Plain truthful tales are Gibbon’s autobiographies. The style is that of the history, and he writes of himself as frankly as he does of any of his historical characters. His [p135] failings—what he has somewhere termed “the amiable weaknesses of human nature”—are disclosed with the openness of a Frenchman. All but one of the ten years between 1783 and 1793, between the ages of 46 and 56, he passed at Lausanne. There he completed “The Decline and Fall,” and of that period he spent from August, 1787, to July, 1788, in England to look after the publication of the last three volumes. His life in Lausanne was one of study, writing, and agreeable society, of which his correspondence with his English friends gives an animated account. The two things one is most impressed with are his love for books and his love for Madeira. “Though a lover of society,” he wrote, “my library is the room to which I am most attached.”[92] While getting settled at Lausanne, he complains that his boxes of books “loiter on the road.”[93] And then he harps on another string. “Good Madeira,” he writes, “is now become essential to my health and reputation;”[94] yet again, “If I do not receive a supply of Madeira in the course of the summer, I shall be in great shame and distress.”[95] His good friend in England, Lord Sheffield, regarded his prayer and sent him a hogshead of “best old Madeira” and a tierce, containing six dozen bottles of “finest Malmsey,” and at the same time wrote: “You will remember that a hogshead is on his travels through the torrid zone for you…. No wine is meliorated to a greater degree by keeping than Madeira, and you latterly appeared so ravenous for it, that I must conceive you wish to have a stock.”[96] Gibbon’s devotion to Madeira bore its penalty. At the age of forty-eight he sent this account to his stepmother: “I was in hopes that my old Enemy the Gout had given over the attack, but the Villain, with his ally the winter, [p136] convinced me of my error, and about the latter end of March I found myself a prisoner in my library and my great chair. I attempted twice to rise, he twice knocked me down again and kept possession of both my feet and knees longer (I must confess) than he ever had done before.”[97] Eager to finish his history, he lamented that his “long gout” lost him “three months in the spring.” Thus as you go through his correspondence, you find that orders for Madeira and attacks of gout alternate with regularity. Gibbon apparently did not connect the two as cause and effect, as in his autobiography he charged his malady to his service in the Hampshire militia, when “the daily practice of hard and even excessive drinking” had sown in his constitution “the seeds of the gout.”[98]
Gibbon has never been a favorite with women, owing largely to his account of his early love affair. While at Lausanne, he had heard much of “the wit and beauty and erudition of Mademoiselle Curchod” and when he first met her, he had reached the age of twenty. “I saw and loved,” he wrote. “I found her learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners…. She listened to the voice of truth and passion…. At Lausanne I indulged my dream of felicity”; and indeed he appeared to be an ardent lover. “He was seen,” said a contemporary, “stopping country people near Lausanne and demanding at the point of a naked dagger whether a more adorable creature existed than Suzanne Curchod.”[99] On his return to England, however, he soon discovered that his father would not hear of this alliance, and he thus related the sequence: “After a painful struggle, I yielded to my fate…. I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.”[100] From [p137] England he wrote to Mademoiselle Curchod breaking off the engagement. Perhaps it is because of feminine criticism that Cotter Morison indulges in an elaborate defense of Gibbon, which indeed hardly seems necessary. Rousseau, who was privy to the love affair, said that “Gibbon was too cold-blooded a young man for his taste or for Mademoiselle Curchod’s happiness.”[101] Mademoiselle Curchod a few years later married Necker, a rich Paris banker, who under Louis XVI held the office of director-general of the finances. She was the mother of Madame de Staël, was a leader of the literary society in Paris and, despite the troublous times, must have led a happy life. One delightful aspect of the story is the warm friendship that existed between Madame Necker and Edward Gibbon. This began less than a year after her marriage. “The Curchod (Madame Necker) I saw at Paris,” he wrote to his friend Holroyd. “She was very fond of me and the husband particularly civil. Could they insult me more cruelly? Ask me every evening to supper; go to bed, and leave me alone with his wife—what an impertinent security!”[102]
If women read the Correspondence as they do the Autobiography, I think that their aversion to the great historian would be increased by these confiding words to his stepmother, written when he was forty-nine: “The habits of female conversation have sometimes tempted me to acquire the piece of furniture, a wife, and could I unite in a single Woman the virtues and accomplishments of half a dozen [p138] of my acquaintance, I would instantly pay my addresses to the Constellation.” [103]
I have always been impressed with Gibbon’s pride at being the author of “six volumes in quartos”; but as nearly all histories now are published in octavo, I had not a distinct idea of the appearance of a quarto volume until the preparation of this essay led me to look at different editions of Gibbon in the Boston Athenæum. There I found the quartos, the first volume of which is the third edition, published in 1777 [it will be remembered that the original publication of the first volume was in February, 1776]. The volume is 11¼ inches long by 9 inches wide and is much heavier than our very heavy octavo volumes. With this volume in my hand I could appreciate the remark of the Duke of Gloucester when Gibbon brought him the second volume of the “Decline and Fall.” Laying the quarto on the table he said, “Another d—d thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?”[104]
During my researches at the Athenæum, I found an octavo edition, the first volume of which was published in 1791, and on the cover was written, “Given to the Athenæum by Charles Cabot. Received December 10, 1807.” This was the year of the foundation of the Athenæum. On the quarto of 1777 there was no indication, but the scholarly cataloguer informed me that it was probably also received in 1807. Three later editions than these two are in this library, the last of which is Bury’s of 1900 to which I have constantly referred. Meditating in the quiet alcove, with the two early editions of Gibbon before me, I found an answer to the comment of H. G. Wells in his book “The Future in America” which I confess had somewhat irritated me. Thus wrote Wells: “Frankly I grieve over Boston as a [p139] great waste of leisure and energy, as a frittering away of moral and intellectual possibilities. We give too much to the past…. We are obsessed by the scholastic prestige of mere knowledge and genteel remoteness.”[105] Pondering this iconoclastic utterance, how delightful it is to light upon evidence in the way of well-worn volumes that, since 1807, men and women here have been carefully reading Gibbon, who, as Dean Milman said, “has bridged the abyss between ancient and modern times and connected together the two worlds of history.”[106] A knowledge of “The Decline and Fall” is a basis for the study of all other history; it is a mental discipline, and a training for the problems of modern life. These Athenæum readers did not waste their leisure, did not give too much to the past. They were supremely right to take account of the scholastic prestige of Gibbon, and to endeavor to make part of their mental fiber this greatest history of modern times.
I will close with a quotation from the Autobiography, which in its sincerity and absolute freedom from literary cant will be cherished by all whose desire is to behold “the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.” “I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life,” wrote Gibbon. “I am disgusted with the affectation of men of letters, who complain that they have renounced a substance for a shadow and that their fame affords a poor compensation for envy, censure, and persecution. My own experience at least has taught me a very different lesson: twenty happy years have been animated by the labor of my history; and its success has given me a name, a rank, a character in the world, to which I should not otherwise have been entitled…. D’Alembert relates that as he was walking in the gardens of Sans-souci [p140] with the King of Prussia, Frederick said to him, ‘Do you see that old woman, a poor weeder, asleep on that sunny bank? She is probably a more happy Being than either of us.’” Now the comment of Gibbon: “The King and the Philosopher may speak for themselves; for my part I do not envy the old woman.”[107]
[1] Autobiography, 270.
[2] Autobiography, 333.
[3] Autobiography, 311.