5. Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831). This novelist is the most considerable of the sentimental school, who took Sterne for their master. His best-known work is The Man of Feeling (1771), in which maudlin sentiment has free play. To his contemporaries Mackenzie was known as “the Man of Feeling.”
6. Frances Burney (1752–1840), whose married name was Madame d’Arblay, is rather an important figure, for she exercised a considerable influence on her age. Her diaries and letters are clever and informative, and her two best novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), are lively and acute representations of fashionable society. Johnson, with his heavy jocularity, called her a “character-monger,” meaning that her chief effects were obtained in the portraying of character. In the construction of Evelina she returns to the clumsy letter-method of Richardson, but she has a wit of an agreeably acid flavor. She is no mean predecessor of Jane Austen. (See p. 354.)
EDWARD GIBBON (1737–94)
1. His Life. Gibbon, who was born at Putney, was a sickly child, and, according to his own grateful acknowledgment, he owed his life to the exertions of his aunt, Catherine Porten. He had little regular schooling, but from his early years he was an eager reader of history. At the age of fifteen he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, an institution of which he always spoke afterward with aversion and contempt. “To the University of Oxford,” he writes, “I acknowledge no obligation, and she will as readily renounce me as a son, as I am willing to disclaim her as a mother.” His private historical studies led him to become a Roman Catholic when he was sixteen years old, to the great horror of his father, and resulted in his expulsion from the university. His father packed him off to Lausanne, in Switzerland, in the hope that the Protestant atmosphere of the place would wean him from his new faith.
From his stay in Lausanne began Gibbon’s long and affectionate acquaintance with French language and learning, two sources from which he was to draw the chief inspiration for his masterpiece. He returned to England in 1758, and had a brief and mixed experience in the Militia; afterward he toured the Continent, visiting the famous salons of Paris and seeing Rome. Returning to England after some years, he entered Parliament (1774), hoping for political preferment. In this he was only moderately successful, for he was a lukewarm and rather cynical politician. He returned to Lausanne, where he completed his great work in June 1787. He finally came back to England, and died in lodgings in London.
2. His Works. His first projected book, A History of Switzerland (1770), was never finished. Then appeared the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). At nearly regular intervals of two years each of the other five volumes was produced, the last appearing in 1788. His Autobiography, which contains valuable material concerning his life, is his only other work of any importance, and it is written with all his usual elegance and suave, ironic humor.
To most judges The Decline and Fall ranks as one of the greatest of historical works, and is a worthy example of what a history ought to be. In time it covers more than a thousand years, and in scope it includes all the nations of Europe. It sketches the events leading up to the dissolution of the Roman Empire, and traces the rise of the states and nations that previously formed the component parts of the Roman world, concluding with the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century. For this great task Gibbon’s knowledge is adequate; recent specialized research has rarely been able to pick holes in his narrative. Moreover, he had also that infallible sense of proportion which is the mark of the born historian: he knows what and when to omit, to condense, or give in full. In consequence his gigantic narrative has the balance and the beauty that result from a single and indivisible mind directing it, and suggests in plan and workmanship a vast cathedral.
Exception has been taken to Gibbon’s humor, and with some reason. His skeptical bias, the product of his studies in French, pervades the entire work. This mental attitude need be no disadvantage to the historian, for it leads him to scrutinize his evidence very severely. But in the case of Gibbon it is troublesome at times, especially when he deals with the rise of the Christian faith. In the chapters devoted to the early Christians he sets the facts down solemnly, but all the time he is subtly and sneeringly ironical, a characteristic that aroused the great indignation of Johnson. At many other points when recording disagreeable incidents Gibbon reveals a sniggering nastiness of humor unworthy of so great a writer.
His prose style, deliberately cultivated as being most suited to his subject, is peculiar to himself. It is lordly and commanding, with a full, free, and majestic rhythm. Admirably appropriate to its gigantic subject, the style has nevertheless some weaknesses. Though it never flags, and rarely stumbles, the very perfection of it tends to monotony, for it lacks ease and variety. The extract shows the elaborate construction of the sentences and the rolling character of the rhythm:
Three days Mahomet and his companion were concealed in the cave of Thor, at the distance of a league from Mecca; and in the close of each evening, they received from the son and daughter of Abubeker a secret supply of intelligence and food. The diligence of the Koreish explored every haunt in the neighbourhood of the city; they arrived at the entrance of the cavern; but the providential deceit of a spider’s web and a pigeon’s nest is supposed to convince them that the place was solitary and inviolate. “We are only two,” said the trembling Abubeker. “There is a third,” replied the prophet; “it is God himself.” No sooner was the pursuit abated, than the two fugitives issued from the rock, and mounted their camels; on the road to Medina they were overtaken by the emissaries of the Koreish; they redeemed themselves with prayers and promises from their hands. In this eventful moment the lance of an Arab might have changed the history of the world. The flight of the prophet from Mecca to Medina has fixed the memorable era of the Hegira, which, at the end of twelve centuries, still discriminates the lunar years of the Mahometan nations.