The Devil's Details

by Chuck Zerby

  Gibbon was an English parliamentarian. He took his seat at a time when the first substantial threat to the British Empire was rolling in from the American colonies. Tea was dumped; Concord was marched toward and retreated from; General Washington rowed as quietly as he could across the Delaware: all of that during the days Gibbon listened to the back and forth of debate, the verbal cut and thrust of master politicians, the hems and haws of the timid, the catcalls and catty whispers of the backbenchers. The first volume of The History came out in 1776, and soon after came Hume’s suggestion. Surely Gibbon, reminded of the possibilities of footnotes, was influenced by the temper of the times and the seating arrangements of the Parliament. We can let Gibbon think of his text as a prime minister’s oration without too much stretching of the facts. He certainly would not want his notes to remain backbenchers; nor would he want them to be leaning over into the face of the orator, as they would be were the notes to be placed in the page margins. They needed to be at the bottom of the page. There they occupy the contradictory place of the leaders of the opposition: at a distance but close at hand. Someone once said that notes ran along the bottom of Gibbon’s pages like dogs yapping at the text;* a more accurate depiction would have them leaping up like offended opposition leaders objecting or quibbling or dragging the debate off in a new direction.

  Gibbon knew that it was the comments and not just the dry facts that enlivened parliamentary debate and persuaded the doubtful. His genius is never more evident than when he refuses to follow Hume toward a footnote of crabbed scholarship, and instead lets the footnote remain fulsome and varied and human. To know Gibbon’s footnotes is to know Gibbon, the man.

  He was a man of inexhaustible curiosity. When his text arrives at Commodus’s rule, it has plenty to say about that cruel and strange emperor; and Gibbon makes sure to use the goings on in the amphitheater to exhibit Commodus’s dreadful taste for the slaughter of people and animals. A panther is dropped by a well-placed arrow before a cheering crowd, elephants, rhinoceros, a hundred lions. But when Commodus cuts “asunder the long bony neck of the ostrich …,”42 Gibbon can’t leave it at that. The reader, he assumes, is as desirous as himself for details. “The ostrich’s neck is three feet long, and composed of seventeen vertebrae ….”43 Not just a fox or a pheasant has been killed but a splendid oddity. Gibbon knows his compatriots. Beasts seen by Englishmen only in works of art or in their “fancy,” he emphasizes. The giraffe is one such animal; Gibbon makes sure we know the giraffe is “the tallest, the most gentle, and the most useless of the large quadrupeds.” Again the details: “… a native only of the interior parts of Africa, [it] has not been seen in Europe since the revival of letters, and though M. de Buffon … has endeavored to describe, he has not ventured to delineate, the giraffe.”44 But much more is going on in this note than the supplying of details. Under cover of adding information, Gibbon is rendering a judgment. The description “tallest,” “gentle,” and “most useless” turns the fabled giraffe into an eccentric aunt whose visits to the house are as pleasant as they are rare; Commodus has been turned into a contemptible bully-as well as a murderer.

  Gibbon’s “facts” often fly as swiftly and deadly as Commodus’s arrows. When his text awhile later wanders into a discussion of the origins of English words, he uses a footnote to settle an old score. “Dr. Johnson affirms that few English words are of British extraction. Mr. Whitaker, who understands the British language, has discovered more than three thousand, and actually produces a long and various catalogue ….”45 The quiet, invidious comparison of the tic-afflicted dictionary maker who “affirms” an error with Mr. Whitaker who “understands” the language is a fine example of speech as a whip that members of Parliament employed time and again. The italicizing of “few” and “three thousand” are the raised eyebrows of an experienced orator making sure his colleagues appreciate his point. Making the reader aware of a catalog is rubbing it in, but then Dr. Johnson was not known for his tact or his restraint either.*

  The eighteenth century was an age of specialists if we judge it by its criminal class, which was made up of subdivision after subdivision of minute distinctions between different kinds of thieves and con men. But the literati were an exception. They refused specialization. A historian like Gibbon felt he had as much right to lay down the law about derivations as about the succession of royalty; he pronounced with equal confidence on military strategy and on an ostrich’s anatomy. Footnotes encouraged this expansiveness; the bottom of the page becomes a long, winding corridor where the scholar pops out of his office to stretch his legs and, meeting colleagues, gossips, tells jokes, rants about politics and society, and feels free to offer opinions based on nothing but his prejudices and whims. In this corridor the scholar becomes autodidact.

  Gibbon himself opens the door and critiques Petrarch’s verse: “He spins this allegory beyond all measure or patience.” 46 And as poets are on his mind, Gibbon doesn’t hesitate to spout off about one of his pet peeves, the office of poet laureate; he mutters about how poets often have been “false and venal” and then sputters “but I much doubt whether any age or court can produce a similar establishment of a stipendiary [sic] poet who in every reign and at all events, is bound to furnish twice a year a measure of praise and verse, such as may be sung in the chapel, and, I believe, in the presence of the sovereign.”47 To this point, the note might seem the casual aside a scholar makes to a colleague; however, Gibbon keeps the model of parliamentary oratory even when speaking in private. The personal is always political; the political always personal. So Gibbon clears his throat and continues. “I speak the more freely,” he says, and we should imagine him bowing his head to the opposition humbly, “as the best time for abolishing this ridiculous custom is while the prince is a man of virtue and the poet a man of genius.”48 With this gracious and calculated compliment, Gibbon keeps the king and the poet laureate on his side of the aisle.

  Gibbon took the picaresque footnote in hand and, without entirely breaking its spirit, put it into a suit. Under his tutelage, footnotes became trustworthy. They made pleasant dining companions. Their conversation is full of carefully balanced sentences and sudden quips, and they can be relied upon to use their napkins. Still, they remain various and filled with the unexpected, but also always with a public face. They are politicians even in the drawing room. To bring this home requires a digression of some length.*

  Gibbon never cut a dashing figure in the eyes of the opposite sex and, in fact, suffered one disappointment after another. One of those disappointments cast a shadow over his entire life, affecting even his footnotes. The affair began simply enough in Switzerland when the twenty-year-old Gibbon met another twenty-year-old, Mademoiselle Curchod, a blond, blue-eyed “belle of Lausanne,”49 coquettish and well read; it progressed when Suzanne, looking past the short and unprepossessing first impression of a mediocre dancer, saw a “physiognomy so extraordinary that one does not tire of examining it, of painting it, of copying it”;50 Gibbon, screwing up his courage, went off to England to tell his hardheaded father his son intended to marry a foreigner with no dowry and no prospects who had no intention of leaving her Switzerland after marriage. The affair came to an end with the young Gibbon dithering in England and Suzanne flirting with other men in Lausanne.51

  Or rather, as is the case with so many early loves, it never really ended. Suzanne went on to become the wife of the formidable Jacques Necker, Swiss banker, Louis the Sixteenth’s director general of finances and minister of state, and casualty of the French Revolution. A writer herself, she founded one of the first of the famous Parisian literary salons; her daughter became the extraordinary Madame de Staël, wit, novelist, and social historian. Gibbon became a member of Parliament, won European fame as the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and settled into an unwanted and uncomfortable bachelorhood. They saw little of each other for a time.

  No matter. When the first volume of Decline and Fall appears, Madame Necke
r scoops it up (presumably before it was translated into French). A letter from her soon arrives at Gibbon’s London address filled with arguments and inducements for Gibbon to visit Paris and larded with thoughtful praise of his history. He has “immense erudition,” she tells him, profound and precise “knowledge of men and humanity, of nations and individuals,” and “a fertile and sensitive imagination.” 52 She compares him to Tacitus, only in order to dismiss the Roman historian. “Only philosophers read Tacitus, you will be read by everyone ….” And then comes praise that, while couched as a general statement, subtly reveals a critic who once was in love: “… we shall learn to think while believing that we are only seeing and feeling.”53 Necker’s response to the mature Gibbon’s work usefully characterizes his prose but surely is also the response of a lover. The heightened alertness of the senses that accompanies love, and particularly first love, does often seem to become a way of knowing: Madame is visceral; her response is that of a woman remembering love. Gibbon had some intimations of this, for he “reread a hundred times” her “charming letter.”54 And he did make his way to Paris and her salon.

  Madame Necker tempered her praise with some critical remarks, the most interesting of which, for our purposes, was the criticism of his treatment of women. “To hear you talk, all their virtues are artificial; were you the man, sir, who ought to have spoken so of women?”55 This comment is not couched in merely general terms; some residue of personal resentment lingers. Gibbon responds as soon as possible; with the very next edition he inserts a new footnote into his first volume, one that goes out of its way to praise the wife of a particularly unpleasant emperor. That emperor, Maximin, did not simply exile or execute his enemies; some were crudely clubbed to death, others were turned over to wild beasts, but others, most imaginatively, were “sewed up in the hides of slaughtered animals.” But Empress Paulina, the footnote claims, “sometimes brought back the tyrant to the way of truth and humanity.”56 A further exculpatory effort was made by the former wooer in subsequent volumes when he portrayed “female virtues more generously,”57 a fact Gibbon made sure to point out to his Suzanne.

  The hopes of the young Gibbon and the young Curchod, their subsequent disappointments and resentments, the lingering attraction to each other that both of them clearly felt, none of that would interest us now except for the light it cast on Gibbon’s annotative habits. The personal and political are joined, the private and the public faces indistinguishable. Our picaresque footnote has become, like Tom Jones, an English squire. Now he is prepared to become a scholar under the tutelage of Leopold von Ranke. This unfortunate development comes next.

  5

  The Illusion of Empire

  THE EMPIRE BUILDERS of nineteenth-century England took enormous satisfaction in their work; they could walk up to their library’s globe of the earth, spin it, and see that their labors of mind and body encircled it. Everywhere lay the outlines of British colonies or ex-colonies. “The sun never sets, harrumph harrumph, on the British Empire!” the globe spinner might say, and the port-splashed, contented voice would be the same as the one used to admire a gourmand’s ten-course meal or a fine cigar. To such well-fed men the disintegration of the Empire was scarcely conceivable; it was everywhere and forever.

  Footnotes would have occasioned similar contented voices should the men have browsed through their library, trailing wisps of smoke, pulling out and opening books at random: Lord Macaulay’s History of England, perhaps, or Lieutenant Colonel Mundy’s Our Antipodes: Residence and Rambles in The Australasian [sic] Colonies with A Glimpse of the Gold Fields, or Miss Jane Porter’s romance, Scottish Chiefs—though one supposes empire builders might not be interested in heroic Scots. Still, Miss Porter’s work saw international success, and was even published in the former colonies of America so a copy might find its way into a library of the upper class. In any case, these and the other books in any well-heeled English gentleman’s library would attest that footnotes were everywhere: “The sun harrumph, etc., etc.”

  These days, of course, we are more impressed with the fall of empires than with their rise, and, indeed, the decline of the footnote’s scope and power began even as it appeared most securely triumphant—surely typical of empires.

  One man’s name particularly deserves to be affixed to the footnote’s decline: Leopold von Ranke.* Ranke was a scholar and a German, two terms that became nearly synonymous in the nineteenth century. He was devoted to research; one of his readers has said that Ranke’s prefaces to his books were “enthusiastic travel reports by a traveler who visited, not city after city, but library after library.”1 Ranke himself makes clear that he preferred burrowing among dark archives to idly drinking and taking in the sun in some outdoor café. “How quickly one studies the day away,” he crooned, as if he were an archivist’s Wordsworth and documents were so many daffodils.2 Like every scholar, however, he developed a complicated relationship with footnotes; he needed them, of course, but he resisted them when he could and, at times, sabotaged them. Early on he told his publisher that he included citations only because a young author needed to prove his reliability but that he had “carefully avoided going in for real annotation.”3 He once meticulously counted up the footnotes in a predecessor’s chapters in order to show that the citations could convey a false sense of scholarly support—twenty-seven references in chapter 104, he tells us, and twenty-seven more references to the same source in chapter 105. All fifty-four footnotes send us to the same source, and a doubtful one at that.

  The unreliable annotator Jean Charles Leonard Sismonde de Sismondi was Swiss, not German, and used French as a first language, but Ranke’s purpose was clearly to raise general questions about the effectiveness of citations and not just about the reliability of non-German scholarship.4

  To write history “wie es eigentlich gewesen,”5 or “history as it had really been,” was Ranke’s credo, or at least the credo that subsequent historians (who also presumably wanted their accounts to be “wie es eigentlich gewesen”) decided was Ranke’s. Ranke wanted to be “scientific, perhaps”; certainly he hoped to be accurate. A well-qualified contemporary historian has argued, however, that Ranke was just as concerned to provide a good tale as to provide scientific authority. “… Ranke’s free employment of dramatic devices,” Peter Gay writes, “places him in the camp of those historians who treat their craft as a branch of the storytelling art.”6 Unfortunately, Ranke failed to see the dramatic possibilities of footnotes; to him, they were simply interruptions required by the exigencies of the historian’s craft, a failure of imagination that him led him to adopt several questionable practices.

  First, he apparently did not always try to put his footnotes where they would clearly indicate the source of his facts and judgments; instead, he tried to hold off annotating until he came to a place where a note would not break the flow of his narrative. An exasperated reader called him on that. The reader complained that such consolidation of notes and the delay in their insertion made for imprecise annotation; Ranke’s book was “inchoate, sentimental” and mostly would please only “learned ladies.”7 Ranke grumbled a reply in a footnote: “I cite for those who want to find, but not for those who look in order not to find.”8 He did not explain why any scholar should fail to make it as easy as possible to find the source of a quotation; a scholar’s research surely should not be game of hide-and-seek—though a sense of play and a child’s capacity to wonder (and wander) are essential to the scholar, of course.

  Ranke also took to sequestering much of his most interesting commentary at the end of a book. His multivolume History of the Popes, for example, allocates 274 of its 1,205 pages or about 10 percent of its space to 165 appendices. No one would argue that all of that material should be run along the bottoms of the pages, but some of it clearly should. To give one demonstration: The Council of Trent, as Ranke says, “engrosses a large portion of the history of the sixteenth century”; 9 indeed, his History of the Popes necessarily keeps returning to it. R
anke draws on two accounts of it, which are “directly opposed to each other,”10 one of them by a certain Paolo Sarpi and the other by Pallavicini. At the time Ranke wrote no consensus had been reached as to whose word was more to be trusted; some church historians called Sarpi mendacious and Pallavicini honest, some reversed the adjectives. Sorting this out might well have been confined to an appendix, particularly if the publisher happens to be a parsimonious type; but surely the personal interpolation that occurs in the appendix of Ranke’s deserves to be directly under the text: “On approaching these voluminous works [Pallavicini’s and Sarpi’s], we are seized with a sort of terror.”11 Nothing in any of the restrained, entirely professional footnotes that accompany Ranke’s text on the Council of Trent does the job of this single sentence. The reader cannot escape its clear warning of troubled waters ahead; to stick it in the back of the book is the scholarly equivalent of dragging a lighthouse well into the interior so its flashing beacon will not disrupt the smooth sailing of pleasure cruises. Ranke continues for several paragraphs more, emphasizing just how “formidable” is his “task rendered by the fact we have to be on our guard at every step, lest we should be falsely directed by one or the other, and drawn into a labyrinth of intentional deceptions!”12 No sentence that earns an exclamation point should be kept at a distance from the text; nor should the appendix be summing up: “Even in these folios, from which industry itself recoils in terror, the presence of a poet makes itself felt.”13 To move from terror to poetry in the space of a few paragraphs is a splendid sleight of hand; it should be done center stage, not backstage.* Nothing makes clearer that the historian’s facts are melted by interpretation on the skillet of the writer’s temperament.