a good deal of his philandering when you remember that he was
the only official of the Navy Office who stuck to his post during the
worst days of the Plague. He may have been—indeed, he assuredly was—a
coward, but the coward who has sense of duty enough to overcome his
cowardice is the most truly brave of mankind.
But the one amazing thing which will never be explained about Pepys is
what on earth induced him to go to the incredible labour of writing
down in shorthand cipher not only all the trivialities of his life, but
even his own very gross delinquencies which any other man would have
been only too glad to forget. The Diary was kept for about ten years,
and was abandoned because the strain upon his eyes of the crabbed
shorthand was helping to destroy his sight. I suppose that he became so
familiar with it that he wrote it and read it as easily as he did
ordinary script. But even so, it was a huge labour to compile these
books of strange manuscript. Was it an effort to leave some memorial of
his own existence to single him out from all the countless sons of men?
In such a case he would assuredly have left directions in somebody’s
care with a reference to it in the deed by which he bequeathed his
library to Cambridge. In that way he could have ensured having his
Diary read at any date he chose to name after his death. But no
allusion to it was left, and if it had not been for the ingenuity and
perseverance of a single scholar the dusty volumes would still lie
unread in some top shelf of the Pepysian Library. Publicity, then, was
not his object. What could it have been? The only alternative is
reference and self-information. You will observe in his character a
curious vein of method and order, by which he loved, to be for ever
estimating his exact wealth, cataloguing his books, or scheduling his
possessions. It is conceivable that this systematic recording of his
deeds—even of his misdeeds—was in some sort analogous, sprung from a
morbid tidiness of mind. It may be a weak explanation, but it is
difficult to advance another one.
One minor point which must strike the reader of Pepys is how musical a
nation the English of that day appear to have been. Every one seems to
have had command of some instrument, many of several. Part-singing was
common. There is not much of Charles the Second’s days which we need
envy, but there, at least, they seem to have had the advantage of us.
It was real music, too—music of dignity and tenderness—with words which
were worthy of such treatment. This cult may have been the last remains
of those mediaeval pre-Reformation days when the English Church choirs
were, as I have read somewhere, the most famous in Europe. A strange
thing this for a land which in the whole of last century has produced
no single master of the first rank!
What national change is it which has driven music from the land? Has
life become so serious that song has passed out of it? In Southern
climes one hears poor folk sing for pure lightness of heart. In
England, alas, the sound of a poor man’s voice raised in song means
only too surely that he is drunk. And yet it is consoling to know that
the germ of the old powers is always there ready to sprout forth if
they be nourished and cultivated. If our cathedral choirs were the best
in the old Catholic days, it is equally true, I believe, that our
orchestral associations are now the best in Europe. So, at least, the
German papers said on the occasion of the recent visit of a north of
England choir. But one cannot read Pepys without knowing that the
general musical habit is much less cultivated now than of old.