During the whole nineteenth century our language underwent a certain
derogation, notorious, different in kind from the corruptions of all
other ages, and as familiar as brick and slate, gas, and the
architecture of stations—and apparently of yesterday, and to-day, and of
a morrow seen in rather dull and discouraging prospect. But the truth is
that this common speech is due to the enormous influence of a great
author who was born in 1737, was for forty-seven years the contemporary
of Dr. Johnson, and died well within the eighteenth century.
Whose, for instance, is the use of ‘I expect’ for a conjecture referring
to the past? It is Gibbon’s: ‘I should expect that the eunuchs were not
expelled from the palace.’ What is the ‘and which’, ‘and who’ of the
slovenly? and what the ‘whose’ applied to inanimate things by authors
too fine and too modern to write ‘whereof’? Gear of Gibbon’s style,
both: ‘Below the citadel stood a palace of gold, decorated with precious
stones, and whose value might be esteemed,’ &c.; and ‘A Menapian of the
meanest origin, but who had long signalized his skill as a pilot’. There
is, it is true, the inanimate ‘whose’ of a more illustrious and older
author, but that claims the excuse of metre.
Whence have we that peculiarly harsh vulgarism, ‘so much per month’,
instead of ‘so much a month’, or ‘per mensem’? From Gibbon. ‘And coal
will be by the sack or per the scuttle,’ said a seaside landlady, in
some one’s observant ear. In her innocence she would not have said it
but for Gibbon. And whose is the confusion of speech that cannot give
the word ‘same’ its proper completion, but saddles it with a relative
pronoun? Gibbon’s: ‘The Western countries were civilized by the same
hands which subdued them.’ ‘The hands which subdued them’ would be
correct, and certainly more majestic.
Gibbon set the example of this common lax grammar: ‘Instead of receiving
with manly resolution the inevitable stroke, his unavailing cries and
entreaties disgraced the last moments of his life’; and ‘The election of
Carus was decided without expecting the approval of the Senate’; and ‘A
peasant and a soldier, his nerves yielded not easily to the impressions
of sympathy’. And there is nothing that (Gibbon always says ‘which’)
illiterate politeness is so fond of as this unconstructed and decorated
phrase. Gibbon’s literature was scholarly, and these errors of his alter
little or nothing of the honour due to his eminent elegance of style.
But it was these laxities that took the public taste mightily, and it
was the ‘corrupt following’ of this apostle that set the fashion of an
animated strut of style—a strut that was animated in its day and soon
grew inanimate, as the original authentic Gibbon never does. His own
narrative never fails to reply to a perpetual stimulation.
But to deal with the rest of the grammatical ill-example, left to
unlucky generations from the very middle of the century of propriety,
and made so much our own. It is very modern to have ‘either’ or
‘neither’ followed by more than two things, and it is pure Gibbon; all
the more conspicuous as Gibbon dearly loves the sound of three: ‘The
policy of the senate, the active emulation of the consuls, and the
martial enthusiasm of the people’; ‘The undertaking became more
difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious.’
But the three go ill with ‘either’: ‘either food, plunder, or glory;’
‘either salt, or oil, or wood’. ‘The generals were either respected by
their troops, or admired for valour, or beloved for frankness and
generosity.’
Finally, for a very little and silly blunder, what is more modern and
current and popular than this: ‘Magnus, with four thousand of his
supposed accomplices, were put to death’? And even this is Gibbon.
To have done with mere grammar, there is surely no author in the history
of our literature who has so imposed a new manner of writing upon an
admiring people. He changed a hundred years of English prose. The dregs
of his style have encumbered the nation. Changes that have been ascribed
to Johnson were his doing and not Johnson’s.
He belonged to the eighteenth century; but the nineteenth century
belonged to him, because he possessed it. That is why he and his English
are thus modern; the times became conformed to him; and he was himself
not his own age, but that which succeeded and admired him.
It was to the broad face of astonishment, and with the self-conscious
face of novelty, that Gibbon addressed his prose. That shortened
sentence (for it was he who shortened the sentence, and Macaulay did but
imitate his full stops for the pauses of historical surprise) was to
strike and to demonstrate, and this with a gesture constantly renewed.
‘Suspicion was equivalent to proof. Trial to condemnation.’ ‘The strict
economy of Vespasian was the source of his magnificence. The works of
Trajan bear the stamp of his genius.’ His, too, is the full ceremony of
the ushering phrase: ‘It is easier to deplore the fate, than to describe
the actual condition, of Corsica.’ His, too, the ‘the latter and the
former’, which became a favourite fashion. ‘Oh, do not condemn me to the
latter!’ exclaims a lover in one of Mrs. Inchbald’s stories, after a
statement of his hopes and fears; and this phrase of emotion was a debt
to Gibbon. The reader finds that the lady does not condemn him to the
latter; she permits some prospect of the former. ‘Peruse’ is Gibbon’s
verb, and ‘extensive’ a favourite adjective. To him we owe ‘the mask of
hypocrisy’ and ‘the voice of flattery’. It is not his fault that
posterity divided this property so lavishly among themselves.
And yet is there no fault in his own frigid prodigality? Take this
sentence in all its splendour: ‘The Tyber rolled at the foot of the
seven hills of Rome, and the country of the Sabines, the Latins, and the
Volsci, from that river to the frontiers of Naples, was the theatre of
her infant victories.’ And this: ‘A distant hope, the child of a
flattering prophecy.’ This all-inhuman image reminds us, by contrast, of
Shelley, who often has this figure of a child, and never, however remote
the thought, without a sense of childhood. So cold is Gibbon that when
the incessant stimulation of his rhetorical intention spurs him to
describe a murder thus: ‘A thousand swords were plunged at once into the
bosom of the unfortunate Probus,’ we are moved to tell him trivially
that he exaggerates. When Burke said ‘A thousand swords’ he meant a
thousand, and had a right to mean them, but Gibbon did not, obviously,
mean a thousand.
‘The unfortunate Probus’ is the model of a sentence that sometimes
becomes monotonous even with the carefully various Gibbon: ‘The prudent
Atticus’ begins a phrase, and ‘the equitable Nerva’ passes it on to ‘the
cautious Athenian’, and then again to ‘the generous Atticus’. His is a
frigidity that deals broadly with massacre and the sack of cities. And
from amid these generalities, as it were invisible unless viewed from
afar, he suddenly plucks us this man’s ‘smile’, or that man’s ‘blush’.
Whatever Gibbon’s race, there never was a writer so exceedingly Latin in
spirit.
‘To view’, by the way, is one of his favourite verbs: ‘Viewing with a
smile of pity and indulgence the various errors of the vulgar ... and
sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition,
they concealed the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robes.’
Readers with a sense of humour may remember under what conditions
Zenobia ‘reiterated the experiment’; and the fatal manner in which the
tradesman’s circular of to-day has ‘diffused’ (as Gibbon would say) the
last ruins of his prose by post, is rather curiously illustrated thus: a
little while ago some infamous face-wash was described in advertisements
as a mixture of drugs brought across the desert by fleet dromedaries.
And here is Gibbon’s Zenobia ‘mounting her fleetest dromedary’.
How great, nevertheless, how sombre are the nobler habits of his
language: ‘The veteran legions of the Rhine and the Danube.’ What
armies! what time! what space! what war! ‘Give back my legions, Varus!’
Give back our legions, Gibbon! We may count our regiments, but thou hast
named, not counted, multitudes.
And when Gibbon ‘gratifies’ these legionaries, the polite word does but
make them more historical: ‘After suppressing a competitor who had
assumed the purple at Mentz, he refused to gratify his troops with the
plunder of the rebellious city.’ So that we do not forgive the
corrupters who so scattered the word that burlesque was necessary for
sweeping it out of the way. When Mr. Micawber confesses his ‘gratifying
emotions of no common description’, Dickens rallies a distant Gibbon.
Ruskin, student of Hooker in the further, and of Johnson in the nearer,
past, was the first writer of pure prose—the first by a long tale of
years—to reject the whole encumbrance of the vain spoils of Gibbon; yet
even he has one little patch of them: ‘A steep bank of earth that has
been at all exposed to the weather contains in it ... features capable
of giving high gratification to a careful observer.’ It is solitary in
_Modern Painters_; it is the nether Gibbon, a waste product of Gibbon.
But now I spoke of burlesque; and Dickens’s burlesque of style is
admirable; there is also a burlesque of another and more innocent kind:
when the author of a recent English work on the _Divine Comedy_ says
that Paolo and Francesca were to receive from Dante ‘such alleviation as
circumstances would allow’, that also is a distant, a shattered Gibbon,
a drift of Gibbon.