Born in 1737 at Putney in Surrey to a wealthy father who could afford to be a member of Parliament, he later reflected on his good luck. “My lot might have been that of a slave, a savage, or a peasant; nor can I reflect without pleasure on the bounty of Nature, which cast my birth in a free and civilized country, in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank, and decently endowed with the gifts of fortune.” The eldest of seven children, and the only one who survived infancy, he had no convivial family life. A sickly child, he withdrew into books. Neglected by his mother, who died when he was nine, he was nurtured by a bookish aunt who became “the true mother of my mind as well as of my health.” As a boy he was charmed by ancient times and faraway places, especially by Pope’s Homer and The Arabian Nights, “two books which will always please by the moving pictures of human manners and specious miracles.” After his two years at Westminster School ill health required that he be instructed by private tutors. Various ailments sent him to physicians at Bath, and his father took him visiting country houses where he explored their antiquarian libraries. Already, he recalled, he “aspired to the character of an historian.” “Instead of repining at my long and frequent confinement to the chamber or the couch, I secretly rejoiced in those infirmities, which delivered me from the exercises of the school and the society of my equals. As often as I was tolerably exempt from danger and pain, reading, free desultory reading, was the employment and the comfort of my solitary hours. My indiscriminate appetite subsided by degrees in the historic line.…”
Before his fifteenth birthday, when his father entered him as a student at Magdalen College, he had read voraciously all the English books he could find on ancient history. “I arrived at Oxford with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.” His fourteen months there were “the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.” Founded in a barbarous age, the schools of Oxford, “steeped in port and prejudice,” were “still tainted with the vices of their origin.” Reading theology on his own at the age of sixteen, he led himself into the Roman Catholic Church, and to his father’s horror was received into the Church by a priest in London in 1753.
Hastily seeking a cure for the boy’s “spiritual malady,” his father succeeded far better than he knew. What he devised as a punishing exile provided the educational base for the historian’s great work. On the advice of a friend, Gibbon’s father sent him to live with a Calvinist minister, Daniel Pavilliard, in Lausanne in Switzerland. And Gibbon recalled that without “my childhood revolt against the religion of my country,” his life would have been quite different. “I should have grown to manhood ignorant of the life and language of Europe; and my knowledge of the world would have been confined to an English cloister.… One … serious and irreparable mischief was derived from the success of my Swiss education; I had ceased to be an Englishman. At the flexible period of youth, from the age of sixteen to twenty-one, my opinions, habits and sentiments were cast in a foreign mould; the faint and distant remembrance of England was almost obliterated; my native language was grown less familiar.” Pavilliard proved the patient tutor, who helped him become bilingual in French, a master of Latin, and competent in Greek. By translating passages from Latin into French, then back into Latin, Gibbon could check his understanding of the original. In his leisure, too, he was “reviewing the Latin Classics under the four divisions of 1 Historians, 2 Poets, 3 Orators, and 4 Philosophers in a chronological series from the days of Plautus and Sallust to the decline of the language and Empire of Rome.” He developed a special admiration for Cicero’s character and style. Following “the precept and model of Mr. Locke,” he kept notes on his sources, writing a critical essay on each of them. A great inspiration was hearing Voltaire declaim his own writings on the stage, and sharing “the wit and philosophy” of his table. Meanwhile he was diligently reading theology, and by Christmas 1754, to his father’s relief, had led himself back into the Protestant communion.
In 1757, when he was just twenty, Gibbon fell in love with Susanne Curchod, whose “personal attractions … were embellished by the virtues and talents of the mind.” The brilliant daughter of a penniless Protestant minister, she was not his father’s idea of a suitable match. “On my return to England I soon discovered that my father would not hear of this strange alliance, and that without his consent I was myself destitute and helpless. After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate: I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son: my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life.” He seems never again to have thought of marriage. What might have become of Gibbon if, instead of listening to his father, he had shared his life with the charming Suzanne? And perhaps have made a literary or political career on the Continent? Suzanne went on to marry the brilliant Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s minister of finance, and established one of the celebrated salons of modern Paris. Their daughter was the prolific author and saloniste Madame de Staël.
Years later, in his Memoirs, Gibbon still ascribed the “fruits” of his education “to the fortunate banishment which placed me at Lausanne.” And his journal suggests what he meant by education. “In the three first months of this year [1758] I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, finished the conic sections with M. de Traytorrens, and went as far as the infinite series; I likewise read Sir Isaac Newton’s Chronology [of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728)], and wrote my critical observations upon it.” Back in England with the two things he loved most, his books and his leisure, he continued his wide reading for another five years.
But Gibbon was provoked when the French “degraded” their Academy of Inscriptions, the guardian of Greek and Latin culture, to the lowest rank among their three royal societies. His response, his first work, an Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, written in French and published in London in 1761, was “suggested by a refinement of vanity, the desire of justifying and praising my favourite pursuit.” And it was prophetic of his lifework. “I was ambitious of proving by my own example, as well as by my precepts, that all the faculties of the mind may be exercised and displayed by the study of ancient literature.” Again “like a pious son” he had yielded to his father’s urging to publish this “proof of some literary talent.” The family hoped it would help secure him a diplomatic appointment “as a gentleman or a secretary” to attend the scheduled peace congress of Augsburg. That congress never met. But Gibbon was not unduly discouraged that this loss of his “literary maidenhood” was received with cold indifference, was little read and speedily forgotten. He toyed with topics for an ambitious work of history. He considered a history of the liberty of the Swiss, but its materials were “locked in the obscurity of an old barbarous German dialect.” Or a history of the Republic of Florence under the Medicis. “On this splendid subject I shall most probably fix; but when or where, or how will it be executed?”
Still searching for his subject, when England’s war with France ended in 1763, he returned to the Continent on a belated grand tour. In Paris he met Diderot and d’Alembert, then revisited Lausanne, climbed in the Italian Alps, and toured the “tame and tiresome uniformity” of Turin, Milan, and Genoa—toward “the great object of our pilgrimage,” Rome. “I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions,” he wrote twenty-five years later, “which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal city. After a sleepless night, I trod, with a lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a minute and cool investigation.” Inspiration for his lifework would not come from “cool investigation” but from lone intimate experience. “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” The motive could hardl
y have been more personal—concern not for the grand epochs of history but for the people and the story behind the poignant ruins where he sat. Characteristically, his “original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire.”
But Gibbon did not plunge at once into his masterwork. The years after his return to England were intellectually vagrant, preoccupied with the declining health of his father. After his father’s death in 1770 Gibbon came into his own, financially and intellectually. He set himself up in a house in Bentinck Street in London, with six servants, a parrot, and a Pomeranian. Though he had found “filial obedience” “natural and easy,” he now enjoyed “the gay prospect of futurity.”
No sooner had I settled in my house and library, than I undertook the composition of the first volume of my History. At the outset all was dark and doubtful; even the title of the work, the true era of the Decline and Fall of the Empire, the limits of the introduction, the division of the chapters, and the order of the narrative; and I was often tempted to cast away the labour of seven years. The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise. 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. In the remainder of the way I advanced with a more equal and easy pace.…
His fluency increased as he went on, and so did his self-confidence. But he remained concerned lest readers should doubt his spontaneity and independence. In his memoirs he insisted that for at least five of his six volumes his “first rough manuscript, without any intermediate copy, has been sent to the press.… Not a sheet has been seen by any human eye, excepting those of the author and the printer: the faults and merits are exclusively my own.”
By 1775 he had been admitted to Dr. Johnson’s select dining circle, which included the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and the actor David Garrick, with both of whom he became friendly. But for James Boswell, who found him “ugly, affected, disgusting,” Gibbon “poisoned” the Literary Club.
Gibbon deserves more credit than he has received for his heroic resistance to the seductions of an age with a genius for oversimplification. Coleridge unwittingly reminds us of Gibbon’s achievement when he blames him for failing to make “a single philosophical attempt … to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline or fall of that empire.” When Gibbon declared that “the subject of history is Man,” he was not mouthing a cliché but affirming his faith in the inscrutable being who is only partly intelligible to himself. His Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was above all else a human comedy. And emphatically not what Montesquieu, Voltaire, and others meant when they said that history was “philosophy teaching by examples.” Gibbon had a wholesome distrust of abstractions. His history did not consist of generalizations that the facts could illustrate but was the very texture of experience. That the greatest of modern historians had no “philosophy of history” was a secret of his greatness and his longevity.
Still, he did not always firmly resist. And in the final Chapters XV and XVI of his first volume he did yield to the simplifying temptation. These chapters on “The Progress of the Christian Religion,” and “The Conduct of the Government towards the Christians” were his most controversial, attracting the greatest interest and exciting the most outspoken hostility. He listed “Five Causes of the Growth of Christianity”: Zeal of the Jews, the Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul among the Philosophers, Miraculous (but Contested) Powers of the Christian Church, Virtues of the First Christians, and the Christians Active in the Government of the Church. He offended by giving no place to the divinity of Christ or divine inspiration, and he outraged the pious by doubting the authenticity of the miracles and mischievously asking when the Church’s miraculous powers had ceased. His “Causes” listed the human elements in the story.
The publisher had originally planned to print only five hundred copies of this first volume but doubled the number when he read the manuscript. Though attacked by some for its impious account of Christianity, the book was widely acclaimed by literary England. Gibbon enjoyed the approval by the “public” to whom he had committed his seven years’ work. “I had likewise flattered myself, that an age of light and liberty would receive, without scandal, an inquiry into the human causes of the progress and establishment of Christianity.” The first printing was exhausted in a few days, and soon Gibbon was flattered by being pirated in Dublin. He luxuriated in the praise and printed at length in his Memoirs the letter from David Hume in Edinburgh saying that had he not known Gibbon personally “such a performance by an Englishman in our age would have given me some surprise.” Joining “all the men of letters” in admiration he urged Gibbon to continue the work.
Two years passed before Gibbon began his second volume. The second and third appeared together in 1781. These bring the story through the age of Constantine, Julian the Apostate’s effort to revive the pagan faith and virtues of the old Rome, the barbarian invasions, the fall of Rome in 410, and the intermixing of Roman and barbarian cultures. The third volume concludes with “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West.”
… the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.
Gibbon felt the transience of power in 1782, when Lord North’s government fell and he lost his remunerative commission on the Board of Trade. He speculated briefly on seeking another government post, but decided instead to return to his beloved Lausanne, where no political concerns would trouble him. Though for eight years he had not exchanged letters with his Lausanne friend, Georges Deyverdun, he now wrote suggesting they set up a household together. “My reason becomes clear, my courage grows strong,” he wrote Deyverdun from London in June 1783, “and I am already walking on the terrace, laughing with you about all these cobweb threads that seemed to be iron chains.” Despite his friend’s warnings that he would be bored, he found Lausanne an intellectual Mecca, especially in summer. An English visitor soon described him as “the grand monarque of literature at Lausanne.” He could not have chosen a better place for his work. Deyverdun was an agreeable and stimulating companion, and he did not lack intellectual visitors.
Had Gibbon been a less passionate historian he might have considered his work complete with three volumes and the end of the Western Empire. But he carried on, and made the next three volumes a work all its own, starting with Byzantium’s counterpart to the Age of the Antonines, then following through the vicissitudes of emperors and empresses, the rise of Roman law, the menace of the barbarians of the desert, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. He had begun Volume Four before leaving England, and the next five years of leisure among friends brought him through Volumes Five and Six, which he completed in June 1787. He took the manuscript of all three volumes to England, where they were published on his fifty-first birthday, May 8, 1788. Again he basked in the favors of literary Britain and a prosperous sale of his books.
In these later volumes Gibbon resists the temptation to dogma. Just as he treats the decline of the Western Empire, volume by volume, as a series of human dramas, in the final three volumes he casts the height and decline of the Eastern Empire as later acts of the same drama. When, in the final chapter of the final volume, he looks back on fifteen centuries, he does not take his stance in the scholar’s library. He reminds us that “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 now again from the Capitoline Hil
l he surveys the ruins of Rome, relics of his story. With the learned Poggius in 1430, he views “from that commanding spot the wide and various prospect of desolation.” “The place and the object gave ample scope for moralising on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empire and cities in a common grave; and it was agreed that in proportion to her former greatness the fall of Rome was the more awful and deplorable.” And when finally “after a diligent inquiry,” he discerns “four principal causes of the ruin of Rome, which continued to operate in a period of more than a thousand years,” what he gives us are not what the modern social scientist could call “causes.” Instead he simply reminds us of the chapters and episodes of his human comedy: “I. The injuries of time and nature. II. The hostile attacks of the barbarians and Christians. III. The use and abuse of the materials. And, IV. The domestic quarrels of the Romans.”
In Gibbon’s lifetime the world of science was newly liberated from the medieval demand for meaning. By abjuring any “philosophy of history” or the rational simplicities of his age, he too was freed to recover impartially all the elusive human atoms of history. In the Royal Society in London and other “invisible colleges,” scientists, virtuosi, and amateurs were expanding their world with tiny increments of knowledge. There were a few theoretic dazzlers like Sir Isaac Newton. But the most important shift in attitude toward knowledge was from an interest in the cosmos, in universal order and salvation, to an interest in facts. Now it seemed possible for every man to become his own scientist, and perhaps also his own historian. The telescope, the “flea glass” (or microscope), the thermometer, and scores of other measuring devices were transforming experience into experiment. The incremental approach to the physical world, spawning a wonderful new-grown wilderness of facts and contraptions, was also Gibbon’s approach to the world of human nature. The new scientific quest for meaning was only beginning to transform the social world into a modern cosmos of new dogmatic simplicities. Gibbon still gives us incremental history on a grand scale.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 47