DECLINE AND FALL

Southland Times, Issue 23182, 24 April 1937, Page 13

DECLINE AND FALL

Edward Gibbon Bicentenary

(Specially Written for The Southland Times.)

(By

SOLON)

It would be difficult to find another Englishman from the time of Chaucer who lived so justly ordered a life as Edward Gibbon. Chqucer, in _ his moments of leisure from his business about the port of London, worked at his long task of raising English from a dialect to a language; Gibbon, in his precariously continued leisure, patiently laboured at his life’s work of reducing the final phase of the Roman Empire to a history. It has been customary to regard his career as the perfection of fulfilment, the total realization of his abilities and a masterpiece of art. Even the accidents which preserved him in the path towards the historian’s crown have the air of being appointed. Gibbon, who was born on April 27, 1737 (his bicentenary actually falls on May 8 because of the 11 days which a changed calendar have whisked away since then), was a man whom tremendous events combined to mould. He was preserved from enormous wealth because his grandfather was held culpable after the bursting of the South Sea bubble and because his father was “not a man to spend, a fortune quietly.” He was saved from the distortions of a vigorously-directed education by his poor health by the fact that his tutor, “remembered that he had a salary to receive and only forgot that he had a duty to perform,” and by the almost superfluous escape from an Oxford where, Adam Smith declared, the professors had “given up almost the pretence of learning.” He escaped by way of conversion to Roman Catholicism; an irate parent dispatched him to Lausanne where the dialectical skill of a Swiss tutor and the entry of new fields of knowledge ended this phase. He read Locke, he met Voltaire, more important, he made such progress with his French that he began to look upon it as his native language; he attacked the classical authors with such vigour that in twenty-seven months he had read practically all the Latins. And he fell in love with that Susan Curchod who was to become the mother of Madame de Stael. Again parental authority delivered its judgment— the girl was penniless—and he sighed as a lover but obeyed as a son. He made a hasty return to England and there threw

himself into work with the militia, serving ardently with, the Hampshire Grenadiers, but carrying a Horace in his pocket. It is an episode which has provoked unnumbered smiles, yet it was probably just what he wanted. For it called into being a new side of life and purged him of much perilous stuff. At the end of his service he plunged back into his books and soon -escaped back onto the Continent. Entry into Parliament The ability to organize his experience was already revealing itself. He needed a guide book for his Grand Tour and prepared it himself, ransacking his books for references to the places to be visited. And then, in 1764, as he sat amid the ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter he saw his task clearly. He would write of the decline and fall of that city which had meant so much to men. Did he begin assembling his materials eagerly and at once? Lack of knowledge of the next five years makes us doubtful. He lived a disturbed and fragmentary life. His father had wasted much of his inheritance, the son began and abandoned various projects and had to face the threat of poverty. But by 1770, after he had published some observations on the “Aeneid,” he is to be seen, hard at work and the task was being carried out with remarkable secrecy. Not even the future Lord Sheffield and editor of the Autobiography guessed what he was at. He asked no advice, did his own research, performed his own proof-reading and even wrote most of the history with the one pen. The task he had set himself was simply the reduction of a chaotic field to some sort of order and he had frequent doubts about his work. He was uncertain as to the title of the book, the actual era he had set about to describe, the division of the chapters, even the order of the narrative. Sometimes he felt moved to destroy all he had writ- ' ten. At one of these times, possibly, he determined to enter Parliament; There he enjoyed a career of the utmost mediocrity. Hhe was unready as a speaker and content to be a looker-on. So politics failed to draw him from his task, and during this time of servi-

tude the first folio of the “Decline and Fall” was issued in the midst of a literary tumult and to the great gam of the author. Five years later the next two volumes were issued and soon thereafter he broke up his London home, sold all but his library and moved to Lausanne. There has been so much fine writing devoted to this episode that it seems almost a pity to point out that he moved to save money. He had £BOO a year, his political office vanished with the fall of Lord North, and his income, insufficient to maintain him according to his ideas in London, was a fortune in Switzerland. _ From this retreat came the remaining volumes of his great work in an unhurried stream. He has told us how, on June 27, 1787, he wrote the last line of his history and after putting down his pen paced up and down an avenue of acacias looking over the glittering lake and mountain-side in the moonlight and rejoicing at his recovered freedom, then feeling melancholy at having taken leave of “an old and agreeable companion” the creation of which had been his real career for 15 years. England read it a year later and he lived honoured and agreeably entertained in his retreat until history in the form of the French Revolution came to mortify his final years and disturb him (as Bagehot thinks) with the leflection that he was the type of man a populace would kill. 'He returned to London in 1793 and there, worn out by the primitive surgery of the eighteenth century, he died early in the new year. Reputation Today Today Gibbon’s position as an historian is still secure. He has won that position not alone by his majestic style (a style which later he did not hesitate to apply to himself as if he were an empire), his wit, his irony, developed by the study of Pascal and applied to religion in the famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters because irony was the one legal weapon of the writer of those times. His standing today is due to his patient accuracy, his scrupulous search through his authorities, his careful documentation, in a word his historical method. Along with these is his'rare judgment. Though he always sought first-hand authorities we have, today, many sources, Armenian, Syrian, Arabic, which were not available to him, we have better texts for authorities which he used. The field which he pioneered has been minutely examined by the expert of the modern age. And today, as has been pointed out by J. B. Bury, his latest editor, we regard the great history as falling into two parts, the first a very full history from 180 A.D. to 641 A.D., the second and smaller part a summary history of the years from 641 to 1453, in which some episodes receive fuller treatment and so greater prominence. For the first history Gibbon’s performance still

wins the greatest praise; his work could scarcely have been bettered. The second part is marred by major faults, one of which is that he sees nothing but “weakness and misery” for the later empire after Heraclitus, the other that he totally failed to grasp the role of the empire as a barrier between Europe and the East and so the guardian of that Greek heritage which was to mould our civilization so materially. And if he may be accused of unfairness to Christianity, Cardinal Newman was able to declare that “Athanasius stands out more grandly in the pages of Gibbon than in those of the orthodox ecclesiastical historians.” For the history as a work of art it is impossible not to have highest respect. It was planned in the spacious yet ornamented style of eighteenth century architecture, classic and carefully wrought. It is easily the greatest work in English of that century and its manner is the grand manner of the salons. Far from being in “anything but a style in which to tell the truth,” as one critic wickedly observed, it is the very essence of the subject, magnificent, sonorous, highly wrought, and no one who opens the page at random can fail to be caught by its subtle appeal.