history. Nothing else was allowed to rob this idea of its majesty. It
brooked no rival near its throne. It dominated his life, for though a
man of pleasure, and, to speak plainly, a good bit of a coxcomb, he had
always the cadences of the _Decline and Fall_ in his ears. It has been
wittily said of him, that he came at last to believe that he was the
Roman Empire, or, at all events, something equally majestic and
imposing. His life had, indeed, its episodes, but so has an epic.
Gibbon's episodes are interesting, abrupt, and always concluded. In his
sixteenth year he, without the aid of a priest or the seductions of
ritual, read himself into the Church of Rome, and was one fine June
morning in 1753 baptized by a Jesuit father. By Christmas, 1754, he had
read himself out again. Gibbon's conversion was perfectly genuine and
should never be spoken of otherwise than respectfully, but it was
entirely a matter of books and reading. 'Persons influence us,' cries
Dr. Newman, 'voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a
man will live and die upon a dogma; no man will be a martyr for a
conclusion.' It takes all sorts to make a world, and our plump historian
was one of those whose actions are determined in libraries, whose lives
are unswayed by personal influences, to whom conclusions may mean a
great deal, but dogmas certainly nothing. Whether Gibbon on leaving off
his Catholicism ever became a Protestant again, except in the sense that
Bayle declared himself one, is doubtful. But all this makes an
interesting episode. The second episode is his well-known love affair
with Mademoiselle Curchod, afterwards Madame Neckar and the mother of
that social portent, Madame de Stael. Gibbon, of course, behaved badly
in this affair. He fell in love, made known his plight, obtained
mademoiselle's consent, and then speeded home to tell his father.
'Love,' said he, 'will make me eloquent.' The elder Gibbon would not
hear of it: the younger tamely acquiesced. His very acquiescence, like
all else about him, has become classical. 'I sighed as a lover, I obeyed
as a son.' He proceeds: 'My wound was insensibly healed by time, absence
and the habits of a new life.' It is shocking. Never, surely, was love
so flouted before. Gibbon is charitably supposed by some persons to have
regretted Paganism, but it was lucky for both him and for me that the
gods had abandoned Olympus, since otherwise it would have required the
pen of a Greek dramatist to depict the horrors that must have eventually
overtaken him for so impious an outrage; as it was, he simply grew
fatter every day. A very recent French biographer of Madame Neckar, who
has published some letters of Gibbon's for the first time, evidently
expects his readers to get very angry with this perfidious son of
Albion. It is much too late to get angry. Of all the many wrongs women
suffer at the hands of men, that of not marrying them, is the one they
ought to find it easiest to forgive; they generally do forgive. Madame
Neckar forgave, and if she, why not you and I? Years after she welcomed
Gibbon to her house, and there he used to sit, fat and famous, tapping
his snuff-box and arranging his ruffles, and watching with a smile of
complacency the infantine, yet I doubt not, the pronounced gambols of
the vivacious Corinne. After Neckar's fall, Gibbon writes to Madame:
'Your husband's condition is always worthy of envy, he knows himself,
his enemies respect him, Europe admires him, _you_ love him.' I decline
to be angry with such a man.
His long residence in Switzerland, an unusual thing in those days, makes
a third episode, which, in so far as it led him to commence author in
the French language, and to study Pascal as a master of style, was not
without its effects on his history, but it never diverted him from his
studies or changed their channels. Though he lived fifteen years in
Lausanne, he never climbed a mountain or ever went to the foot of one,
for though not wholly indifferent to Nature, he loved to see her framed
in a window. He actually has the audacity, in a note to his fifty-ninth
chapter, to sneer at St. Bernard because that true lover of nature on
one occasion, either because his joy in the external world at times
interfered with his devotions, or, as I think, because he was bored by
the vulgar rhapsodies of his monkish companions, abstained from looking
at the lake of Geneva. Gibbon's note is characteristic, 'To admire or
despise St. Bernard as he ought, the reader should have before the
windows of his library the beauty of that incomparable landscape.' St.
Bernard was to Gibbon, as Wordsworth to Pope,
'A forest seer,
A minstrel of the natural year,
A lover true who knew by heart
Each joy the mountain dales impart.'
He was proud to confess that whatever knowledge he had of the scriptures
he had acquired chiefly in the woods and the fields, and that beeches
and oaks had been his best teachers of the Word of God. One cannot fancy
Gibbon in a forest. But if Gibbon had not been fonder of the library
than of the lake, though he might have known more than he did of 'moral
evil and of good,' he would hardly have been the author he was.
But the _Decline and Fall_ was threatened from a quarter more likely to
prove dangerous than the 'incomparable landscape.' On September 10th,
1774, Gibbon writes:
'Yesterday morning about half-past 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. This is a fine prospect opening upon me, and if next
spring I should take my seat and publish my book--(he meant the first
volume only)--it will be a very memorable era in my life. I am ignorant
whether my borough will be Liskeard or St. Germains.'
Mr. Eliot controlled four boroughs and it was Liskeard that became
Gibbon's, and for ten years, though not always for Liskeard, he sat in
parliament. Ten most eventful years they were too, both in our national
and parliamentary history. This might have been not an episode, but a
catastrophe. Mr. Eliot's untimely entrance might not merely have
postponed the destruction of a horde of barbarians, but have destroyed
the history itself. However Mr. Gibbon never opened his mouth in the
House of Commons; 'I assisted,' says he, in his magnificent way, 'at,'
(mark the preposition,) 'at the debates of a free assembly,' that is, he
supported Lord North. He was not from the first content to be a mute; he
prepared a speech and almost made up his mind to catch Sir Fletcher
Norton's eye. The subject, no mean one, was to be the American war; but
his courage oozed away, he did not rise in his place. A month after he
writes from Boodle's: 'I am still a mute, it is more tremendous than I
imagined; the great speakers fill me with despair, the bad ones with
terror.' In 1779 his silent assistance was rewarded with a seat at the
Board of Trade, and a salary of between seven and eight hundred a year.
Readers of Burke's great speech on Economical Reform will remember the
twenty minutes he devoted to this marvellous Board of Trade, with its
perpetual virtual adjournment and unbroken sitting vacation. Such was
Gibbon's passion for style that he listened to the speech with delight,
and gives us the valuable assurance that it was spoken just as it reads,
and that nobody enjoyed either hearing or reading it more than he did.
What a blessing it is to have a good temper! But Gibbon's constituency
did not approve of his becoming a minister's man, and he lost his seat
at the general election of 1783. 'Mr. Eliot,' this is Gibbon's account
of it, 'Mr. Eliot was now deeply engaged in the measures of opposition
and the electors of Liskeard are commonly of the same opinion as Mr.
Eliot.' Lord North found him another seat, and for a short time he sat
in the new parliament for the important seaport of Lymington, but his
office being abolished in 1784, he bade parliament and England farewell,
and, taking his library with him, departed for Lausanne to conclude his
history.
Gibbon, after completing his history, entertained notions of writing
other books, but, as a matter of fact, he had but one thing left him to
do in order to discharge his duty to the universe. He had written a
magnificent history of the Roman Empire. It remained to write the
history of the historian. Accordingly we have the autobiography. These
two immortal works act and react upon one another; the history sends us
to the autobiography, and the autobiography returns us to the history.
The style of the autobiography is better than that of the history. The
awful word 'verbose' has been launched against certain pages of the
history by a critic, formidable and friendly--the great Porson. There is
not a superfluous word in the autobiography. The fact is, in this matter
of style, Gibbon took a great deal more pains with himself than he did
with the empire. He sent the history, except the first volume, straight
to his printer from his first rough copy. He made six different sketches
of the autobiography. It is a most studied performance, and may be
boldly pronounced perfect. Not to know it almost by heart is to deny
yourself a great and wholly innocent pleasure. Of the history it is
permissible to say with Mr. Silas Wegg, 'I haven't been, not to say
right slap through him very lately, having been otherwise employed, Mr.
Boffin;' but the autobiography is no more than a good-sized pamphlet. It
has had the reward of shortness. It is not only our best, but our best
known autobiography. Almost its first sentence is about the style it is
to be in: 'The style shall be simple and familiar, but style is the
image of character, and the habits of correct writing may produce
without labour or design the appearance of art and study.' There is
nothing artless or unstudied about the autobiography, but is it not
sometimes a relief to exchange the quips and cranks of some of our
modern writers, whose humour it is to be as it were for ever slapping
their readers in the face or grinning at them from unexpected corners,
for the stately roll of the Gibbonian sentence? The style settled, he
proceeds to say something about the pride of race, but the pride of
letters soon conquers it, and as we glance down the page we see
advancing to meet us, curling its head, as Shakespeare says of billows
in a storm, the god-like sentence which makes it for ever certain, not
indeed that there will never be a better novel than _Tom Jones_, for
that I suppose is still just possible, but that no novel can ever
receive so magnificent a compliment. The sentence is well known but
irresistible.
'Our immortal Fielding was of the younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh
who draw their origin from the Counts of Hapsburg. Far different have
been the fortunes of the English and German divisions of the family. The
former, the knights and sheriffs of Leicestershire, have slowly risen to
the dignity of a peerage, the latter, the Emperors of Germany and Kings
of Spain, have threatened the liberty of the old and invaded the
treasures of the new world. The successors of Charles the Fifth may
disdain their brethren of England, but the romance of _Tom Jones_, that
exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the Palace of the
Escurial, and the imperial eagle of the House of Austria.'
Well might Thackeray exclaim in his lecture on Fielding, 'There can be
no gainsaying the sentence of this great judge. To have your name
mentioned by Gibbon is like having it written on the dome of St.
Peter's. Pilgrims from all the world admire and behold it.'
After all this preliminary magnificence Gibbon condescends to approach
his own pedigree. There was not much to tell, and the little there was
he did not know. A man of letters whose memory is respected by all
lovers of old books and Elizabethan lyrics, Sir Egerton Brydges, was a
cousin of Gibbon's, and as genealogies were this unfortunate man's
consuming passion, he of course knew all that Gibbon ought to have known
about the family, and speaks with a herald's contempt of the historian's
perfunctory investigations. 'It is a very unaccountable thing,' says Sir
Egerton, 'that Gibbon was so ignorant of the immediate branch of the
family whence he sprang'; but the truth is that Gibbon was far prouder
of his Palace of the Escurial, and his imperial eagle of the House of
Austria, than of his family tree, which was indeed of the most ordinary
hedge-row description. His grandfather was a South Sea director, and
when the bubble burst he was compelled by act of parliament to disclose
on oath his whole fortune. He returned it at £106,543 5s. 6d., exclusive
of antecedent settlements. It was all confiscated, and then £10,000 was
voted the poor man to begin again upon. Such bold oppression, says the
grandson, can scarcely be shielded by the omnipotence of parliament. The
old man did not keep his £10,000 in a napkin, and speedily began, as his
grandson puts it, to erect on the ruins of the old, the edifice of a new
fortune. The ruins must, I think, have been more spacious than the
affidavit would suggest, for when only sixteen years afterwards, the
elder Gibbon died he was found to be possessed of considerable property
in Sussex, Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, and the New River Company, as
well as of a spacious house with gardens and grounds at Putney. A
fractional share of this inheritance secured to our historian the
liberty of action so necessary for the accomplishment of his great
design. Large fortunes have their uses. Mr. Milton, the scrivener, Mr.
Gibbon, the South Sea director, and Dr. Darwin of Shrewsbury had
respectively something to do with _Paradise Lost_, _The Decline and
Fall_, and _The Origin of Species_.
The most, indeed the only, interesting fact about the Gibbon _entourage_
is that the greatest of English mystics, William Law, the inimitable
author of _A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, adapted to the
State and Conditions of all Orders of Christians_, was long tutor to the
historian's father, and in that capacity accompanied the future
historian to Emanuel College, Cambridge, and was afterwards, and till
the end of his days, spiritual director to Miss Hester Gibbon, the
historian's eccentric maiden aunt.
It is an unpleasing impertinence for anyone to assume that nobody save
himself reads any particular book. I read with astonishment the other
day that Sir Humphry Davy's _Consolations in Travel; or, The Closing
Days of a Philosopher's Life_, was a curious and totally forgotten work.
It is, however, always safe to say of a good book that it is not read
as much as it ought to be, and of Law's _Serious Call_ you may add, 'or
as much as it used to be.' It is a book with a strange and moving
spiritual pedigree. Dr. Johnson, one remembers, took it up carelessly at
Oxford, expecting to find it a dull book, 'as,' (the words are his, not
mine,) 'such books generally are; but,' he proceeds, 'I found Law an
overmatch for me, and this was the first occasion of my thinking in
earnest.' George Whitfield writes, 'Soon after my coming up to the
university, seeing a small edition of Mr. Law's _Serious Call_ in a
friend's hand, I soon purchased it. God worked powerfully upon my soul
by that excellent treatise.' The celebrated Thomas Scott, of Aston
Sandford, with the confidence of his school, dates the beginning of his
spiritual life from the hour when he 'carelessly,' as he says, 'took up
Mr. Law's _Serious Call_, a book I had hitherto treated with contempt.'
When we remember how Newman in his _Apologia_ speaks of Thomas Scott as
the writer 'to whom, humanly speaking, I almost owe my soul,' we become
lost amidst a mazy dance of strange, spectral influences which flit
about the centuries and make us what we are. Splendid achievement though
the _History of the Decline and Fall_ may be, glorious monument though
it is, more lasting than brass, of learning and industry, yet in sundry
moods it seems but a poor and barren thing by the side of a book which,
like Law's _Serious Call_, has proved its power
'To pierce the heart and tame the will.'
But I must put the curb on my enthusiasm, or I shall find myself
re-echoing the sentiment of a once celebrated divine who brought down
Exeter Hall by proclaiming, at the top of his voice, that he would
sooner be the author of _The Washerwoman on Salisbury Plain_ than of
_Paradise Lost_.
But Law's _Serious Call_, to do it only bare literary justice, is a
great deal more like _Paradise Lost_ than _The Washerwoman on Salisbury
Plain_, and deserves better treatment at the hands of religious people
than to be reprinted, as it too often is, in a miserable, truncated,
witless form which would never have succeeded in arresting the
wandering attention of Johnson or in saving the soul of Thomas Scott.
The motto of all books of original genius is:
'Love me or leave me alone.'
Gibbon read Law's _Serious Call_, but it left him where it found him.
'Had not,' so he writes, 'Law's vigorous mind been clouded by
enthusiasm, he might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious
writers of his time.'
Upon the death of Law in 1761, it is sad to have to state that Miss
Hester Gibbon cast aside the severe rule of female dress which he had
expounded in his _Serious Call_, and she had practised for sixty years
of her life. She now appeared like Malvolio, resplendent in yellow
stockings. Still, it was something to have kept the good lady's feet
from straying into such evil garments for so long. Miss Gibbon had a
comfortable estate; and our historian, as her nearest male relative,
kept his eye upon the reversion. The fifteenth and sixteenth chapters
had created a coolness, but he addressed her a letter in which he
assured her that, allowing for differences of expression, he had the
satisfaction of feeling that practically he and she thought alike on the
great subject of religion. Whether she believed him or not I cannot say;
but she left him her estate in Sussex. I must stop a moment to consider
the hard and far different fate of Porson. Gibbon had taken occasion to
refer to the seventh verse of the fifth chapter of the First Epistle of
St. John as spurious. It has now disappeared from our Bibles, without
leaving a trace even in the margin. So judicious a writer as Dean Alford
long ago, in his Greek Testament, observed, 'There is not a shadow of a
reason for supposing it genuine.' An archdeacon of Gibbon's period
thought otherwise, and asserted the genuineness of the text, whereupon
Porson wrote a book and proved it to be no portion of the inspired text.
On this a female relative who had Porson down in her will for a
comfortable annuity of £300, revoked that part of her testamentary
disposition, and substituted a paltry bequest of £30: 'for,' said she,
'I hear he has been writing against the Holy Scriptures.' As Porson only
got £16 for writing the book, it certainly cost him dear. But the book
remains a monument of his learning and wit. The last quarter of the
annuity must long since have been paid.
Gibbon, the only one of a family of five who managed to grow up at all,
had no school life; for though a short time at Westminster, his feeble
health prevented regularity of attendance. His father never won his
respect, nor his mother (who died when he was ten) his affection. 'I am
tempted,' he says, 'to enter my protest against the trite and lavish
praise of the happiness of our boyish years which is echoed with so much
affectation in the world. That happiness I have never known.' Upon which
passage Ste. Beuve characteristically remarks 'that it is those who have
been deprived of a mother's solicitude, of the down and flower of tender
affection, of the vague yet penetrating charm of dawning impressions,
who are most easily denuded of the sentiment of religion.'
Gibbon was, however, born free of the 'fair brotherhood' Macaulay so
exquisitely described in his famous poem, written after the Edinburgh
election. Reading became his sole employment. He enjoyed all the
advantages of the most irregular of educations, and in his fifteenth
year arrived at Oxford, to use his celebrated words, though for that
matter almost every word in the _Autobiography_ is celebrated, with a
stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of
ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed--for example, he
did not know the Greek alphabet, nor is there any reason to suppose that
he would have been taught it at Oxford.
I do not propose to refer to what he says about his university. I hate
giving pain, besides which there have been new statutes since 1752. In
Gibbon's time there were no public examinations at all, and no
class-lists--a Saturnian reign which I understand it is now sought to
restore. Had Gibbon followed his father's example and gone to Cambridge,
he would have found the Mathematical Tripos fairly started on its
beneficent career, and might have taken as good a place in it as Dr.
Dodd had just done, a divine who is still year after year referred to
in the University Calendar as the author of _Thoughts in Prison_, the
circumstance that the thinker was later on taken from prison, and hung
by the neck until he was dead being no less wisely than kindly omitted
from a publication, one of the objects of which is to inspire youth with
confidence that the path of mathematics is the way to glory.
On his profession of Catholicism, Gibbon, _ipso facto_ ceased to be a
member of the university, and his father, with a sudden accession of
good sense, packed off the young pervert, who at that time had a very
big head and a very small body, and was just as full of controversial
theology as he could hold, to a Protestant pastor's at Lausanne, where
in an uncomfortable house, with an ill-supplied table and a scarcity of
pocket-money, the ex-fellow-commoner of Magdalen was condemned to live
from his sixteenth to his twenty-first year. His time was mainly spent
in reading. Here he learnt Greek; here also he fell in love with
Mademoiselle Curchod. In the spring of 1758 he came home. He was at
first very shy, and went out but little, pursuing his studies even in
lodgings in Bond Street. But he was shortly to be shaken out of his
dumps, and made an Englishman and a soldier.
If anything could provoke Gibbon's placid shade, it would be the light
and airy way his military experiences are often spoken of, as if, like a
modern volunteer, he had but attended an Easter Monday review. I do not
believe the history of literature affords an equally striking example of
self-sacrifice. He was the most sedentary of men. He hated exercise, and
rarely took any. Once after spending some weeks in the summer at Lord
Sheffield's country place, when about to go, his hat was missing.
'When,' he was asked, 'did you last see it?' 'On my arrival,' he
replied. 'I left it on the hall-table; I have had no occasion for it
since.' Lord Sheffield's guests always knew that they would find Mr.
Gibbon in the library, and meet him at the dinner-table. He abhorred a
horse. His one vocation, and his only avocation, was reading, not lazy
glancing and skipping, but downright savage reading--geography,
chronology, and all the tougher sides of history. What glorious, what
martial times, indeed, must those have been that made Mr. Gibbon leap
into the saddle, desert his books, and for two mortal years and a half
live in camps! He was two months at Blandford, three months at
Cranbrook, six months at Dover, four months at Devizes, as many at
Salisbury, and six more at Southampton, where the troops were disbanded.
During all this time Captain Gibbon was energetically employed. He
dictated the orders and exercised the battalion. It did him a world of
good. What a pity Carlyle could not have been subjected to the same
discipline! The cessation, too, of his habit of continued reading, gave
him time for a little thinking, and when he returned to his father's
house, in Hampshire, he had become fixed in his determination to write a
history, though of what was still undecided.
I am rather afraid to say it, for no two men could well be more unlike
one another, but Gibbon always reminds me in an odd inverted way of
Milton. I suppose it is because as the one is our grandest author, so
the other is our most grandiose. Both are self-conscious and make no
apology--Milton magnificently self-conscious, Gibbon splendidly so.
Everyone knows the great passages in which Milton, in 1642, asked the
readers of his pamphlet on the reason of Church government urged against
prelacy, to go on trust with him for some years for his great unwritten
poem, as 'being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the
vapour of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some
vulgar amorist or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be
obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her seven daughters, but
by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all
utterance and knowledge, and sends out His seraphim with the hallow'd
fire of His Altar to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases: to
this must be added industrious and select reading, study, observation
and insight into all seemly opinions, arts, and affairs.' Different men,
different minds. There are things terrestrial as well as things
celestial. Certainly Gibbon's _Autobiography_ contains no passages like
those which are to be found in Milton's pamphlets; but for all that he,
in his mundane way, consecrated himself for his self-imposed task, and
spared no toil to equip himself for it. He, too, no less than Milton,
had his high hope and his hard attempting. He tells us in his stateliest
way how he first thought of one subject, and then another, and what
progress he had made in his different schemes before he abandoned them,
and what reasons induced him so to do. Providence watched over the
future historian of the Roman Empire as surely as it did over the future
author of _Paradise Lost_, as surely as it does over everyone who has it
in him to do anything really great. Milton, we know, in early life was
enamoured of King Arthur, and had it in his mind to make that blameless
king the hero of his promised epic, but
'What resounds
In fable or romance of Uther's son,
Begirt with British and Amoric knights,'
can brook a moment's comparison with the baffled hero of _Paradise
Lost_; so too, what a mercy that Gibbon did not fritter away his
splendid energy, as he once contemplated doing, on Sir Walter Raleigh,
or squander his talents on a history of Switzerland or even of Florence!