HUMAN HISTORY

Evening Star, Issue 22720, 6 August 1937, Page 11

HUMAN HISTORY

THE VIEW OF GIBBON SCIENCE OR NOSTALGIA ? Only an astrologer is interested in the exact minute or a man’s birth, and Gibbon had to move’ his birthday, after the reform of the calendar in 1761, from April 27 to May 8, wrote G. M. Young in the ‘ Manchester Guardian ’ recently. To the historian it is of more importance to know in what ho rose and what lights were shining in mid-heaven. Gibbon would _ certainly _ not _ have chosen Tom Paine for _ his twin or Joseph Priestley , for his older brother. But in literary history the .Koventoeu-.thirties are a curiously infertile tract of time, and’ we must go back six years or forward three to find, in Cowper and Boswell, stars of any notable magnitude. Pope was still lord of the ascendant. The next dictator was still slaving in Grub street. I take up Dr Gooch’s indispensable ‘ Annals ’ to see what was happening, and I read that in 1737 the King quarrelled with the Prince of Wales. Into so empty and indistinguishable a year was Gibbon born. CHARACTER OF HIS AGE. A placid stability, as if time had ceased to move, is the note of the mid-eighteenth century. We know what fires were working below the surface; romance,'democracy, and pietism, which, taken together, account for the larger part of our spiritual landscape in the next age. were already seeking or making their outlet. But tho_ sense of sin or oppression, of mental inadequacy or emotional limitation to which they could appeal was stilly latent. Bolingbroko once heard Whitfield preach and complimented him on the justice ho had done to the divine attributes. It. is not, I believe, recorded that Gibbon ever attended a Methodist meeting, but, in the closing sentence of the ‘Memoirs,’ “the faith of enthusiasts who sing Hallelujahs above the clouds,” almost suggests that he had heard, and winced at, the triumphant clamour of barbarism and religion advancing to overthrow the world of science and philosophy in which he lived and in which he so religiously believed. I say “ religiously.” because it. is impossible without this clue to share or follow the movement of Gibbons’s mind. Tho visit to Stourhead when he was 14 and tho discovery in the library there of the continuation of Eachard’s ‘ Roman History ’ are exactly such incidents as in the life of a missionary or tho founder of a sect would be registered as the moment of conversion. Then and there lie received the call, and ho proceeded to eouip himsclf for his task with that businesslike promptitude which so often recalls his formidable and successful city grandfather. ROUND THE FRONTIER. From the Goths to Byzantium, from Byzantium to Arabia, and thence, lured, no doubt, by his profound and almost romantic addiction to tho things of Asia, to Tartary, and the Great Wall “guessing at the French of <1 Herbelot and construing the barbarous Latin of Abulpharagius,” in two years he had ranged round the whole frontier of his future domains. Without knowing it, he had conceived the book which ho was to finish 34 years later, on a night, more memorable than any birthday, “ between the hours of II and 12, in a summer-house in mv garden ” at Lausanne.

Now that the whole hook is before us, what are wo to say of it? First, that it is_ entirely of its age, and that nowhere in it shall wo find any hint or adumbration of a coming wav of thought, a different attitude to history and its problems. Imagine a boy of Gibbon's reading and intelligence in 1851, and ask him what he thinks about that “ passage of the Goths over the Danube ” which had hold Gibbon fascinated in the library at Stourhcad. The very word is enough to set his fancy ranging over northern seas and forests, the ships of the fair, heroic stock, their valour and virtue descending to regenerate the corrupt, exhausted Mediterranean civilisation. li is the dawn of the world, of chivaliw and romance, of faith armed for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, of castled crags and minstrels and snaring cathedral snircs. It is the Middle Ages, and to Gibbon the Middle Ages are what they say they arc: a long and lamentable tract of time between

tho classical past and tho present which began with tho classical Renaissance. Tho. world, let us say from 500 n.c. to perhaps a.d. 100, was tho right kind of world for civilised men to make and live in. At Athens, at Alexandria, at Romo, Gibbon would have been intellectually comfortable. He was very comfortable in his own world. It was reasonable, it imposed no creed, it encouraged curiosity and speculation. To put it another and even simpler way, from Aeschylus to Tacitus people wrote excellent books. From the time of Petrarch or so th.ey have been writing excellent books once more. But soon after a.d. 100 something seems to have gone wrong with the human mind. In sequence, everything else went wrong: armies rebelled, frontiers collapsed, fiscal oppression and an otherworldly religion sapped the vigour of the local organs of government, and so “ the Goths passed the Danube,” and not the Goths only. Wave upon wave of destruction follows: all in ruin, - and almost all is might. PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. Tho material failure of tho ancient world is, in Gibbon’s philosophy, the outcome of a moral and intellectual failure. ”If all the Barbarian conquerors,” he writes with unusual emphasis, “ had been annihilated in the same hour, their destruction would not have restored the empire of the West, and if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour.” These, are'conceptions which his successors tended to discard in favour of some more positive or material solution of historic problems. They are antique, and they belong to tho antique world of small, compact States, with no overshadowing inequalities of wealth, an intense local patriotism, and a severe and vigilant code of public morals. It may ho argued that antiquity was not really like that; that what Gibbon has always before his eyes is a legendary past, itself the product of antique fanev looking wistfully back to tho days of Greek freedom and Roman greatness. There is truth in the objection; Gibbon’s learning was that of his day, and much of tho ancient world was not yet revealed. But no new knowledge has come to dispel his faith that tho welfare and tho very life of States depend on the free and rigorous exercise of tho political virtues—prudence, courage; moderation, justice. Under the Roman Empire and its inevitable, necessary, and for generations beneficent absolutism, they died away. Christianity made other demands’ on the J>mnan soul. So the darkness falls. And when you have tried every other explanation of the great catastrophe, do you feel so sure that Gibbon was not right?