Evening Post. SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1937. "THE DECLINE AND, FALL"

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 102, 1 May 1937, Page 8

Evening Post.

SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1937.

"THE DECLINE AND, FALL"

■Although it is two hundred years this week since the birth of Edward Gibbon, the greatest of English historians, and a hundred and fifty next month since the completion of his life work, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," time has dealt more kindly with the literary monument he left than with many of the institutions of his age that seemed so secure. It is this very security, which gives to Gibbon's work its air of the final verdict and eternal judgment, that forms so marked a contrast with the uncertainty of to^ay. If people have little leisure now to read '"The Decline and Fall," it is quite certain that n6 one could write it in the 'inimitable manner of Gibbon. "It ,is slowly being recognised," says ■Professor Bury, the modern editor of Gibbon, "that history is in the last 1 resort somebody's image of the past, and the image is conditioned by the mind and experience of the person who forms it. Only such things as dates, names, documents, can be considered purely objective facts.'' Thus, he adds, "we cannot separate a history from its writer, or the writer from his time." Gibbon lived in what has well been called the Augustan Age .of English literature, because it resembled the peaceful, ordered days of the first of the Roman Emperors, | when Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Livy flourished in an atmosphere congenial to literature. The England of '■ Gibbon's day was never more peaceful and homogeneous in its social structure, however fiercely foreign wars were waged in the rivalry with France for overseas empire, or, later, with the American colonies in their struggle for independence. Through the internal tranquillity of this era which fostered the work of Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Fielding, and a score of other great artists, Gibbon preserved in his own life a tranquillity even more profound. He carried on his project of Roman history undisturbed mainly in his retreat at Lausanne for over fifteen years. The idea of the history came to 'Gibbon,-as he records in his Memoirs, "on October 15,1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol." At I the beginning of the last chapter of 'the whole history Gibbon quotes the learned Poggius, an Italian commentator of an earlier date:

. The hill of the Capitol, on which we sit, was formerly the head;- of >the: -Roman Empire, the citadel,of the earth, the terror of Kings;.-illustrated'by the footsteps of'V-so many triumphs, enriched with, the spoils and tributes of so many, nations. This spectacle,of the world, how is it fallen! how' changed! how defaced! : The-, path' of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of. the senators are concealed by a dunghill. ... The-public and'private edifices,, that -were-founded- for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, .like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from... the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time/and fortune.;.:

Such was, probably, with the little change, the scene that prompted Gibbon to begin his great work. The Rome of-the senators and Caesars, the standards and the fasces, seemed to have passed for ever, with no hope of revival. The Eternal City was eternal only in its ruins of former glory. There is not in the pages of Gibbon the least hint of a change that might restore to Rome even a shadow of the prestige of the past. His history was written in the certitude of the philosophy of his time. It was not till the very last years'of his life that an event occurred to upset the preconceptions of this philosophy. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" had already been finished when the French Revolution opened the vista of a changing world.

It is this conception of a static world that gives "The Decline and Fall" its unity as a work of literary art. while the harmony of style with subject is an additional preservative against decay. Gibbon's history was a "best-seller" of its time from the first, and so long as history is read as the romance of mankind, "The Decline and Fall" will stand. Its value today apart from the music of the language, which charmed Dickens's illiterate Golden Dustman, Mr. Boffin, of "Our Mutual Friend,", even when read aloud by Mr. Silas Wegg with stumbling over-hard words, lies in the picture it gives of the crumbling of an Empire that once covered almost the known earth and seemed indestructible. Gibbon surveyed the scene, which he describes as "the greatest, perhaps, and the most awful in the history of mankind," as a traveller from a coign of safety might cast an appraising eye over the havoc left by some vast terrestrial convulsion, confident that it would never recur. His was an age of complacency, of settled society, and established custom. A j century earlier he would have found i a world disturbed by internal revolu-, tion and civil war, a King of England beheaded, the Monarchy superseded for ten years by a dictator, the Restoration and then another revolution, an age "of unrest, alien to the devotion of a lifetime to the writing of a single history. A century later arid Gibbon would have lived in the turmoil of industrialism and the development of an Empire of which he saw the beginning.; He saw the creation of the United States of America, but not the rise of Latin American Republics from the ruins of the Spanish Empire. He died too coon to witness the meteoric career of Napoleon. That age, too, was unfavourable to the writing of a history such as Gibbon's "Decline." Today such a work, if it were undertaken at all, would fall to the lot of

a group of specialists, each of whom would write about the period which he had studied, with the result, a mine of information, but not a work of art. Yet if Gibbon were alive today, it is doubtful whether, in view of all that is happening in Europe and the rest of the world, he would have changed his opinions or his fundamental philosophy. He was, above all, a lover of liberty, and it was his intention, before he became fascinated by the fate of Ancient Rome, to write, as he said, "The History of the Liberty of the Swiss," a nation whom he greatly admired as for years a guest in their midst. In his progress through the centuries he came to the conclusion that the Age of the Anlonines—from about 98 A.D. to the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 A.D. —was the period of history in which the human race was most happy and prosperous. But under a paternal Government which excluded liberty there could be no security for the future, and he says 'A these beneficent Roman rulers: '" They must often have recollected the instability of a happiness which depended on the character of a single man." 'The happiness of mankind, including liberty as an essential ingredient and an indispensable condition, comments Professor Bury, is the standard by which.Gibbon judged the past. Who shall say that his judgment would not apply equally to the present?