Although the idea was conceived when Gibbon was twenty-seven, he was thirty-one before he set himself seriously at work to study his material. At thirty-six he began the [p109] composition, and he was thirty-nine, when, in February, 1776, the first quarto volume was published. The history had an immediate success. “My book,” he wrote, “was on every table and almost on every toilette; the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day.”[3] The first edition was exhausted in a few days, a second was printed in 1776, and next year a third. The second and third volumes, which ended the history of the Western empire, were published in 1781, and seven years later the three volumes devoted to the Eastern empire saw the light. The last sentence of the work, written in the summer-house at Lausanne, is, “It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candor of the public.”
This is a brief account of one of the greatest historical works, if indeed it is not the greatest, ever written. Let us imagine an assemblage of English, German, and American historical scholars called upon to answer the question, Who is the greatest modern historian? No doubt can exist that Gibbon would have a large majority of the voices; and I think a like meeting of French and Italian scholars would indorse the verdict. “Gibbon’s work will never be excelled,” declared Niebuhr.[4] “That great master of us all,” said Freeman, “whose immortal tale none of us can hope to displace.”[5] Bury, the latest editor of Gibbon, who has acutely criticised and carefully weighed “The Decline and Fall,” concludes “that Gibbon is behind date in many details. But in the main things he is still our master, above and beyond date.”[6] His work wins plaudits from those [p110] who believe that history in its highest form should be literature and from those who hold that it should be nothing more than a scientific narrative. The disciples of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Stubbs and Gardiner, would be found voting in unison in my imaginary Congress. Gibbon, writes Bury, is “the historian and the man of letters,” thus ranking with Thucydides and Tacitus. These three are put in the highest class, exemplifying that “brilliance of style and accuracy of statement are perfectly compatible in an historian.”[7] Accepting this authoritative classification it is well worth while to point out the salient differences between the ancient historians and the modern. From Thucydides we have twenty-four years of contemporary history of his own country. If the whole of the Annals and History of Tacitus had come down to us, we should have had eighty-three years; as it is, we actually have forty-one of nearly contemporary history of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s tale covers 1240 years. He went far beyond his own country for his subject, and the date of his termination is three centuries before he was born. Milman spoke of “the amplitude, the magnificence, and the harmony of Gibbon’s design,”[8] and Bury writes, “If we take into account the vast range of his work, his accuracy is amazing.”[9] Men have wondered and will long wonder at the brain with such a grasp and with the power to execute skillfully so mighty a conception. “The public is seldom wrong” in their judgment of a book, wrote Gibbon in his Autobiography,[10] and, if that be true at the time of actual publication to which Gibbon intended to apply the remark, how much truer it is in the long run of years. “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” has had a life of over one hundred and thirty years, and there is no indication that it will not endure as long as any interest [p111] is taken in the study of history. “I have never presumed to accept a place in the triumvirate of British historians,” said Gibbon, referring to Hume and Robertson. But in our day Hume and Robertson gather dust on the shelf, while Gibbon is continually studied by students and read by serious men.
A work covering Gibbon’s vast range of time would have been impossible for Thucydides or Tacitus. Historical skepticism had not been fully enough developed. There had not been a sufficient sifting and criticism of historical materials for a master’s work of synthesis. And it is probable that Thucydides lacked a model. Tacitus could indeed have drawn inspiration from the Greek, while Gibbon had lessons from both, showing a profound study of Tacitus and a thorough acquaintance with Thucydides.
If circumstances then made it impossible for the Greek or the Roman to attempt history on the grand scale of Gibbon, could Gibbon have written contemporary history with accuracy and impartiality equal to his great predecessors? This is one of those delightful questions that may be ever discussed and never resolved. When twenty-three years old, arguing against the desire of his father that he should go into Parliament, Gibbon assigned, as one of the reasons, that he lacked “necessary prejudices of party and of nation”;[11] and when in middle life he embraced the fortunate opportunity of becoming a member of the House of Commons, he thus summed up his experience, “The eight sessions that I sat in Parliament were a school of civil prudence, the first and most essential virtue of an historian.”[12] At the end of this political career, Gibbon, in a private letter to an intimate Swiss friend, gave the reason why he had embraced it. “I entered Parliament,” he said, “without [p112] patriotism, and without ambition, and I had no other aim than to secure the comfortable and honest place of a Lord of Trade. I obtained this place at last. I held it for three years, from 1779 to 1782, and the net annual product of it, being £750 sterling, increased my revenue to the level of my wants and desires.”[13] His retirement from Parliament was followed by ten years’ residence at Lausanne, in the first four of which he completed his history. A year and a half after his removal to Lausanne, he referred, in a letter to his closest friend, Lord Sheffield, to the “abyss of your cursed politics,” and added: “I never was a very warm patriot and I grow every day a citizen of the world. The scramble for power and profit at Westminster or St. James’s, and the names of Pitt and Fox become less interesting to me than those of Cæsar and Pompey.”[14]
These expressions would seem to indicate that Gibbon might have written contemporary history well and that the candor displayed in “The Decline and Fall” might not have been lacking had he written of England in his own time. But that subject he never contemplated. When twenty-four years old he had however considered a number of English periods and finally fixed upon Sir Walter Raleigh for his hero; but a year later, he wrote in his journal: “I shrink with terror from the modern history of England, where every character is a problem, and every reader a friend or an enemy; where a writer is supposed to hoist a flag of party and is devoted to damnation by the adverse faction…. I must embrace a safer and more extensive theme.”[15]
How well Gibbon knew himself! Despite his coolness and candor, war and revolution revealed his strong Tory prejudices, which he undoubtedly feared might color any [p113] history of England that he might undertake. “I took my seat,” in the House of Commons, he wrote, “at the beginning of the memorable contest between Great Britain and America; and supported with many a sincere and silent vote the rights though perhaps not the interests of the mother country.”[16] In 1782 he recorded the conclusion: “The American war had once been the favorite of the country, the pride of England was irritated by the resistance of her colonies, and the executive power was driven by national clamor into the most vigorous and coercive measures.” But it was a fruitless contest. Armies were lost; the debt and taxes were increased; the hostile confederacy of France, Spain and Holland was disquieting. As a result the war became unpopular and Lord North’s ministry fell. Dr. Johnson thought that no nation not absolutely conquered had declined so much in so short a time. “We seem to be sinking,” he said. “I am afraid of a civil war.” Dr. Franklin, according to Horace Walpole, said “he would furnish Mr. Gibbon with materials for writing the History of the Decline of the British Empire.” With his country tottering, the self-centered but truthful Gibbon could not avoid mention of his personal loss, due to the fall of his patron, Lord North. “I was stripped of a convenient salary,” he said, “after having enjoyed it about three years.”[17]
The outbreak of the French Revolution intensified his conservatism. He was then at Lausanne, the tranquillity of which was broken up by the dissolution of the neighboring kingdom. Many Lausanne families were terrified by the menace of bankruptcy. “This town and country,” Gibbon wrote, “are crowded with noble exiles, and we sometimes [p114] count in an assembly a dozen princesses and duchesses.”[18] Bitter disputes between them and the triumphant Democrats disturbed the harmony of social circles. Gibbon espoused the cause of the royalists. “I beg leave to subscribe my assent to Mr. Burke’s creed on the Revolution of France,” he wrote. “I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can almost excuse his reverence for Church establishments.”[19] Thirteen days after the massacre of the Swiss guard in the attack on the Tuileries in August, 1792, Gibbon wrote to Lord Sheffield, “The last revolution of Paris appears to have convinced almost everybody of the fatal consequences of Democratical principles which lead by a path of flowers into the abyss of hell.”[20] Gibbon, who was astonished by so few things in history, wrote Sainte-Beuve, was amazed by the French Revolution.[21] Nothing could be more natural. The historian in his study may consider the fall of dynasties, social upheavals, violent revolutions, and the destruction of order without a tremor. The things have passed away. The events furnish food for his reflections and subjects for his pen, while sanguine uprisings at home or in a neighboring country in his own time inspire him with terror lest the oft-prophesied dissolution of society is at hand. It is the difference between the earthquake in your own city and the one 3000 miles away. As Gibbon’s pocket-nerve was sensitive, it may be he was also thinking of the £1300 he had invested in 1784 in the new loan of the King of France, deeming the French funds as solid as the English.[22]
It is well now to repeat our dictum that Gibbon is the greatest modern historian, but, in reasserting this, it is no more than fair to cite the opinions of two dissentients—the [p115] great literary historians of the nineteenth century, Macaulay and Carlyle. “The truth is,” wrote Macaulay in his diary, “that I admire no historians much except Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus…. There is merit no doubt in Hume, Robertson, Voltaire, and Gibbon. Yet it is not the thing. I have a conception of history more just, I am confident, than theirs.”[23] “Gibbon,” said Carlyle in a public lecture, is “a greater historian than Robertson but not so great as Hume. With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more futile account of human things than he has done of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; assigning no profound cause for these phenomena, nothing but diseased nerves, and all sorts of miserable motives, to the actors in them.”[24] Carlyle’s statement shows envious criticism as well as a prejudice in favor of his brother Scotchman. It was made in 1838, since when opinion has raised Gibbon to the top, for he actually lives while Hume is read perfunctorily, if at all. Moreover among the three—Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle—whose works are literature as well as history, modern criticism has no hesitation in awarding the palm to Gibbon.
Before finally deciding upon his subject Gibbon thought of “The History of the Liberty of the Swiss” and “The History of the Republic of Florence under the House of Medicis,”[25] but in the end, as we have seen, he settled on the later history of the Roman Empire, showing, as Lowell said of Parkman, his genius in the choice of his subject. His history really begins with the death of Marcus Aurelius, 180 A.D., but the main narrative is preceded by three excellent introductory chapters, covering in Bury’s edition eighty-two pages. After the completion of his work, he regretted [p116] that he had not begun it at an earlier period. On the first page of his own printed copy of his book where he announces his design, he has entered this marginal note: “Should I not have given the history of that fortunate period which was interposed between two iron ages? Should I not have deduced the decline of the Empire from the Civil Wars that ensued after the Fall of Nero or even from the tyranny which succeeded the reign of Augustus? Alas! I should; but of what avail is this tardy knowledge?”[26] We may echo Gibbon’s regret that he had not commenced his history with the reign of Tiberius, as, in his necessary use of Tacitus, we should have had the running comment of one great historian on another, of which we have a significant example in Gibbon’s famous sixteenth chapter wherein he discusses Tacitus’s account of the persecution of the Christians by Nero. With his power of historic divination, he would have so absorbed Tacitus and his time that the history would almost have seemed a collaboration between two great and sympathetic minds. “Tacitus,” he wrote, “very frequently trusts to the curiosity or reflection of his readers to supply those intermediate circumstances and ideas, which, in his extreme conciseness, he has thought proper to suppress.”[27] How Gibbon would have filled those gaps! Though he was seldom swayed by enthusiasm, his admiration of the Roman historian fell little short of idolatry. His references in “The Decline and Fall” are many, and some of them are here worth recalling to mind. “In their primitive state of simplicity and independence,” he wrote, “the Germans were surveyed by the discerning eye and delineated by the masterly pencil of Tacitus, the first of historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study of facts.”[28] Again he speaks of him as “the philosophic historian whose [p117] writings will instruct the last generation of mankind.”[29] And in Chapter XVI he devoted five pages to citation from, and comment on, Tacitus, and paid him one of the most splendid tributes one historian ever paid another. “To collect, to dispose, and to adorn a series of fourscore years in an immortal work, every sentence of which is pregnant with the deepest observations and the most lively images, was an undertaking sufficient to exercise the genius of Tacitus himself during the greatest part of his life.”[30] So much for admiration. That, nevertheless, Gibbon could wield the critical pen at the expense of the historian he rated so highly, is shown by a marginal note in his own printed copy of “The Decline and Fall.” It will be remembered that Tacitus published his History and wrote his Annals during the reign of Trajan, whom he undoubtedly respected and admired. He referred to the reigns of Nerva and Trajan in suggested contrast to that of Domitian as “times when men were blessed with the rare privilege of thinking with freedom, and uttering what they thought.”[31] It fell to both Tacitus and Gibbon to speak of the testament of Augustus which, after his death, was read in the Senate: and Tacitus wrote, Augustus “added a recommendation to keep the empire within fixed limits,” on which he thus commented, “but whether from apprehension for its safety, or jealousy of future rivals, is uncertain.”[32] Gibbon thus criticised this comment: “Why must rational advice be imputed to a base or foolish motive? To what cause, error, malevolence, or flattery, shall I ascribe the unworthy alternative? Was the historian dazzled by Trajan’s conquests?”[33]
The intellectual training of the greatest modern historian is a matter of great interest. “From my early youth,” [p118] wrote Gibbon in his Autobiography, “I aspired to the character of an historian.”[34] He had “an early and invincible love of reading” which he said he “would not exchange for the treasures of India” and which led him to a “vague and multifarious” perusal of books. Before he reached the age of fifteen he was matriculated at Magdalen College, giving this account of his preparation. “I arrived at Oxford,” he said, “with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a Doctor and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.”[35] He did not adapt himself to the life or the method of Oxford, and from them apparently derived no benefit. “I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College,” he wrote; “they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.”[36] He became a Roman Catholic. It was quite characteristic of this bookish man that his conversion was effected, not by the emotional influence of some proselytizer, but by the reading of books. English translations of two famous works of Bossuet fell into his hands. “I read,” he said, “I applauded, I believed … and I surely fell by a noble hand.” Before a priest in London, on June 8, 1753, he privately “abjured the errors of heresy” and was admitted into the “pale of the church.” But at that time this was a serious business for both priest and proselyte. For the rule laid down by Blackstone was this, “Where a person is reconciled to the see of Rome, or procures others to be reconciled, the offence amounts to High-Treason.” This severe rule was not enforced, but there were milder laws under which a priest might suffer perpetual imprisonment and the proselyte’s estate be transferred to his nearest relations. Under such laws prosecutions were had and convictions obtained. Little wonder was it when Gibbon apprised his father in [p119] an “elaborate controversial epistle” of the serious step which he had taken, that the elder Gibbon should be astonished and indignant. In his passion he divulged the secret which effectually closed the gates of Magdalen College to his son[37], who was packed off to Lausanne and “settled under the roof and tuition” of a Calvinist minister[38]. Edward Gibbon passed nearly five years at Lausanne, from the age of sixteen to that of twenty-one, and they were fruitful years for his education. It was almost entirely an affair of self-training, as his tutor soon perceived that the student had gone beyond the teacher and allowed him to pursue his own special bent. After his history was published and his fame won, he recorded this opinion: “In the life of every man of letters there is an æra, from a level, from whence he soars with his own wings to his proper height, and the most important part of his education is that which he bestows on himself.”[39] This was certainly true in Gibbon’s case. On his arrival at Lausanne he hardly knew any French, but before he returned to England he thought spontaneously in French and understood, spoke, and wrote it better than he did his mother tongue.[40] He read Montesquieu frequently and was struck with his “energy of style and boldness of hypothesis.” Among the books which “may have remotely contributed to form the historian of the Roman Empire” were the Provincial Letters of Pascal, which he read “with a new pleasure” almost every year. From them he said, “I learned to manage the weapon of grave and temperate irony, even on subjects of ecclesiastical solemnity.” As one thinks of his chapters in “The Decline and Fall” on Julian, one is interested to know that during this period he was introduced to the life and times of this [p120] Roman emperor by a book written by a French abbé. He read Locke, Grotius, and Puffendorf, but unquestionably his greatest knowledge, mental discipline, and peculiar mastery of his own tongue came from his diligent and systematic study of the Latin classics. He read nearly all of the historians, poets, orators, and philosophers, going over for a second or even a third time Terence, Virgil, Horace, and Tacitus. He mastered Cicero’s Orations and Letters so that they became ingrained in his mental fiber, and he termed these and his other works, “a library of eloquence and reason.” “As I read Cicero,” he wrote, “I applauded the observation of Quintilian, that every student may judge of his own proficiency by the satisfaction which he receives from the Roman orator.” And again, “Cicero’s epistles may in particular afford the models of every form of correspondence from the careless effusions of tenderness and friendship to the well-guarded declaration of discreet and dignified resentment.”[41] Gibbon never mastered Greek as he did Latin; and Dr. Smith, one of his editors, points out where he has fallen into three errors from the use of the French or Latin translation of Procopius instead of consulting the original.[42] Indeed he himself has disclosed one defect of self-training. Referring to his youthful residence at Lausanne, he wrote: “I worked my way through about half the Iliad, and afterwards interpreted alone a large portion of Xenophon and Herodotus. But my ardor, destitute of aid and emulation, was gradually cooled and, from the barren task of searching words in a lexicon, I withdrew to the free and familiar conversation of Virgil and Tacitus.”[43]