16 January: Boreham on Edward Gibbon

Volumes of Splendour
We cannot overlook today the fact that the sixteenth of January is the anniversary of the death of the greatest historian of all time. Edward Gibbon died on Jan. 16, 1794. Nobody who knew him in the days immediately preceding his epoch-making achievement dreamed for a single moment that he had it in him to write a masterpiece that mankind would prize for centuries. Looking for all the world like a thorough-paced fop, a beau, a dancing-master, he has been described by so many of his illustrious contemporaries that we all seem to have seen him.

He is a podgy figure dressed in an elaborate suit of flowered velvet with silk stockings and silver buckles. The gay kerchief that he so ostentatiously flutters, and the gold snuffbox that he so frequently taps, stamp him as one of the dandies of the town. Painfully self-conscious, he is a creature of quickly-moving hands, of restless, nervous eyes, of fair hair faultlessly arranged and delicately powdered, of depressed nose and huge protuberant cheeks. It seems hard on one who is so extremely anxious to cut a handsome figure in society that Nature has done so little to promote this end. Over such handicaps, however, he triumphed gloriously. His "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is the greatest history ever written. It set a new fashion in the craft of the chronicler. Instead of merely raking among dead men's bones, Gibbon electrified antiquity, making the cob-webbed and moth-eaten past live throbbingly again. His glowing and interminable panorama is indescribable. Every chapter seems to be a more gorgeous painting on a more spacious canvas than the one that preceded it. The imagination is captivated by the swaying hordes of Goths and Huns, Vandals and Saracens; the imposing and variegated pageant of martial movement sweeps majestically through one's mind for weeks after laying the volumes aside. It is archaeology palpitating with vitality.

Summoning The Glorious Ghosts Of Yesterday
With that characteristic egotism which, in the perspective of history, we find so intriguing, Gibbon has told us of the circumstances and emotions that marked alike the conception, and the completion of his magnum opus. It was on Oct. 15, 1764, that as a young man of 27, the idea of becoming the historian of a fallen empire first captivated his fancy. On a holiday visit to Rome he stood for the first time among the ruins of the Capitol. As he watched the bare-footed friars chanting vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, the splendid spectres of long-forgotten centuries seemed to fill the air, challenging him to give them corporeal life once more.
It was on June 27, 1787, that he finished his stupendous task. He was then 50. In a postscript which he appends to his manuscript, he describes the tumult of emotion with which, after so many years of closest application, he penned the last line of the last volume. It was a radiant midsummer night at Lausanne. "After laying down my pen," he says, "I took several turns in a covered walk of acacias which commanded a prospect of the country, the lake and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters and all nature was silent." He sighs with relief at having regained his freedom: he feels a lump in his throat as he takes farewell of a work that has been, through all his mature years, his constant companion. Between those two dates—1764 and 1787—we catch fitful and fugitive glimpses of him as, with the romances and the tragedies of a score of empires exciting his fevered brain, he haunts the libraries, the coffee-houses and the clubrooms of London.

A Proud Citizen Of A Score Of Centuries
Gibbon was a familiar figure in that famous circle that revolved about the colossal and commanding personality of Dr. Samuel Johnson—the circle that included Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, James Boswell, and all the rest of them. He entered Parliament in 1774, although he never once addressed the House. He was known to have a lodging, overflowing with stacks of historical tomes, in Bentinck St., Manchester Square, in the seclusion of which he forsook the eighteenth century and rambled at will among all the others. He several times heard Dr. Johnson declare that the artistry of history was an unconquered realm. It was all an affair of dates and kings and battles: nobody had ever written a history as a history should be written. Gibbon thought of the manuscript lying on his desk at Manchester Square and secretly vowed that he would remove that reproach. And, as everybody knows, he did it.

He lived for nearly seven years after finishing his masterpiece. His closing days were brightened by the conviction that he was recognised as the greatest historian of all time. For, first and last, he was essentially an egotist. Edward Gibbon believed implicitly in Edward Gibbon. He never asked advice: he never conferred with others: he never showed a sentence to anybody until it was published. His work is one of the wonders of the world. He ransacked the archives of 50 nations and caught the spirit of 20 separate centuries. With the most serene confidence he leads across his glowing pages the colourful procession of the ancient Orient and the stately drama of modern Europe. His theme, however stupendous, is always well within his grasp. He moves through the ages with the tramp of a conqueror. We may smile at the foppish little coxcomb as, in his dainty suit, he lounges in the corner of some odorous tavern, tiresomely tapping that golden snuffbox; we may be amused at the importance that he attaches to his own sayings and his own doings; but, for all that, we are compelled to admire his titanic achievement and to salute him as one of the greatest masters of our English speech.

F W Boreham

Image: Edward Gibbon