Gibbon
By STEVEN RUNC1MAN
IN these days, when academic pundits are apt to tell us that narrative history is 'out' and that scholars should not concern themselves with fine writing, it is consoling to reflect that Edward Gibbon is still generally acclaimed as the greatest of British historians. He did everything that the best modern dons dislike. He chose a large theme and treated it broadly, as a philosopher; he gave full rein to his own tastes and moral judgments; he branched off into subjects for which, by present-day standards, he was not intellectually equipped; and, above all, he planned and executed his great History as a work of art. No book in English has been written with more consummate artistry than The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and none is more certain of immortality.
Gibbon's supreme greatness is as a literary artist; and Professor Bond's intelligent discus- sion of his literary art* is therefore welcome and interesting. Professor Bond approaches his task with good transatlantic thoroughness. He ex- plains how Gibbon came to conceive his History and what experiences and influences lay behind it. He analyses its argument, its structure, its narrative, its characters, its satire and its language. If sometimes he repeats himself, it is because his various headings are not easy to separate. Gibbon's narrative style, his delineation of character and his deadly irony are all de- pendent on his choice and use of words. To dismember a work of art in order to examine its ingredients is not easy when its essence lies in their perfect blending. But Professor Bond per- forms his anatomical dissection with clarity and grace; and the result is both stimulating and persuasive.
Gibbon thought of his great work as an epic. His devotion to Homer is easily discerned; but Professor Bond suggestively emphasises the epic quality by comparing Gibbon more than once with Milton. The likeness between Paradise Lost and The Decline and Fall is greater than appears at first sight. In his discussion of the book's structure, Professor Bond explains the overall scheme, convincingly showing how carefully balanced and co-ordinated the chapters are and how necessary the long digressions are for the balance of the whole. In dealing with the narra- tive he makes a very effective comparison of Gibbon's style, particularly in the great battle- pieces, with a Roman bas-relief such as adorned the triumphal arches of the capital. There is the same insistence on the most memorable features of the episode; the emphasis is on the vivid turmoil in the foreground, and the terrain (which was almost always unknown to Gibbon, who was not a wide traveller) is only barely indicated. But Professor Bond maintains that Gibbon could also describe landscape. Here it is difficult to follow him. The passage on the groves of Daphne which he quotes with enthusiasm may provide an atmosphere of luscious splendour; but it does not paint a picture. The technique, as he says, is like Milton's; but then Milton, for all his imagination, had little visual sense. The tricks of style used by Gibbon to make his effects are well brought out. He liked to 'show that passion * THE LITERARY ART OF EDWARD GIBBON. By Harold L. Bond. (0.U.P., 21s.) was more important than personality: he many sentences have the passion ins, ead of t° person as their subject. 'The pride of CO stantius' or 'the honour of Theodoric' perf0lto1 the action, not the man himself. The POlv/ voice is continually used to achieve the sal° effect. His use of the word 'or' when the evidea0 was not complete enough for him to assign I motive or when he wished to suggest stating a baser cause is another characteristh trick.
The chapter on diction is especially interest' ing, emphasising both the rhetorical quality of Gibbon's prose and his basic two-part unit 'thought, used sometimes to show a closely 1' cause and effect, sometimes to make a contrast from which a balanced judgment can be derive sometimes to reduce the whole to ironicsl absurdity. Yet the variety of rhythm and gra°. matical form and the occasional introductior of a sharp and simple sentence prevent the dater of monotony.
There is much to learn from Professor Band; and after reading his work we can go back Gibbon better able to value and enjoy his literary mastery. Nevertheless this book is sone. how unsatisfying. Any so thorough a piece 01 dissection tends to kill the subject. Gibbon Was a careful and conscientious writer. We know tbat he rewrote his first chapters several times, eve° after the first edition had appeared. We know thal he took great pains over the rhythm and sonority of his phrases. But was his method quit' as self-conscious as this analysis suggests? Though Gibbon, like most great writers, tin' doubtedly repeated his sentences aloud be f°' committing them to paper, he could not have produced so vast a work with such comparative speed had he not possessed or acquired the genius to express himself fluently without pails' ing deliberately to plan every single word. was surely a greater natural writer than this careful study implies. At the same time Professor Bond carries his admiration of Gibbon almost t° excess. In his eyes the Master can do not!. ing wrong. But to many readers there is, in spite of itS skill, something a little monotonous in this ich rolling style. Just as few of the admirers of Paradise Lost ever manage to plough through the whole of Paradise Regained, so many acl• mirers of The Decline and Fall begin to wilt after the forty-seventh chapter, and not so manY penetrate to the end of the seventy-first. It is na1 the subject-matter which discourages thole complicated though it is; but they are satiated bY the language. Phrases of exceptional felicity and shafts of wicked irony may revive interest r and then; but it is an exhausting task to read the work straight through. Sheridan, when speaking in Westminster Hall at the trial of Warren
Hastings, referred to the 'luminous pages of Gibbon,' to the historian's delight, but then teased him afterwards by declaring that he had meant to say 'voluminous.' Both epithets ale deserved.
But the main fault of a book such as Profe Bond's is that it is incomplete. Gibbon wa historian who used his art for the purpose writing history. His artistry cannot be divot from his subject-matter. Professor Bond is sor s a of ced not
a historian, at least as regards the Middle Ages. One or two historical errors, trivial in them- selves, make this clear. He does not attempt to assess Gibbon as a historian; contenting himself with emphasising Gibbon's belief in the value of Liberty and Reason. Rome fell because the Romans rejected the responsibilities of freedom. But Gibbon was not a profound thinker. He never worked out thoroughly what he meant by liberty. Was it to be found in Athenian demo- cracy, based on slave labour, or in the semi- oligarchic constitution of the Roman republic? He never understood that the Arabs under the Caliphate considered themselves free, because their religion guaranteed to each of them his individual dignity and each had the right of access to the autocrat, or that in the later Roman and Byzantine Empires what Mommsen has called 'the legal right of revolution' allowed for the expression of public opinion. He was also a little vague about the meaning of Reason. We can really only say that he regarded religion, except in the form of simple theism, as unreason- able.
In many was Gibbon had a remarkable historical sense. Though he was not above com- bining sources of different dates to make a com- posite picture, and he sometimes relied, as on the career of Mahomet, on sources that were un- reliable, his use of source-material was on the whole, for his time, accurate and wise. Where he had to make guesses owing to the lack of avail- able material, he has often been justified. But he had one great and fundamental defect, a lack of imaginative sympathy. The whole world of religious experience was distasteful to him, and he made no attempt to understand it. His erudi- tion was not at fault, as his religious critics dis- covered. But his dislike of Christianity and of the whole mediaNal mentality, in the east as in the west, and of its artistic expression, though it may help the architectural structure of the great book and its 'philosophic' argument, badly damages its historical merit. To a reader whose sympathies are wider the superb strictures and the witty irony begin to grow unpleasant. The work of art is vitiated by a certain lack of human good taste, Professor Bond goes so far as to quote. without entire agreement, opinions that 18s Gibbon is more important as illustrating his own times than as describing the past. This, I think, is true, so long as we remember that the eighteenth century was not only the age of the Rationalists, but also of Methodist enthusiasm, of Jacobite nostalgia, of the. Rosicrucians and of the Gothick. And Professor Bond is just when he suggests that 'The Decline and Fall can be re- garded as an eighteenth-century, secular, prose equivalent of Paradise Lost. Its subject is the fall of man from a state of intellectual, spiritual and political freedom into the darkness of bar- barism and servitude of every sort, until . . . man begins to emerge into the enlightenment, which, Gibbon felt, characterised his own age.' 16s That can indeed be a great theme; but should it be attached to a history of the whole medkeval world?
I do not know the answer. I hope and believe that coming generations will continue to read The Decline and Fall and to learn from it that historians need not fear to face large themes, and that the writing of history is most effective when it is done by a consummate artist; but I hope too that they will not depend on Gibbon for the understanding Of the centuries about which he wrote. Perhaps we should say that he was one of the greatest of historians, but not 'a good historian: and meanwhile we should be grateful for a book which helps us to understand in detail the art on which his greatness was based.
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