Empire of the mind
Jonathan Clark
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE' by David Womersley
CUP, £35, pp. 318
Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eli! Mr Gibbon?' To the Hanoverians' critics, William Henry, Duke of Glouces- ter, brother of George III, provides the clinching evidence of royal philistinism. Secretly, of course, we side with the Duke. We can't get through Gibbon either. The Decline and Fall may not fit the ironist's definition of a classic (a work that sells hugely, but only after the author's death), but it fits the cynic's (a work that derives its authority from not being read). As Dr Johnson said of Paradise Lost, it is `one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.'
Why not? Gibbon, after all, produced the greatest prose work in Augustan Eng- lish. Perhaps this answers our question: the scale of the achievement defeats us. Dip into it at any point, and we find the same stream of the crimes, follies and misfor- tunes of mankind whizzing past like the bridges on those old films of the London to Brighton railway. What does it all mean? Gibbon's answer seems too vast, too architectonic, to be grasped.
Instead, writers on Gibbon turn into biographers, squeezing every drop of titila- tion from a retiring and not overly dis- turbed psyche. That approach helped little: Gibbon may have boasted that the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers had not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire, but which of the readers under- stood his book better? As to the engaging fiction of the historian inspired to write by the spectacle of those barefoot friars sing- ing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, Gibbon's autobiography obscured rather than elucidated his spiritual journey from Canterbury to Geneva via Rome. Life marmorealised art. Now all that is changed: David Womersley has devised a key to what Gibbon actually wrote. Thanks to this profound commentary, The Decline and Fall is more comprehensible than at any time in the 200 years since its comple- tion.
Gibbon was, of course, less than Olym- pian both in his history and his contempor- ary politics. `We have both the right and the power on our side', was his view of the American dispute. 'I am more and more convinced that with firmness all may go well.' That was in 1775. Things turned out somewhat differently; but then, so did his book. The key to The Decline and Fall is the discovery that Gibbon's position evolved during the course of its six quarto volumes. This was only natural: losing the American war unleashed a wave of reform, orchestrated by Edmund Burke, which abolished Gibbon's sinecure post at the Board of Trade and forced him to adopt a European viewpoint in the cheap retreat of Lausanne. Momentous events unfolding around him shaped his vision.
So did scholarship itself. The Decline and Fall appeared in three instalments in 1776, 1781 and 1788. During this pub- lishing epic, Gibbon gradually departed from the central tenets of Enlightenment historiography — the constancy of human nature, the priority of trivial causes, the
role of the past as a compendium of moral examples. Crucially, the modern world evolved its distinctive historical outlook, its sense of being essentially different from so much that had gone before, in emancipat- ing itself from the spell of Rome. Nothing of this had happened in Montesquieu or Voltaire, argues Womersley. Rather, the process can only be understood as we see Gibbon's thought develop.
Gibbon famously complimented Rome between the death of Domitian and the accession of Commodus as that period In the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous'. What he meant was that it was the period which his historical preconceptions best fitted. But the later vicissitudes of Rome drew him steadily away from this happy congruence. How could his faith in the uniformity of human nature (that is, of rationalist, patri- cian, sceptical, virtuous patriotism) survive the spectacle of the collapse of public virtue under arbitrary power, the rise of Christianity, the triumph of the barbarian tribes, the survival of Byzantium, the rise of Islam?
Slowly, too, Gibbon's scorn for the past was modified. Under the microscope of research, what had seemed to Gibbon the philosophe a structureless heap of ignor- ance and folly became to Gibbon the historian a created record both richly varied and profoundly intelligible. Ches- terfield had advised his son: 'To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.' Gibbon obeys this precept in his first volume, but by his last he is plunged into the detail and stream of affairs. Christianity appears as a target of irony in the notorious chapters 15 and 16; by the fall of Constantinople it is close to being the defining principle of western civilisation.
The sort of history which the philosophes wrote did not disappear overnight. Histor- ians can still be divided into the sneerers, who satirise their past from some lordly vantage point, and the scholars, those archive-grubbers who labour to understand it. Thanks to David Womersley, we can read The Decline and Fall as Gibbon's application to join the scholars.
Jonathan Clark is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
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