by Will Durant
2. The Book
After 1772 Gibbon’s absorbing concern was his history, and he found it difficult to think seriously about anything else. “Many experiments were made before I could hit the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation. Three times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their effect.”75 He was resolved to make his history a work of literature.
In 1775 Gibbon offered the manuscript of the first sixteen chapters to a publisher, who refused it as necessitating a prohibitive price. Two other booksellers, Thomas Caldwell and William Strahan, pooled their risks in printing (February 17, 1776) Volume I of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Though it was priced at a guinea ($26.00?), the thousand copies were sold by March 26. A second edition, of fifteen hundred copies, issued on June 3, was exhausted in three days. “My book was on every table, and almost on every toilette.”76 The literary world, usually rent with factional jealousies, united in praising it. William Robertson sent generous compliments; Hume, in this year of his death, wrote to the author a letter which, said Gibbon, “overpaid the labor of ten years.”77 Horace Walpole, on the day after publication, announced to William Mason: “Lo, there is just appeared a truly classic work.”
The book began logically and bravely with three scholarly chapters detailing the geographical extent, the military organization, the social structure, and the legal constitution of the Roman Empire at the death of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 180). The preceding eighty-four years, Gibbon felt, had seen the Empire at its peak of official competence and public content.
If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian [96] to the accession of Commodus [180]. The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws. . . . The labors of these monarchs were overpaid by the … honest pride of virtue, and by the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness of which they were the authors.78
But Gibbon recognized the “instability of a happiness which must depend on the character of a single man. The fatal moment was perhaps approaching, when some licentious youth or some jealous tyrant would abuse … that absolute power.”79 The “good emperors” had been chosen by adoptive monarchy—each ruler transmitting his authority to a chosen and trained member of his entourage. Marcus Aurelius allowed the imperial power to pass down to his worthless son Commodus; from that accession Gibbon dated the decline.
Gibbon thought that the rise of Christianity had contributed to that decline. Here he abandoned the lead of Montesquieu, who had said nothing like this in his Greatness and decadence of the Romans; Gibbon, rather, followed Voltaire. His attitude was thoroughly intellectual; he had no sympathy for mystic rapture or hopeful faith. He expressed his view in a passage that has a Voltairean flavor: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced religious concord.”80 Gibbon usually avoided any direct expression of hostility to Christianity. There were still laws on the statute books of England making such expression a serious crime; e.g., “if any person educated in the Christian religion shall by writing … deny the Christian religion to be true, he shall … for the second offense … suffer three years’ imprisonment without bail.”81 To avoid such inconvenience Gibbon developed subtle suggestion and transparent irony as elements in his style. He carefully pointed out that he would discuss not the primary and supernatural sources of Christianity, but only the secondary and natural factors in its origin and growth. Among these secondary factors he listed “the pure and austere morals of the Christians” in their first century, but he added, as another cause, “the inflexible (and, if we may use the expression, the intolerant) zeal of the Christians.”82 And while he praised “the union and discipline of the Christian republic,” he noted that “it gradually formed an independent and increasing state in the heart of the Roman Empire.”83 In general he reduced the early progress of Christianity from a miracle to a natural process; he removed the phenomenon from theology to history.
How had Christianity made for the decline of Rome? First, by sapping the faith of the people in the official religion, and thereby undermining the state which that religion supported and sanctified. [This, of course, was precisely the argument of the theologians against the philosophes.] The Roman government distrusted the Christians as forming a secret society hostile to military service, and diverting men from useful employments to concentration on heavenly salvation. (The monks, in Gibbon’s judgment, were idlers who found it easier to beg and pray than to work.) Other sects could be tolerated because they were tolerant and did not imperil the unity of the nation; the Christians were the only new sect that denounced all others as vicious and damned, and openly predicted the fall of “Babylon”—i.e., Rome.84 Gibbon attributed much of this fanaticism to the Judaic origin of Christianity, and he followed Tacitus in denouncing the Jews at various points in his narrative. He proposed to interpret Nero’s persecution of the Christians as really a persecution of the Jews;85 this theory has no supporter today. With more success he followed Voltaire in reducing the number of Christians martyred by the Roman government; he reckoned them to be two thousand at most; and agreed with Voltaire “that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions [since Constantine], have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they have experienced from the zeal of infidels”; and “the Church of Rome defended by violence the empire she had acquired by fraud.”86
These concluding chapters (xv-xvi) of Volume I aroused many replies accusing Gibbon of inaccuracy, unfairness, or insincerity. Ignoring his critics for the time being, he treated himself to an extended vacation in Paris (May to November, 1777). Suzanne Curchod, become the wife of the banker and finance minister Jacques Necker, invited him to their home. She was now too comfortable to resent his having “sighed as a lover, obeyed as a son”; and M. Necker, so far from being jealous, often left the former lovers alone and went to business or bed. “Could they insult me more cruelly?” Gibbon complained. “What an impertinent security!” Suzanne’s daughter, Germaine (the future Mme. de Staël), found him such good company that she (aged eleven) tried her budding arts on him, and offered to marry him so as to keep him in the family.87 At the Neckers’ he met the Emperor Joseph II; at Versailles he was presented to Louis XVI, who was said to have shared in translating Volume I into French. He was feted in the salons, particularly by the Marquise du Deffand, who found him “gentle and polite, … superior to nearly all the persons among whom I live,” but pronounced his style “declamatory, oratorical,” and “in the tone of our professed wits.”88 He rejected an invitation from Benjamin Franklin, with a card saying that though he respected the American envoy as a man and a philosopher, he could not reconcile it with his duty to his King to have any conversation with a revolted subject. Franklin replied that he had such high regard for the historian that if ever Gibbon should consider the decline and fall of the British Empire as a subject, Franklin would be happy to furnish him with some relevant materials.89
Back in London, Gibbon prepared a reply to his critics—A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1779). He dealt briefly and courteously with his theological opponents, but he rose to some temper in handling Henry Davies, a youth of twenty-one, who had in 284 pages accuse
d Gibbon of inaccuracies. The historian admitted some mistakes, but denied “willful misrepresentations, gross errors, and servile plagiarisms.”90 The Vindication was generally received as a successful rebuttal. Gibbon made no further reply to criticism except casually in the Memoirs, but he found place for some conciliatory compliments to Christianity in his later volumes.
His writing was accelerated by the loss of his seat in Parliament (September 1, 1780). Volumes II and III of the History were published on March 1, 1781. They were quietly received. The barbarian invasions were an old story, and the long and expert discussions of the heresies that had excited the Christian Church in the fourth and fifth centuries were of no interest to a generation of worldly skeptics. Gibbon had sent an advance copy of Volume II to Horace Walpole; he visited Walpole in Berkeley Square, and was chagrined to be told that “there is so much of the Arians and Eunomians and semi-Pelagians … that though you have written the story as well as it could be written, I fear few will have patience to read it.” “From that hour to this,” Walpole wrote, “I have never seen him, though he used to call once or twice a week.”91 Gibbon later agreed with Walpole.92
Volume II recovered life when Constantine came to the front. Gibbon interpreted the famous conversion as an act of statesmanship. The Emperor had perceived that “the operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.” Amid the chaos of morals, economy, and government in the disrupted Empire, “a prudent magistrate might observe with pleasure the progress of a religion which diffused among the people a pure, benevolent, and universal system of ethics, adapted to every duty and every condition of life, recommended as the will and reason of the supreme Deity, and enforced by the sanction of eternal rewards or punishments.”93 That is, Constantine recognized that the aid of a supernatural religion was a precious aid to morality, social order, and government. Then Gibbon penned 150 eloquent and impartial pages on Julian the Apostate.
He ended Chapter XXXVIII and Volume III with a footnote praising George III’s “pure and generous love of science and of mankind.” In June, 1781, by the aid of Lord North, Gibbon was re-elected to Parliament, where he resumed his support of the ministry. The fall of Lord North (1782) brought an end to the Board of Trade, and to Gibbon’s post therein; “I was stripped of a convenient salary of £750 a year.”94 When North took a place in the coalition ministry (1783), Gibbon applied for another sinecure; he received none. “Without additional income I could not long or prudently maintain the style of expense to which I was accustomed.”95 He calculated that he could afford that style in Lausanne, where his pounds sterling had twice the purchasing power they had in London. He resigned his seat in Parliament, sold all his impersonal effects except his library, and on September 15, 1783, he left London—“its smoke and wealth and noise”—for Lausanne. There he shared a comfortable mansion with his old friend Georges Deyverdun. “Instead of looking on a paved court twelve feet square, I command a boundless prospect of vale, mountain, and water.”96 His two thousand books reached him after some delay, and he proceeded with Volume IV.
He had originally planned to end The Decline and Fall with the conquest of Rome in 476. But after publishing Volume III he “began to wish for the daily task, the active pursuit, which gave a value to every book, and an object to every inquiry.”97 He decided to interpret “Roman Empire” to mean the Eastern as well as the Western Empire, and to continue his narrative to the destruction of Byzantine rule through the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. So he added a thousand years to his scope, and undertook hundreds of new subjects requiring arduous research.
Volume IV included masterly chapters on Justinian and Belisarius, a chapter on Roman law which won high praise from jurists, and a dreary chapter on the further wars within Christian theology. “I wish,” wrote Walpole, “Mr. Gibbon had never heard of Monophysites, Nestorians, or any such fools!”98 In Volume V Gibbon turned with evident relief to the rise of Mohammed and the Arab conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire, and he lavished upon the Prophet and the martial caliphs all the impartial understanding that had failed him in the case of Christianity. In Volume VI the Crusades gave him another stirring theme, and the capture of Constantinople by Mohammed II provided the climax and crown of his work.
In the final chapter he summarized his labors in a famous sentence: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.”99 Like his unacknowledged teacher, Voltaire, he saw nothing in the Middle Ages but crudity and superstition. He pictured the ruinous state of Rome in 1430, and quoted Poggio’s lament, “This spectacle of the world, how it is fallen, how changed, how defaced!”—the destruction or dilapidation of classic monuments and art, the Forum Romanum overgrown with weeds and possessed by cattle and swine. And Gibbon concluded sadly: “It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candor of the public.” And in his Memoirs he recalled that hour of ambivalent deliverance:
It was on the … night of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer house in my garden. After laying down my pen I took several turns in … a covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains.... I will not dissemble the emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatever might be the future fate of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.100
3. The Man
Gibbon at sixteen was described by M. Pavilliard as “a thin little figure with a large head.”101 Hating exercise and loving food,102 he soon developed a rotundity of body and face, a portly belly sustained by spindly legs; add red hair curled at the side and tied at the back, gentle cherubic features, a button nose, puffy cheeks, multiple chin, and, above all, a broad, high forehead promising “enterprises of great pith and moment,” majesty, and scope. He rivaled Johnson in appetite and Walpole in gout. His scrotum swelled painfully year by year to proportions which his tight breeches set off to disconcerting prominence. Despite his handicaps he was vain of his appearance and his dress, and prefaced Volume II with his portrait by Reynolds. He carried a snuffbox at his waist, and tapped it when nervous or wishing to be heard. He was self-centered, like any man with an absorbing purpose. But he truthfully claimed: “I am endowed with a cheerful temperament, a moderate sensibility [but no sentiment!], and a natural disposition to repose.”103
In 1775 he was elected to “the Club.” He attended frequently but rarely spoke, disliking Johnson’s idea of conversation. Johnson commented too audibly on Gibbon’s “ugliness”;104 Gibbon called the Great Bear an “oracle,” “an unforgiving enemy,” “a bigoted though vigorous mind, greedy of every pretext to hate and persecute those who dissent from his creed.”105 Boswell, feeling no mercy for an infidel, described the historian as “an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow,” who “poisons our Literary Club for me.” Nevertheless Gibbon must have had many friends, for in London he dined out almost every night.
He came from Lausanne to London in August, 1787, to supervise the publication of Volumes IV-VI. They appeared on his fifty-first birthday, May 8, 1788, and brought him £ 4,000, one of the highest fees paid to an author in the eighteenth century. “The conclusion of my work was generally read, and variously judged. … Yet, upon the whole, the History of the Decline and Fall seems to have struck root, both at home and abroad, and may, perhaps, a hundred years hence, still continue to be abused.”106 Already Adam Smith ranked him “at the head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe.”107 On June 13, 1788, during the trial of Hastings in Westminster Hall, Gibbon, in the gallery, had the pleasure
of hearing Sheridan, in one of his most dramatic addresses, refer to “the luminous pages of Gibbon.”108 According to an unlikely story, Sheridan later claimed to have said “voluminous”;109 but that adjective could hardly be applied to pages, and “luminous” was surely the fitting word.
In July, 1788, Gibbon returned to Lausanne. A year later Deyverdun died, leaving his home to Gibbon for the duration of the historian’s life. There, with several servants and an income of £ 1,200 a year, Gibbon lived at ease, drank much wine, and added to his gout and girth. “From February 9 to July 1, 1790, I was not able to move from my house or chair.”110 To this period belongs the legend that he knelt at the feet of Mme. de Crousaz with a declaration of love, that she bade him rise, and that he could not, being too heavy.111 The sole source of the story is Mme. de Genlis, whom Sainte-Beuve described as “a woman with a malicious tongue”;112 and her own daughter rejected the tale as, due to a confusion of persons.113
The French Revolution interfered with Gibbon’s tranquillity. Revolutionary sentiments were voiced in the Swiss cantons, and word came of similar agitation in England. He had good reason to fear the collapse of the French monarchy, having invested £ 1,300 in a French government loan.114 In 1788, in an unlucky prophecy, he had written of the French monarchy that “it stood founded, as it might seem, on the rock of time, force, and opinion, supported by the triple Aristocracy of the Church, the Nobility, and the Parliaments.”115 He rejoiced when Burke issued Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790); he wrote to Lord Sheffield advising against any reform in the British political structure; “if you admit the smallest and most specious change in our parliamentary system, you are lost.”116 Now he deplored the success of the philosophes in combating religion; “I have sometimes thought of writing a dialogue of the dead, in which Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire should mutually acknowledge the danger of exposing an old superstition to the contempt of the blind and fanatical multitude.”117 He urged some Portuguese leaders not to abandon the Inquisition during this crisis that threatened all thrones.118