Such a book is not to be sneered at, nor the writer of it; perhaps we think it would be easy for us or anybody to write such another, if we would only forget conventionalisms and have the courage of our impressions; but if we made trial, I daresay we should find that to forget conventionalisms is just what we can't and do not know how to do; and so our impressions get bundled into the swathings of an ambitious rhetoric which spoils our chances and vulgarizes effort. I do not say Boswell was a very high-toned man or a very capable man in most directions; but he did have the art of easy narrative to a most uncommon degree; and did clearly perceive and apprehend just those points and qualities which go to make portraiture complete and satisfying.[[8]] I do not believe that he stupidly blundered into doing his biographic work well; stupid blundering never did and never could accomplish work that will meet acceptance by the intelligence of the world.
Gibbon.
Edward Gibbon.
I come now to speak of a more respectable personage—one of whom you have often heard, and whose resounding periods, full of Roman History you will most surely have read; I mean Edward Gibbon[[9]]—not an original member of the club, but elected at an early day. His life has great interest. He was the sole survivor of seven children; his father being a Member of Parliament—very reputable, but very inefficient. There were fears that his famous son would be a cripple for life, so weakly was he, and so ill put together; but growing stronger, he went to Oxford; was there for only a short time; did not love Oxford then, or ever; inclined to theologic inquiry and became Romanist; which so angered his father that he sent him to Lausanne, Switzerland, to be re-converted under the Calvinist teachers of that region to Protestantism. This in due time came about; and it was perhaps by a sort of compensating mental retaliation for this topsy-turvy condition of his youth that he assumed and cultivated the pugnacious indifference to religion which so marked all his later years and much of his work. He had his love passages, too, there upon the beautiful borders of Lake Geneva; a certain Mademoiselle Curchod, daughter of a Protestant clergyman, lived near by; and with her the future historian read poetry, read philosophy, read the skies and the mountains, discoursed upon the conjugation of verbs, and upon conjugalities of other sorts; but this the English father disapproved as much as he had disapproved of Romanism; and by reason of this—as Gibbon tells us, in his delightful autobiography—that "sweet dream came to an end." It is true the French biographers[[10]] put a rather different phase upon the story, and represent that while Mademoiselle respected young Mr. Gibbon very much, she could not return his ardor. Two colors, I have observed, are very commonly given to any sudden interruption of such festivities.
Mademoiselle, however, did not pine in single blessedness; she had a career before her. She became in a few years the distinguished wife of Necker, the great finance minister of France in the days immediately preceding the Revolution, and the mother of a still more famous daughter—that Mme. de Stael who wrote Corinne.
Though Gibbon lived and died a bachelor, he always maintained friendly relations with his old flame Mme. Necker, being frequently a guest at her elegant Paris home; and she, on at least one occasion, a guest of the historian in London. It was in the year 1774—ten years after its foundation, that Gibbon was elected member of the Literary Club; he being then in his thirty-seventh year and well known for his wide learning and his conversational powers. He was recognized as an author, too, of critical acumen, and great range of language; some of his earlier treatises were written in French, which he knew as well as English; German he never knew; but the first volume of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did not appear until the year 1776—a good tag for that great American date! That first volume made a prodigious surprise, and immense applause. Poor Hume[[11]] (whose story waits), struggling with the mortal disease which was to carry him off in that year, wrote his praises from Edinburgh. Horace Walpole, who had the vanity of professing to know everybody worth knowing, says, "I am astonished; I know the man a little; I could not believe it was in him; I must get to know him better."
Yet Gibbon was not a modest man in the ordinary sense; never, except when—very rarely—warmed into a colloquial display of his extraordinary learning, did he impress a stranger with any sense of his power. He was short and corpulent; had a waddling walk and puffy cheeks and a weak double chin; with very much in his general aspect and manner to explain the miscarriage of his love-affair, and nothing at all to explain the Decline of the Roman Empire. Withal, he was obsequious, studiously courteous; had ready smiles at command; had a mincing manner; his wig was always in order, and so was his flowered waistcoat; and he tapped his snuff-box with an easy dégagé air, that gave no warrant for anything more than an agreeable titillation of the nerves. But if an opening came for a thrust of his cumulated learning in establishing some historic point in dispute, it poured out with a gush, authority upon authority, citation on citation, as full and impetuous and unlooked for as a great spring flood.
He went over to Paris with his honors fresh upon him; was cordially received there; the Necker influence, and his familiarity with French, standing him in good stead. He affected a certain style too. "I have," he says, "two footmen in handsome liveries behind my coach, and my apartment is hung with damask." He loved such display, though only the hired luxury of a hotel. He had never a taste for the simpler enjoyments of English country life; never mounted a horse and scorned partridge shooting or angling. In a letter to a friend he says, "Never pretend to allure me by painting in odious colors the dust of London. I love the dust, and whenever I move into the Weald, it is to visit you, and not your trees."
It does not appear that he went frequently to the Turk's-Head Club. The brusquerie of Johnson would have grated on him—grated on him in more senses than one, we suspect; and the gruff Doctor would have scorned his dilettanteism as much as his scepticism. Gibbon took kindly, though, to Goldsmith; but he hated Boswell honestly, and Boswell honestly hated back.[[12]]
His letters were never strong or bright, nor were his occasional literary criticisms either acute or profound; all his great powers were kept in reserve for his magnum opus—the History. For the quietude he thought necessary to its completion he went again to the home of his youth at Lausanne, and there, in sight of that wondrous panorama of lake and mountain, upon a site where now stands the Hotel Gibbon,[[13]] and a few acacia trees under which the historian meditated, the great work was brought to completion—a great work then, and a great work now, measured by what standard we will. To say that one approaches the accuracy of Gibbon is to exhaust praise; to say that one surpasses him in reach of learning is to deal in hyperbole. Even the historian, Dr. Freeman, who, I think, did much prefer saying a critical thing to saying a pleasant thing, testified that—"He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside, nor threatened to set aside." Modern high critics sneer at his large, ceremonious manner; Ruskin pronounces "his English the worst ever written by an educated Englishman"[[14]] (the same Ruskin who found a "mass of errors" under the sunshine of Claude). But let us remember what burden of knowledge those grandiloquent sentences of Gibbon had to carry; what reach of empire they had to cover! Here be no pigmies, predicating the outcome of little factions, no discourse about the smallness of word-meanings; but vast populations are arrayed under our eye. We cannot talk of the stars in their courses as we talk of the will-o'-wisps of politicians. Rome marching to its dissolution, with captive nations in its trail,[[15]] must put a lofty strain upon the page that records her downfall.