wretchedness, the sins, and the unstableness that was in the worlde;
therefore she left all the worlde, and wente into the deserte, and lived
there many years with roots and grasse, and such fruit as she might
gete; and dranke water of the welle-spryng, for othere livelihood had
she none. Atte laste, when she had longe dwelled there in that place,
the Devil in likenesse of a woman, come to this holy woman's place; and
when he come there he knocked at the door. The holy woman come to the
door and asked what she would? She saide, "I pray thee, dame, that thou
wilt harbor me this night; for this day is at an end, and I am afeard
that wild beasts should devour me." The good woman saide, "For God's
love ye are welcome to me; and take such as God sendeth." They sat them
down together, and the good woman sat and read saints' lives and other
good things, till she come to this writing, "Every tree that bringeth
not forth good fruit shall be caste downe, and burnt in helle." "That is
sooth," saide the Fiend, "and therefore I am adread; for if we lead oure
life alone, therefore we shall have little meed, for when we dwelle
alone we profit none but oure self. Therefore it were better, me
thinketh, to go and dwelle among folke, for to give example to man and
woman dwelling in this worlde. Then shall we have much meed." When this
was saide they went to reste. This good woman thought faste in her heart
that she might not sleep nor have no rest, for the thing that the Fiend
had said. Anon this woman arose and saide to the other woman, "This
night might I have no reste for the words that thou saide yester even.
Therefore I wot never what is best to be done for us." Then the Devil
said to her again, "It is best to go forth to profit to othere that
shall be glad of oure coming, for that is much more worth than to live
alone." Then saide the woman to the Fiend, "Go we now forthe on oure
way, for me thinketh it is not evil to essay." And when she should go
oute at the door, she stood still, and said thus, "Now, sweet Lady,
Mother of mercy, and help at all need, now counsell me the beste, and
keep me both body and soule from deadly sin." When she had said these
words with good heart and with good will, oure Lady come and laide her
hande on her breast, and put her in again, and bade her that she should
abide there, and not be led by falsehood of oure Enemy. The Fiend anon
went away that she saw him no more there. Then she was full fain that
she was kept and not beguiled of her enemy. Then she said on this wise
to oure Blessed Lady that is full of mercy and goodnesse, "I thanke thee
nowe with all my heart, specially for this keeping and many more that
thou hast done to me oft since; and good Lady, keep me from
henceforward." Lo! here may men and women see how ready this good Lady
is to help her servants at all their need, when they call to her for
help, that they fall not in sin bestirring of the wicked enemy the false
Fiend.
[Illustration: EDWARD GIBBON.]
EDWARD GIBBON
(1737-1794)
BY W. E. H. LECKY
The history of Gibbon has been described by John Stuart Mill as the only
eighteenth-century history that has withstood nineteenth-century
criticism; and whatever objections modern critics may bring against some
of its parts, the substantial justice of this verdict will scarcely be
contested. No other history of that century has been so often reprinted,
annotated, and discussed, or remains to the present day a capital
authority on the great period of which it treats. As a composition it
stands unchallenged and conspicuous among the masterpieces of English
literature, while as a history it covers a space of more than twelve
hundred years, including some of the most momentous events in the annals
of mankind.
Gibbon was born at Putney, Surrey, April 27th, 1737. Though his father
was a member of Parliament and the owner of a moderate competence, the
author of this great work was essentially a self-educated man. Weak
health and almost constant illness in early boyhood broke up his school
life,--which appears to have been fitfully and most imperfectly
conducted,--withdrew him from boyish games, but also gave him, as it has
given to many other shy and sedentary boys, an early and inveterate
passion for reading. His reading, however, was very unlike that of an
ordinary boy. He has given a graphic picture of the ardor with which,
when he was only fourteen, he flung himself into serious but unguided
study; which was at first purely desultory, but gradually contracted
into historic lines, and soon concentrated itself mainly on that
Oriental history which he was one day so brilliantly to illuminate.
"Before I was sixteen," he says, "I had exhausted all that could be
learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks; and
the same ardor led me to guess at the French of D'Herbelot, and to
construe the barbarous Latin of Pocock's 'Abulfaragius.'"
His health however gradually improved, and when he entered Magdalen
College, Oxford, it might have been expected that a new period of
intellectual development would have begun; but Oxford had at this time
sunk to the lowest depth of stagnation, and to Gibbon it proved
extremely uncongenial. He complained that he found no guidance, no
stimulus, and no discipline, and that the fourteen months he spent
there were the most idle and unprofitable of his life. They were very
unexpectedly cut short by his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith,
which he formally adopted at the age of sixteen.
This conversion is, on the whole, the most surprising incident of his
calm and uneventful life. The tendencies of the time, both in England
and on the Continent, were in a wholly different direction. The more
spiritual and emotional natures were now passing into the religious
revival of Wesley and Whitefield, which was slowly transforming the
character of the Anglican Church and laying the foundations of the great
Evangelical party. In other quarters the predominant tendencies were
towards unbelief, skepticism, or indifference. Nature seldom formed a
more skeptical intellect than that of Gibbon, and he was utterly without
the spiritual insight, or spiritual cravings, or overmastering
enthusiasms, that produce and explain most religious changes. Nor was he
in the least drawn towards Catholicism on its aesthetic side. He had
never come in contact with its worship or its professors; and to his
unimaginative, unimpassioned, and profoundly intellectual temperament,
no ideal type could be more uncongenial than that of the saint. He had
however from early youth been keenly interested in theological
controversies. He argued, like Lardner and Paley, that miracles are the
Divine attestation of orthodoxy. Middleton convinced him that unless the
Patristic writers were wholly undeserving of credit, the gift of
miracles continued in the Church during the fourth and fifth centuries;
and he was unable to resist the conclusion that during that period many
of the leading doctrines of Catholicism had passed into the Church. The
writings of the Jesuit Parsons, and still more the writings of Bossuet,
completed the work which Middleton had begun. Having arrived at this
conclusion, Gibbon acted on it with characteristic honesty, and was
received into the Church on the 8th of June, 1753.
The English universities were at this time purely Anglican bodies, and
the conversion of Gibbon excluded him from Oxford. His father
judiciously sent him to Lausanne to study with a Swiss pastor named
Pavilliard, with whom he spent five happy and profitable years. The
theological episode was soon terminated. Partly under the influence of
his teacher, but much more through his own reading and reflections, he
soon disentangled the purely intellectual ties that bound him to the
Church of Rome; and on Christmas Day, 1754, he received the sacrament in
the Protestant church of Lausanne.
His residence at Lausanne was very useful to him. He had access to books
in abundance, and his tutor, who was a man of great good sense and
amiability but of no remarkable capacity, very judiciously left his
industrious pupil to pursue his studies in his own way. "Hiving wisdom
with each studious year," as Byron so truly says, he speedily amassed a
store of learning which has seldom been equaled. His insatiable love of
knowledge, his rare capacity for concentrated, accurate, and fruitful
study, guided by a singularly sure and masculine judgment, soon made
him, in the true sense of the word, one of the best scholars of his
time. His learning, however, was not altogether of the kind that may be
found in a great university professor. Though the classical languages
became familiar to him, he never acquired or greatly valued the minute
and finished scholarship which is the boast of the chief English
schools; and careful students have observed that in following Greek
books he must have very largely used the Latin translations. Perhaps in
his capacity of historian this deficiency was rather an advantage than
the reverse. It saved him from the exaggerated value of classical form,
and from the neglect of the more corrupt literatures, to which English
scholars have been often prone. Gibbon always valued books mainly for
what they contained, and he had early learned the lesson which all good
historians should learn: that some of his most valuable materials will
be found in literatures that have no artistic merit; in writers who,
without theory and almost without criticism, simply relate the facts
which they have seen, and express in unsophisticated language the
beliefs and impressions of their time.
Lausanne and not Oxford was the real birthplace of his intellect, and he
returned from it almost a foreigner. French had become as familiar to
him as his own tongue; and his first book, a somewhat superficial essay
on the study of literature, was published in the French language. The
noble contemporary French literature filled him with delight, and he
found on the borders of the Lake of Geneva a highly cultivated society
to which he was soon introduced, and which probably gave him more real
pleasure than any in which he afterwards moved. With Voltaire himself he
had some slight acquaintance, and he at one time looked on him with
profound admiration; though fuller knowledge made him sensible of the
flaws in that splendid intellect. I am here concerned with the life of
Gibbon only in as far as it discloses the influences that contributed to
his master work, and among these influences the foreign element holds a
prominent place. There was little in Gibbon that was distinctively
English; his mind was essentially cosmopolitan. His tastes, ideals, and
modes of thought and feeling turned instinctively to the Continent.
In one respect this foreign type was of great advantage to his work.
Gibbon excels all other English historians in symmetry, proportion,
perspective, and arrangement, which are also the pre-eminent and
characteristic merits of the best French literature. We find in his
writing nothing of the great miscalculations of space that were made by
such writers as Macaulay and Buckle; nothing of the awkward repetitions,
the confused arrangement, the semi-detached and disjointed episodes that
mar the beauty of many other histories of no small merit. Vast and
multifarious as are the subjects which he has treated, his work is a
great whole, admirably woven in all its parts. On the other hand, his
foreign taste may perhaps be seen in his neglect of the Saxon element,
which is the most vigorous and homely element in English prose. Probably
in no other English writer does the Latin element so entirely
predominate. Gibbon never wrote an unmeaning and very seldom an obscure
sentence; he could always paint with sustained and stately eloquence an
illustrious character or a splendid scene: but he was wholly wanting in
the grace of simplicity, and a monotony of glitter and of mannerism is
the great defect of his style. He possessed, to a degree which even
Tacitus and Bacon had hardly surpassed, the supreme literary gift of
condensation, and it gives an admirable force and vividness to his
narrative; but it is sometimes carried to excess. Not unfrequently it is
attained by an excessive allusiveness, and a wide knowledge of the
subject is needed to enable the reader to perceive the full import and
meaning conveyed or hinted at by a mere turn of phrase. But though his
style is artificial and pedantic, and greatly wanting in flexibility, it
has a rare power of clinging to the memory, and it has profoundly
influenced English prose. That excellent judge Cardinal Newman has said
of Gibbon, "I seem to trace his vigorous condensation and peculiar
rhythm at every turn in the literature of the present day."
It is not necessary to relate here in any detail the later events of the
life of Gibbon. There was his enlistment as captain in the Hampshire
militia. It involved two and a half years of active service, extending
from May 1760 to December 1762; and as Gibbon afterwards acknowledged,
if it interrupted his studies and brought him into very uncongenial
duties and societies, it at least greatly enlarged his acquaintance with
English life, and also gave him a knowledge of the rudiments of military
science, which was not without its use to the historian of so many
battles. There was a long journey, lasting for two years and five
months, in France and Italy, which greatly confirmed his foreign
tendencies. In Paris he moved familiarly in some of the best French
literary society; and in Rome, as he tells us in a well-known passage,
while he sat "musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the
barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter" (which
is now the Church of the Ara Coeli),--on October 15th, 1764,--he first
conceived the idea of writing the history of the decline and fall of
Rome.
There was also that very curious episode in his life, lasting from 1774
to 1782,--his appearance in the House of Commons. He had declined an
offer of his father's to purchase a seat for him in 1760; and fourteen
years later, when his father was dead, when his own circumstances were
considerably contracted, he received and accepted at the hands of a
family connection the offer of a seat. His Parliamentary career was
entirely undistinguished, and he never even opened his mouth in
debate,--a fact which was not forgotten when very recently another
historian was candidate for a seat in Parliament. In truth, this
somewhat shy and reserved scholar, with his fastidious taste, his
eminently judicial mind, and his highly condensed and elaborate style,
was singularly unfit for the rough work of Parliamentary discussion. No
one can read his books without perceiving that his English was not that
of a debater; and he has candidly admitted that he entered Parliament
without public spirit or serious interest in politics, and that he
valued it chiefly as leading to an office which might restore the
fortune which the extravagance of his father had greatly impaired. His
only real public service was the composition in French of a reply to the
French manifesto which was issued at the beginning of the war of 1778.
He voted steadily and placidly as a Tory, and it is not probable that in
doing so he did any violence to his opinions. Like Hume, he shrank with
an instinctive dislike from all popular agitations, from all turbulence,
passion, exaggeration, and enthusiasm; and a temperate and well-ordered
despotism was evidently his ideal. He showed it in the well-known
passage in which he extols the benevolent despotism of the Antonines as
without exception the happiest period in the history of mankind, and in
the unmixed horror with which he looked upon the French Revolution that
broke up the old landmarks of Europe, For three years he held an office
in the Board of Trade, which added considerably to his income without
adding greatly to his labors, and he supported steadily the American
policy of Lord North and the Coalition ministry of North and Fox; but
the loss of his office and the retirement of North soon drove him from
Parliament, and he shortly after took up his residence at Lausanne.
But before this time a considerable part of his great work had been
accomplished. The first quarto volume of the 'Decline and Fall' appeared
in February 1776. As is usually the case with historical works, it
occupied a much longer period than its successors, and was the fruit of
about ten years of labor. It passed rapidly through three editions,
received the enthusiastic eulogy of Hume and Robertson, and was no doubt
greatly assisted in its circulation by the storm of controversy that
arose about his Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters. In April 1781 two more
volumes appeared, and the three concluding volumes were published
together on the 8th of May, 1788, being the fifty-first birthday of the
author.
A work of such magnitude, dealing with so vast a variety of subjects,
was certain to exhibit some flaws. The controversy at first turned
mainly upon its religious tendency. The complete skepticism of the
author, his aversion to the ecclesiastical type which dominated in the
period of which he wrote, and his unalterable conviction that
Christianity, by diverting the strength and enthusiasm of the Empire
from civic into ascetic and ecclesiastical channels, was a main cause of
the downfall of the Empire and of the triumph of barbarism, gave him a
bias which it was impossible to overlook. On no other subject is his
irony more bitter or his contempt so manifestly displayed. Few good
critics will deny that the growth of the ascetic spirit had a large part
in corroding and enfeebling the civic virtues of the Empire; but the
part which it played was that of intensifying a disease that had already
begun, and Gibbon, while exaggerating the amount of the evil, has very
imperfectly described the great services rendered even by a monastic
Church in laying the basis of another civilization and in mitigating the
calamities of the barbarian invasion. The causes he has given of the
spread of Christianity in the Fifteenth Chapter were for the most part
true causes, but there were others of which he was wholly insensible.
The strong moral enthusiasms that transform the character and inspire or
accelerate all great religious changes lay wholly beyond the sphere of
his realizations. His language about the Christian martyrs is the most
repulsive portion of his work; and his comparison of the sufferings
caused by pagan and Christian persecutions is greatly vitiated by the
fact that he only takes account of the number of deaths, and lays no
stress on the profuse employment of atrocious tortures, which was one of
the most distinct features of the pagan persecutions. At the same time,
though Gibbon displays in this field a manifest and a distorting bias,
he never, like some of his French contemporaries, sinks into the mere
partisan, awarding to one side unqualified eulogy and to the other
unqualified contempt. Let the reader who doubts this examine and compare
his masterly portraits of Julian and of Athanasius, and he will perceive
how clearly the great historian could recognize weaknesses in the
characters by which he was most attracted, and elements of true
greatness in those by which he was most repelled. A modern writer, in
treating of the history of religions, would have given a larger space to
comparative religion, and to the gradual, unconscious, and spontaneous
growth of myths in the twilight periods of the human mind. These however
were subjects which were scarcely known in the days of Gibbon, and he
cannot be blamed for not having discussed them.
Another class of objections which has been brought against him is that
he is weak upon the philosophical side, and deals with history mainly
as a mere chronicle of events, and not as a chain of causes and
consequences, a series of problems to be solved, a gradual evolution
which it is the task of the historian to explain. Coleridge, who
detested Gibbon and spoke of him with gross injustice, has put this
objection in the strongest form. He accuses him of having reduced
history to a mere collection of splendid anecdotes; of noting nothing
but what may produce an effect; of skipping from eminence to eminence
without ever taking his readers through the valleys between; of having
never made a single philosophical attempt to fathom the ultimate causes
of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which is the very subject
of his history. That such charges are grossly exaggerated will be
apparent to any one who will carefully read the Second and Third
Chapters, describing the state and tendencies of the Empire under the
Antonines; or the chapters devoted to the rise and character of the
barbarians, to the spread of Christianity, to the influence of
monasticism, to the jurisprudence of the republic and of the Empire; nor
would it be difficult to collect many acute and profound philosophical
remarks from other portions of the history. Still, it may be admitted
that the philosophical side is not its strongest part. Social and
economical changes are sometimes inadequately examined and explained,
and we often desire fuller information about the manners and life of the
masses of the people. As far as concerns the age of the Antonines, this
want has been amply supplied by the great work of Friedlaender.
History, like many other things in our generation, has fallen largely
into the hands of specialists; and it is inevitable that men who have
devoted their lives to a minute examination of short periods should be
able to detect some deficiencies and errors in a writer who traversed a
period of more than twelve hundred years. Many generations of scholars
have arisen since Gibbon; many new sources of knowledge have become
available, and archaeology especially has thrown a flood of new light on
some of the subjects he treated. Though his knowledge and his narrative
are on the whole admirably sustained, there are periods which he knew
less well and treated less fully than others. His account of the
Crusades is generally acknowledged to be one of the most conspicuous of
these, and within the last few years there has arisen a school of
historians who protest against the low opinion of the Byzantine Empire
which was held by Gibbon, and was almost universal among scholars till
the present generation. That these writers have brought into relief
certain merits of the Lower Empire which Gibbon had neglected, will not
be denied; but it is perhaps too early to decide whether the reaction
has not, like most reactions, been carried to extravagance, and whether
in its general features the estimate of Gibbon is not nearer the truth
than some of those which are now put forward to replace it.
Much must no doubt be added to the work of Gibbon in order to bring it
up to the level of our present knowledge; but there is no sign that any
single work is likely to supersede it or to render it useless to the
student; nor does its survival depend only or even mainly on its great
literary qualities, which have made it one of the classics of the
language. In some of these qualities Hume was the equal of Gibbon and in
others his superior, and he brought to his history a more penetrating
and philosophical intellect and an equally calm and unenthusiastic
nature; but the study which Hume bestowed on his subject was so
superficial and his statements were often so inaccurate, that his work
is now never quoted as an authority. With Gibbon it is quite otherwise.
His marvelous industry, his almost unrivaled accuracy of detail, his
sincere love of truth, his rare discrimination and insight in weighing
testimony and in judging character, have given him a secure place among
the greatest historians of the world.
His life lasted only fifty-six years; he died in London on January 15th,
1794. With a single exception his history is his only work of real
importance. That exception is his admirable autobiography. Gibbon left
behind him six distinct sketches, which his friend Lord Sheffield put
together with singular skill. It is one of the best specimens of
self-portraiture in the language, reflecting with pellucid clearness
both the life and character, the merits and defects, of its author. He
was certainly neither a hero nor a saint; nor did he possess the moral
and intellectual qualities that dominate in the great conflicts of life,
sway the passions of men, appeal powerfully to the imagination, or
dazzle and impress in social intercourse. He was a little slow, a little
pompous, a little affected and pedantic. In the general type of his mind
and character he bore much more resemblance to Hume, Adam Smith, or
Reynolds, than to Johnson or Burke. A reserved scholar, who was rather
proud of being a man of the world; a confirmed bachelor, much wedded to
his comforts though caring nothing for luxury, he was eminently moderate
in his ambitions, and there was not a trace of passion or enthusiasm in
his nature. Such a man was not likely to inspire any strong devotion.
But his temper was most kindly, equable, and contented; he was a steady
friend, and he appears to have been always liked and honored in the
cultivated and uncontentious society in which he delighted. His life was
not a great one, but it was in all essentials blameless and happy. He
found the work which was most congenial to him. He pursued it with
admirable industry and with brilliant success, and he left behind him a
book which is not likely to be forgotten while the English language
endures.
[Signature: W. E. H. Lecky]
ZENOBIA