to spend the money it was originally proposed to lay out in buying him a
seat in Parliament, upon foreign travel, and early in 1763 he reached
Paris, where he abode three months. An accomplished scholar whose too
early death all who knew him can never cease to deplore, Mr. Cotter
Morison, whose sketch of Gibbon is, by general consent, admitted to be
one of the most valuable books of a delightful series, does his best,
with but partial success, to conceal his annoyance at Gibbon's stupidly
placid enjoyment of Paris and French cookery. 'He does not seem to be
aware,' says Mr. Morison, 'that he was witnessing one of the most
singular social phases which have ever yet been presented in the history
of man.' Mr. Morison does not, indeed, blame Gibbon for this, but
having, as he had, the most intimate acquaintance with this period of
French history, and knowing the tremendous issues involved in it, he
could not but be chagrined to notice how Gibbon remained callous and
impervious. And, indeed, when the Revolution came it took no one more by
surprise than it did the man who had written the _Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire_. Writing, in 1792, to Lord Sheffield, Gibbon says,
'Remember the proud fabric of the French monarchy: not four years ago it
stood founded, and might it not seem on the rock of time, force, and
opinion, supported by the triple authority of the Church, the Nobility,
and the Parliament?' But the Revolution came for all that; and what,
when it did come, did it teach Mr. Gibbon? 'Do not, I beseech you,
tamper with Parliamentary representation. If you begin to improve the
Constitution, you may be driven step by step from the disfranchisement
of Old Sarum to the King in Newgate; the Lords voted useless, the
bishops abolished, the House of Commons _sans culottes_.' The importance
of shutting off the steam and sitting on the safety-valve was what the
French Revolution taught Mr. Gibbon. Mr. Bagehot says: 'Gibbon's horror
of the French Revolution was derived from the fact that he had arrived
at the conclusion that he was the sort of person a populace invariably
kills.' An excellent reason, in my opinion, for hating revolution, but
not for misunderstanding it.
After leaving Paris Gibbon lived nearly a year in Lausanne, reading hard
to prepare himself for Italy. He made his own handbook. At last he felt
himself fit to cross the Alps, which he did seated in an osier basket
planted on a man's shoulders. He did not envy Hannibal his elephant. He
lingered four months in Florence, and then entered Rome in a spirit of
the most genuine and romantic enthusiasm. His zeal made him positively
active, though it is impossible to resist a smile at the picture he
draws of himself 'treading with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum.' He
was in Rome eighteen weeks; there he had, as we saw at the beginning,
his heavenly vision, to which he was not disobedient. He paid a visit of
six weeks' duration to Naples, and then returned home more rapidly.
'The spectacle of Venice,' he says, 'afforded some hours of
astonishment.' Gibbon has sometimes been called 'long-winded,' but when
he chooses, nobody can be shorter with either a city or a century.
He returned to England in 1765, and for five rather dull years lived in
his father's house in the country or in London lodgings. In 1770 his
father died, and in 1772 Gibbon took a house in Bentinck Street,
Manchester Square, filled it with books--for in those days it must not
be forgotten there was no public library of any kind in London--and
worked hard at his first volume, which appeared in February, 1775. It
made him famous, also infamous, since it concluded with the fifteenth
and sixteenth chapters on Christianity. In 1781 two more volumes
appeared. In 1783 he gave up Parliament and London, and rolled over
Westminster Bridge in a post-chaise, on his way to Lausanne, where he
had his home for the rest of his days. In May, 1788, the three last
volumes appeared. He died in St. James's Street whilst on a visit to
London, on the 15th of January, 1794, of a complaint of a most
pronounced character, which he had with characteristic and almost
criminal indolence totally neglected for thirty years. He was buried in
Fletching Churchyard, Sussex, in the family burial-place of his faithful
friend and model editor, the first Lord Sheffield. He had not completed
his fifty-eighth year.
* * * * *
Before concluding with a few very humble observations on Gibbon's
writings, something ought to be said about him as a social being. In
this aspect he had distinguished merit, though his fondness of, and
fitness for, society came late. He had no schooldays, no college days,
no gilded youth. From sixteen to twenty-one he lived poorly in Lausanne,
and came home more Swiss than English. Nor was his father of any use to
him. It took him a long time to rub off his shyness; but the militia,
Paris, and Rome, and, above all, the proud consciousness of a noble
design, made a man of him, and after 1772, he became a well-known figure
in London society. He was a man of fashion as well as of letters. In
this respect, and, indeed, in all others, except their common love of
learning, he differed from Dr. Johnson. Lords and ladies, remarked that
high authority, don't like having their mouths shut. Gibbon never shut
anybody's mouth, and in Johnson's presence rarely opened his own.
Johnson's dislike of Gibbon does not seem to have been based upon his
heterodoxy, but his ugliness. 'He is such an amazing ugly fellow,' said
that Adonis. Boswell follows suit, and, with still less claim to be
critical, complains loudly of Gibbon's ugliness. He also hated him very
sincerely. 'The fellow poisons the whole club to me,' he cries. I feel
sorry for Boswell, who has deserved well of the human race. Ironical
people like Gibbon are rarely tolerant of brilliant folly. Gibbon, no
doubt, was ugly. We get a glance at him in one of Horace Walpole's
letters, which, sparkling as it does with vanity, spite, and humour, is
always pleasant. He is writing to Mr. Mason:
'You will be diverted to hear that Mr. Gibbon has quarrelled with me. He
lent me his second volume in the middle of November; I returned it with
a most civil panegyric. He came for more incense. I gave it, but, alas!
with too much sincerity; I added: "Mr. Gibbon, I am sorry _you_ should
have pitched on so disgusting a subject as the Constantinopolitan
history. There is so much of the Arians and Eunomians and
semi-Pelagians; and there is such a strange contrast between Roman and
Gothic manners, that, though you have written the story as well as it
could be written, I fear few will have patience to read it." He
coloured, all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp angles;
he screwed up his button-mouth, and rapping his snuff-box, said, "It had
never been put together before"--so _well_ he meant to add, but gulped
it. He meant so _well_, certainly, for Tillemont, whom he quotes in
every page, has done the very thing. Well, from that hour to this, I
have never seen him, though he used to call once or twice a week; nor
has he sent me the third volume, as he promised. I well knew his vanity,
even about his ridiculous face and person, but thought he had too much
sense to avow it so palpably.' 'So much,' adds Walpole, with sublime
nescience of the verdict of posterity upon his own most amusing self,
'so much for literature and its fops.'
Male ugliness is an endearing quality, and in a man of great talents it
assists his reputation. It mollifies our inferiority to be able to add
to our honest admiration of anyone's great intellectual merit, 'But did
you ever see such a chin!'
Nobody except Johnson, who was morbid on the subject of looks, liked
Gibbon the less for having a button-mouth and a ridiculous nose. He was,
Johnson and Boswell apart, a popular member of the club. Sir Joshua and
he were, in particular, great cronies, and went about to all kinds of
places, and mixed in every sort of society. In May, June, and July,
1779, Gibbon sat for his picture--that famous portrait to be found at
the beginning of every edition of the History. Sir Joshua notes in his
Diary: 'No new sitters--hard at work repainting the "Nativity," and busy
with sittings of Gibbon.'
If we are to believe contemporary gossip, this was not the first time
Reynolds had depicted the historian. Some years earlier the great
painter had executed a celebrated portrait of Dr. Beattie, still
pleasingly remembered by the lovers of old-fashioned poetry as the poet
of _The Minstrel_, but who, in 1773, was better known as the author of
an _Essay on Truth_. This personage, who in later life, it is melancholy
to relate, took to drinking, is represented in Reynolds's picture in his
Oxford gown of Doctor of Laws, with his famous essay under his arm,
while beside him is Truth, habited as an angel, holding in one hand a
pair of scales, and with the other thrusting down three frightful
figures emblematic of Sophistry, Scepticism, and Infidelity. That
Voltaire and Hume stood for two of these figures was no secret, but it
was whispered Gibbon was the third. Even if so, an incident so trifling
was not likely to ruffle the composure, or prevent the intimacy, of two
such good-tempered men as Reynolds and Gibbon. The latter was immensely
proud of Reynolds's portrait--the authorised portrait, of course--the
one for which he had paid. He had it hanging up in his library at
Lausanne, and, if we may believe Charles Fox, was fonder of looking at
it than out of the window upon that incomparable landscape, with
indifference to which he had twitted St. Bernard.
But, as I have said, Gibbon was a man of fashion as well as a man of
letters. In another volume of Walpole we have a glimpse of him playing a
rubber of whist. His opponents were Horace himself, and Lady Beck. His
partner was a lady whom Walpole irreverently calls the Archbishopess of
Canterbury.[5] At Brooks's, White's, and Boodle's, Gibbon was a prime
favourite. His quiet manner, ironical humour, and perpetual good temper
made him excellent company. He is, indeed, reported once, at Brooks's,
to have expressed a desire to see the heads of Lord North and half a
dozen ministers on the table; but as this was only a few days before he
accepted a seat at the Board of Trade at their hands, his wrath was
evidently of the kind that does not allow the sun to go down upon it.
His moods were usually mild:
'Soon as to Brooks's thence thy footsteps bend,
What gratulations thy approach attend!
See Gibbon rap his box, auspicious sign
That classic wit and compliment combine.'
To praise Gibbon heartily, you must speak in low tones. 'His cheek,'
says Mr. Morison, 'rarely flushes in enthusiasm for a good cause.' He
was, indeed, not obviously on the side of the angels. But he was a
dutiful son to a trying father, an affectionate and thoughtful stepson
to a stepmother who survived him, and the most faithful and warm-hearted
of friends. In this article of friendship he not only approaches, but
reaches, the romantic. While in his teens he made friends with a Swiss
of his own age. A quarter of a century later on, we find the boyish
companions chumming together, under the same roof at Lausanne, and
delighting in each other's society. His attachment to Lord Sheffield is
a beautiful thing. It is impossible to read Gibbon's letters without
responding to the feeling which breathes through Lord Sheffield's
preface to the miscellaneous writings:
'The letters will prove how pleasant, friendly, and amiable Mr. Gibbon
was in private life; and if in publishing letters so flattering to
myself I incur the imputation of vanity, I meet the charge with a frank
confession that I am indeed highly vain of having enjoyed for so many
years the esteem, the confidence, and the affection of a man whose
social qualities endeared him to the most accomplished society, whose
talents, great as they were, must be acknowledged to have been fully
equalled by the sincerity of his friendship.'
To have been pleasant, friendly, amiable and sincere in friendship, to
have written the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, and the
_Autobiography_, must be Gibbon's excuse for his unflushing cheek.
To praise Gibbon is not wholly superfluous; to commend his history would
be so. In May, 1888, it attained, as a whole, its hundredth year. Time
has not told upon it. It stands unaltered, and with its authority
unimpaired. It would be invidious to name the histories it has seen
born and die. Its shortcomings have been pointed out--it is well; its
inequalities exposed--that is fair; its style criticised--that is just.
But it is still read. 'Whatever else is read,' says Professor Freeman,
'Gibbon must be.'
The tone he thought fit to adopt towards Christianity was, quite apart
from all particular considerations, a mistaken one. No man is big enough
to speak slightingly of the constructions his fellow-men have from time
to time put upon the Infinite. And conduct which in a philosopher is
ill-judged, is in an historian ridiculous. Gibbon's sneers could not
alter the fact that his History, which he elected to style the _Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire_, might equally well, as Dean Stanley has
observed, have been called the 'Rise and Progress of the Christian
Church.' This tone of Gibbon's was the more unfortunate because he was
not of those men who are by the order of their minds incapable of
theology. He was an admirable theologian, and, even as it is, we have
Cardinal Newman's authority for the assertion, that Gibbon is the only
Church historian worthy of the name who has written in English.
Gibbon's love of the unseemly may also be deprecated. His is not the
boisterous impropriety which may sometimes be observed staggering across
the pages of Mr. Carlyle, but the more offensive variety which is
overheard sniggering in the notes.
The importance, the final value, of Gibbon's History has been assailed
in high quarters. Coleridge, in a well-known passage in his _Table
Talk_--too long to be quoted--said Gibbon was a man of immense reading;
but he had no philosophy. 'I protest,' he adds, 'I do not remember a
single philosophical attempt made throughout the work to fathom the
ultimate causes of the decline and fall of the empire.' This spoiled
Gibbon for Coleridge, who has told us that 'though he had read all the
famous histories, and he believed some history of every country or
nation, that is or ever existed, he had never done so for the story
itself--the only thing interesting to him being the principles to be
evolved from and illustrated by the facts.'
I am not going to insult the majestic though thickly-veiled figure of
the Philosophy of History. Every sensible man, though he might blush to
be called a philosopher, must wish to be the wiser for his reading; but
it may, I think, be fairly said that the first business of an historian
is to tell his story, nobly and splendidly, with vivacity and vigour.
Then I do not see why we children of a larger growth may not be
interested in the annals of mankind simply as a story, without worrying
every moment to evolve principles from each part of it. If I choose to
be interested in the colour of Mary Queen of Scots' eyes, or the
authorship of the _Letters of Junius_, I claim the right to be so. Of
course, if I imagine either of these subjects to be matters of
importance--if I devote my life to their elucidation, if I bore my
friends with presentation pamphlets about them--why, then, I am either a
feeble fribble or an industrious fool; but if I do none of these things
I ought to be left in peace, and not ridiculed by those who seem to
regard the noble stream of events much as Brindley did rivers--mainly
as something which fills their ugly canals of dreary and frequently
false comment.
But, thirdly, whilst yielding the first place to philosophy, divine
philosophy, as I suppose, when one comes to die, one will be glad to
have done, it is desirable that the text and the comment should be kept
separate and apart. The historian who loads his frail craft with that
perilous and shifting freight, philosophy, adds immensely to the dangers
of his voyage across the ocean of Time. Gibbon was no fool, yet it is as
certain as anything can be, that had he put much of his philosophy into
his history, both would have gone to the bottom long ago. And even
better philosophy than Gibbon's would have been, is apt to grow mouldy
in a quarter of a century, and to need three new coats of good oily
rhetoric, to make it presentable to each new generation.
Gibbon was neither a great thinker nor a great man. He had neither light
nor warmth. This is what, doubtless, prompted Sir James Mackintosh's
famous exclamation, that you might scoop Gibbon's mind out of Burke's
without missing it. But hence, I say, the fitness of things that chained
Gibbon to his library chair, and set him as his task, to write the
history of the Roman Empire, whilst leaving Burke at large to illuminate
the problems of his own time.
Gibbon avowedly wrote for fame. He built his History meaning it to last.
He got £6,000 for writing it. The booksellers netted £60,000 by printing
it. Gibbon did not mind. He knew it would be the volumes of his History,
and not the banking books of his publishers, who no doubt ran their
trade risks, which would keep their place upon men's shelves. He did an
honest piece of work, and he has had a noble reward. Had he attempted to
know the ultimate causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he
must have failed, egregiously, childishly. He abated his pretensions as
a philosopher, was content to attempt some picture of the thing
acted--of the great pageant of history--and succeeded.
WILLIAM COWPER
The large and weighty family of Gradgrinds may, from their various
well-cushioned coigns of advantage, give forcible utterance to their
opinions as to what are the really important things in this life; but
the fact remains, distasteful as it may be to those of us who accomplish
the disciplinary end of vexing our fathers' souls by other means than
'penning stanzas,' that the lives of poets, even of people who have
passed for poets, eclipse in general and permanent interest the lives of
other men. Whilst above the sod, these poets were often miserable
enough. But charm hangs over their graves. The sternest pedestrian, even
he who is most bent on making his inn by the precise path he has, with
much study of the map, previously prescribed for himself, will yet often
veer to the right or to the left, to visit the lonely churchyard where,
as he hears by the way, lie the ashes of some brother of the tuneful
quill. It may well be that this brother's verses are not frequently on
our lips. It is not the lot of every bard to make quotations. It may
sometimes happen to you, as you stand mournfully surveying the little
heap, to rack your brains unavailingly for so much as a single couplet;
nay, so treacherous is memory, the very title of his best-known poem
may, for the moment, have slipped you. But your heart is melted all the
same, and you feel it would indeed have been a churlish thing to go on
your original way, unmindful of the fact that
'In yonder grave a Druid lies!'
And you have your reward. When you have reached your desired haven, and
are sitting alone after dinner in the coffee-room, neat-handed Phyllis
(were you not fresh from a poet's grave, a homelier name might have
served her turn) having administered to your final wants, and
disappeared with a pretty flounce, the ruby-coloured wine the dead poet
loved, the bottled sunshine of a bygone summer, glows the warmer in
your cup as you muse over minstrels now no more, whether
'Of mighty poets in their misery dead,'
or of such a one as he whose neglected grave you have just visited.
It was a pious act, you feel, to visit that grave. You commend yourself
for doing so. As the night draws on, this very simple excursion down a
rutty lane and across a meadow, begins to wear the hues of devotion and
of love; and unless you are very stern with yourself, the chances are
that by the time you light your farthing dip, and are proceeding on your
dim and perilous way to your bedroom at the end of a creaking passage,
you will more than half believe you were that poet's only unselfish
friend, and that he died saying so.
All this is due to the charm of poetry. Port has nothing to do with it.
Indeed, as a plain matter of fact, who would drink port at a village
inn? Nobody feels a bit like this after visiting the tombs of soldiers,
lawyers, statesmen, or divines. These pompous places, viewed through the
haze of one's recollections of the 'careers' of the men whose names
they vainly try to perpetuate, seem but, if I may slightly alter some
words of old Cowley's, 'An ill show after a sorry sight.'
It would be quite impossible, to enumerate one half of the reasons which
make poets so interesting. I will mention one, and then pass on to the
subject-matter. They often serve to tell you the age of men and books.
This is most interesting. There is Mr. Matthew Arnold. How impossible it
would be to hazard even a wide solution of the problem of his age, but
for the way he has of writing about Lord Byron! Then we know
'The thought of Byron, of his cry
Stormily, sweet, his Titan agony.'
And again:
'What boots it now that Byron bore,
With haughty scorn which mocked the smart,
Through Europe to the Ætolian shore,
The pageant of his bleeding heart?'
Ask any man born in the fifties, or even the later forties, what he
thinks of Byron's Titan agony, and his features will probably wear a
smile. Insist upon his giving his opinion about the pageant of the
Childe's bleeding heart, and more likely than not he will laugh
outright. But, I repeat, how interesting to be able to tell the age of
one distinguished poet from his way of writing of another!
So, too, with books. Miss Austen's novels are dateless things. Nobody in
his senses would speak of them as 'old novels.' _John Inglesant_ is an
old novel, so is _Ginx's Baby_. But _Emma_ is quite new, and, like a
wise woman, affords few clues as to her age. But when, taking up _Sense
and Sensibility_, we read Marianne Dashwood's account of her sister's
lover--
'And besides all this, I am afraid, mamma, he has no real taste. Music
seems scarcely to attract him, and though he admires Elinor's drawings
very much, it is not the admiration of a person who can understand their
worth. He admires as a lover, and not as a connoisseur. Oh, mamma! how
spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in reading last night! I felt
for my sister most severely. I could hardly keep my seat to hear those
beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced
with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!' 'He would
certainly [says Mrs. Dashwood] have done more justice to simple and
elegant prose. I thought so, at the time, but you _would_ give him
Cowper.' 'Nay, mamma, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!'--when we
read this, we know pretty well when Miss Austen was born. It is surely
pleasant to be reminded of a time when sentimental girls used Cowper as
a test of a lover's sensibility. One of our modern swains is no more
likely to be condemned as a Philistine for not reading _The Task_ with
unction, than he is to be hung for sheep-stealing, or whipped at the
cart's tail for speaking evil of constituted authorities; but the
position probably still has its perils, and the Marianne Dashwoods of
the hour are quite capable of putting their admirers on to _Rose Mary_,
or _The Blessed Damosel_, and then flouting their insensibility. The
fact, of course, is, that each generation has a way of its own, and
poets are interesting because they are the mirrors in which their
generation saw its own face; and what is more, they are magic mirrors,
since they retain the power of reflecting the image long after what was
pleased to call itself the substance has disappeared into thin air.