Independently of these abstruse theological disputations, he spent many
hours daily—rising early and reading carefully—on classical and secular
learning. He was not, however, wholly thus engrossed. There was in the
neighbourhood of Lausanne a certain Mademoiselle Curchod, to whom he
devoted some of his time. She seems to have been a morbidly rational
lady; at least she had a grave taste. Gibbon could not have been a very
enlivening lover; he was decidedly plain, and his predominating taste
was for solid learning. But this was not all; she formed an attachment
to M. Necker, afterwards the most slow of premiers, whose financial
treatises can hardly have been agreeable even to a Genevese beauty.
This was, however, at a later time. So far as appears, Gibbon was her
first love. How extreme her feelings were one does not know. Those of
Gibbon can scarcely be supposed to have done him any harm. However,
there was an intimacy, a flirtation, an engagement—when, as usual, it
appeared that neither had any money. That the young lady should procure
any seems to have been out of the question; and Gibbon, supposing that
he might, wrote to his father. The reply was unfavourable. Gibbon’s
mother was dead; Mr. Gibbon senior was married again; and even in other
circumstances would have been scarcely ready to encourage a romantic
engagement to a lady with nothing. She spoke no English, too, and
marriage with a person speaking only French is still regarded as a most
unnatural event; forbidden, not indeed by the literal law of the Church,
but by those higher instinctive principles of our nature, to which the
bluntest own obedience. No father could be expected to violate at once
pecuniary duties and patriotic principles. Mr. Gibbon senior forbade
the match. The young lady does not seem to have been quite ready to
relinquish all hope; but she had shown a grave taste, and fixed her
affections on a sound and cold mind. ‘I sighed,’ narrates the historian,
‘as a lover; but I obeyed as a son.’ ‘I have seen,’ says M. Suard,
‘the letter in which Gibbon communicated to Mademoiselle Curchod the
opposition of his father to their marriage. The first pages are tender
and melancholy, as might be expected from an unhappy lover; the latter
become by degrees calm and reasonable; and the letter concludes with
these words: _C’est pourquoi, mademoiselle, j’ai l’honneur d’être votre
très-humble et très-obéissant serviteur, Edward Gibbon_.’ Her father
died soon afterwards, and she retired to Geneva, where, by teaching
young ladies, she earned a hard subsistence for herself and her mother;
but the tranquil disposition of her admirer preserved him from any
romantic display of sympathy and fidelity. He continued to study various
readings in Cicero, as well as the passage of Hannibal over the Alps;
and with those affectionate resources set sentiment at defiance. Yet
thirty years later the lady, then the wife of the most conspicuous man
in Europe, was able to suggest useful reflections to an aged bachelor,
slightly dreaming of a superannuated marriage: ‘_Gardez-vous, monsieur,
de former un de ces liens tardifs: le mariage qui rend heureux dans l’âge
mûr, c’est celui qui fut contracté dans la jeunesse. Alors seulement
la réunion est parfaite, les goûts se communiquent, les sentimens se
répandent, les idées deviennent communes, les facultés intellectuelles
se modèlent mutuellement. Toute la vie est double, et toute la vie est
une prolongation de la jeunesse; car les impressions de l’âme commandent
aux yeux, et la beauté qui n’est plus conserve encore son empire; mais
pour vous, monsieur, dans toute la vigueur de la pensée, lorsque toute
l’existence est décidée, l’on ne pourroit sans un miracle trouver une
femme digne de vous; et une association d’un genre imparfait rappelle
toujours la statue d’Horace, qui joint à une belle tête le corps d’un
stupide poisson. Vous êtes marié avec la gloire._’ She was then a
cultivated French lady, giving an account of the reception of the Decline
and Fall at Paris, and expressing rather peculiar ideas on the style of
Tacitus. The world had come round to her side, and she explains to her
old lover rather well her happiness with M. Necker.
After living nearly five years at Lausanne, Gibbon returned to England.
Continental residence has made a great alteration in many Englishmen;
but few have undergone so complete a metamorphosis as Edward Gibbon.
He left his own country a hot-brained and ill taught youth, willing to
sacrifice friends and expectations for a superstitious and half-known
creed; he returned a cold and accomplished man, master of many accurate
ideas, little likely to hazard any coin for any faith: already, it is
probable, inclined in secret to a cautious scepticism; placing thereby,
as it were, upon a system the frigid prudence and unventuring incredulity
congenial to his character. His change of character changed his position
among his relatives. His father, he says, met him as a friend; and they
continued thenceforth on a footing of ‘easy intimacy.’ Especially after
the little affair of Mademoiselle Curchod, and the ‘very sensible view
he took in that instance of the matrimonial relation,’ there can be but
little question that Gibbon was justly regarded as a most safe young
man, singularly prone to large books, and a little too fond of French
phrases and French ideas; but yet with a great feeling of common sense,
and a wise preference of permanent money to transitory sentiment. His
father allowed him a moderate, and but a moderate income, which he
husbanded with great care, and only voluntarily expended in the purchase
and acquisition of serious volumes. He lived an externally idle but
really studious life, varied by tours in France and Italy; the toils
of which, though not in description very formidable, a trifle tried a
sedentary habit and somewhat corpulent body. The only English avocation
which he engaged in was, oddly enough, war. It does not appear the most
likely in this pacific country, nor does he seem exactly the man for _la
grande guerre_; but so it was; and the fact is an example of a really
Anglican invention. The English have discovered pacific war. We may not
be able to kill people as well as the French, or fit out and feed distant
armaments as neatly as they do; but we are unrivalled at a quiet armament
here at home which never kills anybody, and never wants to be sent
anywhere. A ‘constitutional militia’ is a beautiful example of the mild
efficacy of civilisation, which can convert even the ‘great manslaying
profession’ (as Carlyle calls it) into a quiet and dining association.
Into this force Gibbon was admitted; and immediately, contrary to his
anticipations, and very much against his will, was called out for
permanent duty. The hero of the _corps_ was a certain dining Sir Thomas,
who used at the end of each new bottle to announce with increasing joy
how much soberer he had become. What his fellow-officers thought of
Gibbon’s French predilections and large volumes it is not difficult to
conjecture; and he complains bitterly of the interruption to his studies.
However, his easy composed nature soon made itself at home; his polished
tact partially concealed from the ‘mess’ his recondite pursuits, and he
contrived to make the Hampshire armament of classical utility. ‘I read,’
he says, ‘the Analysis of Cæsar’s Campaign in Africa. Every motion of
that great general is laid open with a critical sagacity. A complete
military history of his campaigns would do almost as much honour to M.
Guichardt as to Cæsar. This finished the _Mémoires_, which gave me a much
clearer notion of ancient tactics than I ever had before. Indeed, my own
military knowledge was of some service to me, as I am well acquainted
with the modern discipline and exercise of a battalion. So that though
much inferior to M. Folard and M. Guichardt, who had seen service, I am
a much better judge than Salmasius, Casaubon, or Lipsius; mere scholars,
who perhaps had never seen a battalion under arms.’
The real occupation of Gibbon, as this quotation might suggest, was
his reading; and this was of a peculiar sort. There are many kinds of
readers, and each has a sort of perusal suitable to his kind. There
is the voracious reader, like Dr. Johnson, who extracts with grasping
appetite the large features, the mere essence of a trembling publication,
and rejects the rest with contempt and disregard. There is the subtle
reader, who pursues with fine attention the most imperceptible and
delicate ramifications of an interesting topic, marks slight traits,
notes changing manners, has a keen eye for the character of his author,
is minutely attentive to every prejudice and awake to every passion,
watches syllables and waits on words, is alive to the light air of
nice associations which float about every subject—the motes in the
bright sunbeam—the delicate gradations of the passing shadows. There
is the stupid reader, who prefers dull books—is generally to be known
by his disregard of small books and English books, but likes masses in
modern Latin, _Grævius de torpor e mirabili_; _Horrificus de gravitate
sapientiæ_. But Gibbon was not of any of these classes. He was what
common people would call a matter-of-fact, and philosophers now-a-days
a _positive_ reader. No disciple of M. Comte could attend more strictly
to precise and provable phenomena. His favourite points are those which
can be weighed and measured. Like the dull reader, he had perhaps a
preference for huge books in unknown tongues; but, on the other hand, he
wished those books to contain real and accurate information. He liked the
firm earth of positive knowledge. His fancy was not flexible enough for
exquisite refinement, his imagination too slow for light and wandering
literature; but he felt no love of dullness in itself, and had a prompt
acumen for serious eloquence. This was his kind of reflection. ‘The
author of the Adventurer, No. 127 (Mr. Joseph Warton, concealed under the
signature of Z), concludes his ingenious parallel of the ancients and
moderns by the following remark: “That age will never again return, when
a Pericles, after walking with Plato in a portico built by Phidias and
painted by Apelles, might repair to hear a pleading of Demosthenes or a
tragedy of Sophocles.” It will never return, because it never existed.
Pericles (who died in the fourth year of the LXXXIXth Olympiad. ant. Ch.
429, Dio. Sic. l. xii. 46) was confessedly the patron of Phidias, and the
contemporary of Sophocles; but he could enjoy no very great pleasure in
the conversation of Plato, who was born in the same year that he himself
died (Diogenes Laertius in Platone v. Stanley’s History of Philosophy, p.
154). The error is still more extraordinary with regard to Apelles and
Demosthenes, since both the painter and the orator survived Alexander
the Great, whose death is above a century posterior to that of Pericles
(in 323). And indeed, though Athens was the seat of every liberal art
from the days of Themistocles to those of Demetrius Phalereus, yet no
particular era will afford Mr. Warton the complete synchronism he seems
to wish for; as tragedy was deprived of her famous triumvirate before the
arts of philosophy and eloquence had attained the perfection which they
soon after received from the hands of Plato, Aristotle, and Demosthenes.’
And wonderful is it for what Mr. Hallam calls ‘the languid students
of our present age’ to turn over the journal of his daily studies.
It is true, it seems to have been revised by himself; and so great a
narrator would group effectively facts with which he was so familiar;
but allowing any discount (if we may use so mean a word) for the skilful
art of the impressive historian, there will yet remain in the _Extraits
de mon Journal_ a wonderful monument of learned industry. You may open
them anywhere. ‘_Dissertation on the Medal of Smyrna_, by M. de Boze:
replete with erudition and taste; containing curious researches on the
pre-eminence of the cities of Asia.—_Researches on the Polypus_, by
Mr. Trembley. A new world: throwing light on physics, but darkening
metaphysics.—Vegetius’s _Institutions_. This writer on tactics has good
general notions; but his particular account of the Roman discipline is
deformed by confusion and anachronisms.’ Or, ‘I this day began a very
considerable task, which was, to read Cluverius’ _Italia Antiqua_ in
two volumes folio, Leyden 1624, Elzevirs;’ and it appears he did read
it as well as begin it, which is the point where most enterprising men
would have failed. From the time of his residence at Lausanne his Latin
scholarship had been sound and good, and his studies were directed
to the illustration of the best Roman authors; but it is curious to
find on August 16, 1761, after his return to England, and when he was
twenty-four years old, the following extract: ‘I have at last finished
the Iliad. As I undertook it to improve myself in the Greek language,
which I had totally neglected for some years past, and to which I never
applied myself with a proper attention, I must give a reason why I began
with Homer, and that contrary to Le Clerc’s advice. I had two: 1st,
As Homer is the most ancient Greek author (excepting perhaps Hesiod)
who is now extant; and as he was not only the poet, but the lawgiver,
the theologian, the historian, and the philosopher of the ancients,
every succeeding writer is full of quotations from, or allusions to his
writings, which it would be difficult to understand without a previous
knowledge of them. In this situation, was it not natural to follow the
ancients themselves, who always began their studies by the perusal of
Homer? 2ndly. No writer ever treated such a variety of subjects. As
every part of civil, military, or economical life is introduced into his
poems, and as the simplicity of his age allowed him to call everything
by its proper name, almost the whole compass of the Greek tongue is
comprised in Homer. I have so far met with the success I hoped for, that
I have acquired a great facility in reading the language, and treasured
up a very great stock of words. What I have rather neglected is, the
grammatical construction of them, and especially the many various
inflexions of the verbs. In order to acquire that dry but necessary
branch of knowledge, I propose bestowing some time every morning on the
perusal of the _Greek Grammar of Port Royal_, as one of the best extant.
I believe that I read nearly one-half of Homer like a mere schoolboy,
not enough master of the words to elevate myself to the poetry. The
remainder I read with a good deal of care and criticism, and made many
observations on them. Some I have inserted here; for the rest I shall
find a proper place. Upon the whole, I think that Homer’s few faults
(for some he certainly has) are lost in the variety of his beauties. I
expected to have finished him long before. The delay was owing partly to
the circumstances of my way of life and avocations, and partly to my own
fault; for while every one looks on me as a prodigy of application, I
know myself how strong a propensity I have to indolence.’ Posterity will
confirm the contemporary theory that he was a ‘prodigy’ of steady study.
Those who know what the Greek language is, how much of the Decline and
Fall depends on Greek authorities, how few errors the keen criticism of
divines and scholars has been able to detect in his employment of them,
will best appreciate the patient every-day labour which could alone
repair the early neglect of so difficult an attainment.
It is odd how little Gibbon wrote, at least for the public, in early
life. More than twenty-two years elapsed from his first return from
Lausanne to the appearance of the first volume of his great work, and in
that long interval his only important publication, if it can indeed be
so called, was a French essay, _Sur l’Etude de la Littérature_, which
contains some sensible remarks, and shows much regular reading; but which
is on the whole a ‘conceivable treatise,’ and would be wholly forgotten
if it had been written by any one else. It was little read in England,
and must have been a serious difficulty to his friends in the militia;
but the Parisians read it, or said they had read it, which is more in
their way, and the fame of being a French author was a great aid to him
in foreign society. It flattered, indeed, the French _literati_ more
than any one can now fancy. The French had then the idea that it was
uncivilised to speak any other language, and the notion of _writing_ any
other seemed quite a _bêtise_. By a miserable misfortune you might not
know French, but at least you could conceal it assiduously; white paper
any how might go unsoiled; posterity at least should not hear of such
ignorance. The Parisian was to be the universal tongue. And it did not
seem absurd, especially to those only slightly acquainted with foreign
countries, that this might in part be so. Political eminence had given
their language a diplomatic supremacy. No German literature existed as
yet; Italy had ceased to produce important books. There was only England
left to dispute the literary omnipotence; and such an attempt as Gibbon’s
was a peculiarly acceptable flattery, for it implied that her most
cultivated men were beginning to abandon their own tongue, and to write
like other nations in the cosmopolitan _lingua franca_. A few far-seeing
observers, however, already contemplated the train of events which at the
present day give such a preponderating influence to our own writers, and
make it an arduous matter even to explain the conceivableness of the
French ambition. Of all men living then or since, David Hume was the most
likely from prejudice and habit to take an unfavourable view of English
literary influence; he had more literary fame than he deserved in France,
and less in England; he had much of the French neatness, he had but
little of the English nature; yet his cold and discriminating intellect
at once emancipated him from the sophistries which imposed on those less
watchful. He wrote to Gibbon, ‘I have only one objection, derived from
the language in which it is written. Why do you compose in French, and
carry faggots into the wood, as Horace says with regard to Romans who
wrote in Greek? I grant that you have a like motive to those Romans, and
adopt a language much more generally diffused than your native tongue;
but have you not remarked the fate of those two ancient languages in
the following ages? The Latin, though then less celebrated and confined
to more narrow limits, has in some measure outlived the Greek, and
is now more generally understood by men of letters. Let the French,
therefore, triumph in the present diffusion of their tongue. Our solid
and increasing establishments in America, where we need less dread the
inundation of barbarians, promise a superior stability and duration to
the English language.’ The cool sceptic was correct. The great breeding
people have gone out and multiplied; colonies in every clime attest our
success; French is the _patois_ of Europe; English is the language of the
world.
Gibbon took the advice of his sagacious friend, and prepared himself for
the composition of his great work in English. His studies were destined,
however, to undergo an interruption. ‘Yesterday morning,’ he wrote to a
friend, ‘about half an hour after seven, as I was destroying an army of
barbarians, I heard a double rap at the door, and my friend Mr. Eliot was
soon introduced. After some idle conversation, he told me that if I was
desirous of being in parliament, he had an independent seat very much at
my service.’ The borough was Liskeard; and the epithet independent is,
of course, ironical, Mr. Eliot being himself the constituency of that
place. The offer was accepted, and one of the most learned of members of
parliament took his seat.
The political life of Gibbon is briefly described. He was a supporter
of Lord North. That well-known statesman was, in the most exact sense,
a representative man,—although representative of the class of persons
most out of favour with the transcendental thinkers who invented this
name. Germans deny it, but in every country common opinions are very
common. Everywhere, there exists the comfortable mass; quiet, sagacious,
short-sighted,—such as the Jews whom Rabshakeh tempted by their vine
and their fig-tree; such as the English with their snug dining-room and
after dinner nap, domestic happiness and Bullo coal; sensible, solid
men, without stretching irritable reason, but with a placid, supine
instinct; without originality and without folly; judicious in their
dealings, respected in the world; wanting little, sacrificing nothing;
good-tempered people in a word, ‘caring for nothing until they are
themselves hurt.’ Lord North was one of this class. You could hardly make
him angry. ‘No doubt,’ he said, tapping his fat sides, ‘I am that odious
thing, a minister; and I believe other people wish they were so too.’
Profound people look deeply for the maxims of his policy; and it being on
the surface, of course they fail to find it. He did not what the mind,
but what the _body_ of the community wanted to have done; he appealed to
the real people, the large English commonplace herd. His abilities were
great; and with them he did what people with no abilities wished to do,
and could not do. Lord Brougham has published the King’s Letters to him,
showing that which partial extracts had made known before, that Lord
North was quite opposed to the war he was carrying on; was convinced it
could not succeed; hardly, in fact, wished it might. Why did he carry it
on? _Vox populi_, the voice of well-dressed men commanded it to be done;
and he cheerfully sacrificed American people, who were nothing to him,
to English, who were something, and a king, who was much. Gibbon was
the very man to support such a ruler. His historical writings have given
him a posthumous eminence; but in his own time he was doubtless thought
a sensible safe man, of ordinary thoughts and intelligible actions. To
do him justice, he did not pretend to be a hero. ‘You know,’ he wrote to
his friend Deyverdun, ‘_que je suis entré au parlement sans patriotisme,
sans ambition, et que toutes mes vues se bornoient à la place commode et
honnête d’un_ lord of trade.’ ‘Wise in his generation’ was written on his
brow. He quietly and gently supported the policy of his time.
Even, however, amid the fatigue of parliamentary attendance,—the fatigue,
in fact, of attending a nocturnal and oratorical club, where you met the
best people, who could not speak, as well as a few of the worst, who
_would_,—Gibbon’s history made much progress. The first volume, a quarto,
one-sixth of the whole, was published in the spring of 1776, and at once
raised his fame to a high point. Ladies actually read it—read about
Bœtica and Tarraconensis, the Roman legions and the tribunitian powers.
Grave scholars wrote dreary commendations. ‘The first impression,’ he
writes, ‘was exhausted in a few days; a second and a third edition were
scarcely adequate to the demand; and my bookseller’s property was twice
invaded by the pirates of Dublin. My book was on every table’—tables
must have been rather few in that age—‘and almost on every toilette;
the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day; nor was
the general voice disturbed by the barking of any profound critic.’ The
noise penetrated deep into the unlearned classes. Mr. Sheridan, who never
read anything ‘on principle,’ said that the crimes of Warren Hastings
surpassed anything to be found in the ‘correct sentences of Tacitus or
the _luminous_ page of Gibbon.’ Some one seems to have been struck with
the jet of learning, and questioned the great wit. ‘I said,’ he replied,
‘_vo_luminous.’
History, it is said, is of no use; at least a great critic, who is
understood to have in the press a very elaborate work in that kind, not
long since seemed to allege that writings of this sort did not establish
a theory of the universe, and were therefore of no avail. But whatever
may be the use of this sort of composition in itself and abstractedly,
it is certainly of great use relatively and to literary men. Consider
the position of a man of that species. He sits beside a library-fire,
with nice white paper, a good pen, a capital style, every means of saying
everything, but nothing to say; of course he is an able man; of course he
has an active intellect, beside wonderful culture; but still one cannot
always have original ideas. Every day cannot be an era; a train of new
speculation very often will not be found; and how dull it is to make it
your business to write, to stay by yourself in a room to write, and then
to have nothing to say! It is dreary work mending seven pens, and waiting
for a theory to ‘turn up.’ What a gain if something would happen! then
one could describe it. Something has happened, and that something is
history. On this account, since a sedate Greek discovered this plan for
a grave immortality, a series of accomplished men have seldom been found
wanting to derive a literary capital from their active and barbarous
kindred. Perhaps when a Visigoth broke a head, he thought that that was
all. Not so; he was making history; Gibbon has written it down.
The manner of writing history is as characteristic of the narrator as the
actions are of the persons who are related to have performed them; often
much more so. It may be generally defined as a view of one age taken by
another; a picture of a series of men and women painted by one of another
series. Of course, this definition seems to exclude contemporary history;
but if we look into the matter carefully, is there such a thing? What are
all the best and most noted works that claim the title—memoirs, scraps,
materials—composed by men of like passions with the people they speak of,
involved it may be in the same events describing them with the partiality
and narrowness of eager actors; or even worse, by men far apart in a
monkish solitude, familiar with the lettuces of the convent-garden,
but hearing only faint dim murmurs of the great transactions which they
slowly jot down in the barren chronicle; these are not to be named in
the same short breath, or included in the same narrow word, with the
equable, poised, philosophic narrative of the retrospective historian. In
the great histories there are two topics of interest—the man as a type
of the age in which he lives,—the events and manners of the age he is
describing; very often almost all the interest is the contrast of the two.
You should do everything, said Lord Chesterfield, in minuet time. It
was in that time that Gibbon wrote his history, and such was the manner
of the age. You fancy him in a suit of flowered velvet, with a bag
and sword, wisely smiling, composedly rounding his periods. You seem
to see the grave bows, the formal politeness, the finished deference.
You perceive the minuetic action accompanying the words: ‘Give,’ it
would say, ‘Augustus a chair: Zenobia, the humblest of your slaves:
Odoacer, permit me to correct the defect in your attire.’ As the
slap-dash sentences of a rushing critic express the hasty impatience
of modern manners; so the deliberate emphasis, the slow acumen, the
steady argument, the impressive narration bring before us what is now
a tradition, the picture of the correct eighteenth-century gentleman,
who never failed in a measured politeness, partly because it was due in
propriety towards others, and partly because from his own dignity it was
due most obviously to himself.