Gibbon's Decline and Fall

...For like many another Englishman, Gibbon understood only too well that "the Catholic superstition which is always the enemy of reason is often the parent of taste...

...His project of "reviewing the simple transactions of a private and litterary [sic] life" he contrasts with "more serious history," characterizing it as a "vain undertaking" and promising that the work "will be secreted from the public eye until the author shall be removed beyond the reach of criticism or ridicule...

...Johnson, Adam Smith, Charles James Fox...

...Gibbon's discretion about the details of his private life in no way detracts from the strongly personal flavor of his narrative...

...Paul's, put it: "Gibbon, with a single discharge from his ponderous artillery of learning and sarcasm, laid prostrate the whole disorderly squadron...

...to have belonged to the same clubs as Dr...

...His childhood was lonely and stricken with disease, and his one and only move toward matrimony ran aground...

...by the precocious application that made him a self-taught classical scholar of European reputation before he was well out of his teens, equipped him to chronicle the decline of the Roman Empire, and impelled him to undertake his "enquiry into the human causes of the progress and establishment of Christianity...

...He was saved, however, by the prodigious energy with which he investigated the very matters that seemed most to vindicate his pessimism...

...As a member of the minor landed gentry, subsisting on the dwindling remnants of his merchant grandfather's fortune, he was chronically concerned with the "oeconomy" of his own and other people's estates ("She managed a small income with elegant oeconomy...

...It all seems unimaginably remote...

...Echoes of this Gibbonian ordnance may occasionally be heard like distant thunder in the pages of the Memoirs, although the brunt of the historian's displeasure here falls not so much on the canting priests as on the grievous failings of Oxford University at the time of his brief attendance there, and on the dreadful-ness of the French Revolution...

...There is no better index of the radical change in our sensibilities since the 18th century than the curious fact that the historian felt he must apologize for thus turning his attention to personal matters...

...He was a formidable opponent...

...but the temper of a mind exempt from avarice suggests some reasonable topics of consolation...

...By all accounts an ugly little chap (there were some unkind caricatures when he became famous), for fully the last 30 years of his life he hobbled about with a monstrously swollen testicle that he was too shy to have seen to until it was too late...

...His first published work was written in French-a fact which aroused some "Anti-gallican clamour" in the ranks of his countrymen-but a spell in the Hampshire militia during the Seven Years War restored him to a proper sense of his Englishness...

...Gibbon observed the turmoil in France with the deepest misgivings...

...I can only declare," he writes, "that the first stroke of a rebel drum would be the signal of my immediate departure...

...Such remembrance [of financial reverses] is bitter...

...As Henry Milan, Dean of St...

...to have corresponded with David Hume...

...In his time it was still happily true that he style est I'homme mime...

...He was desperately afraid that what he called "the French disease, the wild theories of equal and boundless freedom" would spread to Switzerland, where he lived in retirement in Lausanne...

...and after revolving several schemes, she preferred the humble industry of keeping a boarding-house for Westminster school...

...Writers & Writing GIBBON'S DECLINE AND FALL BY KINGSLEY SHORTER When Edward Gibbon finished writing his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he set about a much more modest task: the composition of his memoirs...

...I can never read anything from this period without being seized by nostalgia...

...Throughout the Memoirs, as in the novels of Jane Austen, one is sublimely aware of the lurking horrors of penury and the various kinds of dead end (tutoring, dressmaking, keeping a boardinghouse) that awaited what to this day in England are called "distressed gentlefolk"-members of the rentier class who finally fail to make ends meet...

...Her more wealthy relations were not absolutely without bowels," he says about a maiden aunt who found herself in this position, "but her noble spirit scorned a life of obligation and dependence...

...How splendid to have been an English gentleman of letters back in the good old days before George III went to pieces with porphyria, and the dream of reason began producing monsters, before the French Revolution, the American Revolution (how strange that sounds), even the Industrial Revolution...

...There were several such in Gibbon's own family...

...The book is endlessly diverting, a gold mine of social history, as well as a joy for anyone who loves the orotund sonorities of late 18th-century English prose...

...His fear of the "French disease," in part an expression of the deepening conservatism that marked his declining years, demonstrates as well his ambiguous attitude to the French language and culture...

...Gibbon himself seems to have understood that there was something faintly ludicrous about bringing the weighty machinery of his Latinoid prose to bear on small matters...

...Still, he remained effectively bicultural for the rest of his life, and it is fascinating to watch the traditional English Francophobia fight it out with his love of French...

...Perhaps this may account for an air of wry avuncular amusement, a certain twinkling-eyed, tongue-in-cheek portentous-ness that for some reason reminds me of the discomfited old gentlemen on the wrong end of the joke in those old Punch cartoons from a century ago, captioned: "Collapse of Stout Party...

...The economics (in the modern sense) of their class being such that one generation could thrive only at the expense of the next, Gibbon could not be truly independent until hi9 father was out of the way...

...All the same, the man in this case happened to be the historian of the Roman Empire, and I suspect that what makes the Memoirs such compulsive reading-quite apart from documentary interest-Is a certain comic disjunction between style and subject matter...

...Difficulties of oeconomy were not the only matters calling for consolation...

...the structure of a man's prose reflected his personality, and that was that...

...Not that Gibbon's personal situation was particularly advantageous...

...to have attended the theater at a time when "a constellation of excellent actors both in tragedy and comedy was eclipsed by the meridian brightness of Garrick...

...For those who have wondered at the philosophic gloom that pervades much of the Decline and Fall, the Memoirs provide an explanation: Gibbon was not a very happy man...

...Try telling that to a Frenchman...

...A modern reader may find it distinctly refreshing to be told that "the first consciousness of manhood is a very interesting moment in our lives: but it less properly belongs to the memoirs of an individual than to the natural history of the species...

...This chronic equivocation also shows up in his attitude to popery...

...With stubborn integrity he resisted what Hume called "the clamor of Bigots," the clerical backlash provoked by his findings...

...Gibbon expected little of this world-not surprising, perhaps, in a man who regarded history as "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind"?and less still of the next...

...How invigorating-provided you were in the right income bracket-to have breathed the same air as Diderot and Voltaire...

...His resentment of his father's spendthrift ways is clearly audible through the protestations of filial sentiment, and his relief at the old man's death is both unconcealed and unabashed...

...Perhaps I may suspect that the language itself is ill-adapted to sustain the vigour and dignity of an important narrative" he says at one point, reflecting on the inadequacies of his French style...

...Gibbon's lifelong intimacy with things Gallic began with his adolescent conversion to Roman Catholicism, at which time his outraged father packed him off to Lausanne to board with a Calvinist minister in the hope that he would see the error of his ways...

...Although he eventually made money from his writing, and was sustained in lean times by the patronage and generosity of his many influential friends, one gets the impression that he had constantly to reassure himself that all was well...

...Indeed, so difficult did he find it to commit his own life to paper that he wrote no fewer than six versions, and was removed beyond the reach of ridicule before he could complete the work...

...Although soon returned to the paths of righteousness, the cure might be regarded as worse than the disease: By the time he came home five years later, "I had ceased to be an Englishman...

...With the publication of Georges Bonnard's new edition of the Memoirs of My Life (Funk & Wagnalls, 346 pp., $10), we have for the first time a fully coherent reading of Gibbon's autobiography...

...Gibbon was obviously afraid to find himself similarly destitute...