With all his devotion to study at Lausanne[2] (he read ten or twelve hours a day), he still found some time for the acquisition of some of the lighter accomplishments, such as riding, dancing, drawing, and also for mingling in such society as the place had to offer. In September 1755 he writes to his aunt: “I find a great many agreeable people here, see them sometimes, and can say upon the whole, without vanity, that, though I am the Englishman here who spends the least money, I am he who is most generally liked.” Thus his “studious and sedentary life” passed pleasantly enough, interrupted only at rare intervals by boyish excursions of a day or a week in the neighbourhood, and by at least one memorable tour of Switzerland, by Basel, Zürich, Lucerne and Bern, made along with Pavilliard in the autumn of 1755. The last eighteen months of this residence abroad saw the infusion of two new elements—one of them at least of considerable importance—into his life. In 1757 Voltaire came to reside at Lausanne; and although he took but little notice of the young Englishman of twenty, who eagerly sought and easily obtained an introduction, the establishment of the theatre at Monrepos, where the brilliant versifier himself declaimed before select audiences his own productions on the stage, had no small influence in fortifying Gibbon’s taste for the French theatre, and in at the same time abating that “idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman.” In the same year—apparently about June—he saw for the first time, and forthwith loved, the beautiful, intelligent and accomplished Mademoiselle Susan Curchod, daughter of the pasteur of Crassier. That the passion which she inspired in him was tender, pure and fitted to raise to a higher level a nature which in some respects was much in need of such elevation will be doubted by none but the hopelessly cynical; and probably there are few readers who can peruse the paragraph in which Gibbon “approaches the delicate subject of his early love” without discerning in it a pathos much deeper than that of which the writer was himself aware. During the remainder of his residence at Lausanne he had good reason to “indulge his dream of felicity”; but on his return to England, “I soon discovered that my father would not hear of this strange alliance, and that without his consent I was myself destitute and helpless. After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate; I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life.”[3]
In 1758 he returned with mingled joy and regret to England, and was kindly received at home. But he found a stepmother there; and this apparition on his father’s hearth at first rather appalled him. The cordial and gentle manners of Mrs Gibbon, however, and her unremitting care for his happiness, won him from his first prejudices, and gave her a permanent place in his esteem and affection. He seems to have been much indulged, and to have led a very pleasant life of it; he pleased himself in moderate excursions, frequented the theatre, mingled, though not very often, in society; was sometimes a little extravagant, and sometimes a little dissipated, but never lost the benefits of his Lausanne exile; and easily settled into a sober, discreet, calculating Epicurean philosopher, who sought the summum bonum of man in temperate, regulated and elevated pleasure. The first two years after his return to England he spent principally at his father’s country seat at Buriton, in Hampshire, only nine months being given to the metropolis. He has left an amusing account of his employments in the country, where his love of study was at once inflamed by a large and unwonted command of books and checked by the necessary interruptions of his otherwise happy domestic life. After breakfast “he was expected,” he says, to spend an hour with Mrs Gibbon; after tea his father claimed his conversation; in the midst of an interesting work he was often called down to entertain idle visitors; and, worst of all, he was periodically compelled to return the well-meant compliments. He mentions that he dreaded the “recurrence of the full moon,” which was the period generally selected for the more convenient accomplishment of such formidable excursions.
His father’s library, though large in comparison with that he commanded at Lausanne, contained, he says, “much trash”; but a gradual process of reconstruction transformed it at length into that “numerous and select” library which was “the foundation of his works, and the best comfort of his life both at home and abroad.” No sooner had he returned home than he began the work of accumulation, and records that, on the receipt of his first quarter’s allowance, a large share was appropriated to his literary wants. “He could never forget,” he declares, “the joy with which he exchanged a bank note of twenty pounds for the twenty volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions,” an Academy which has been well characterized (by Sainte-Beuve) as Gibbon’s intellectual fatherland. It may not be uninteresting here to note the principles which guided him both now and afterwards in his literary purchases. “I am not conscious,” says he, “of having ever bought a book from a motive of ostentation; every volume, before it was deposited on the shelf, was either read or sufficiently examined”; he also mentions that he soon adopted the tolerating maxim of the elder Pliny, that no book is ever so bad as to be absolutely good for nothing.
In London he seems to have seen but little select society—partly from his father’s taste, “which had always preferred the highest and lowest company,” and partly from his own reserve and timidity, increased by his foreign education, which had made English habits unfamiliar, and the very language in some degree strange. And thus he was led to draw that interesting picture of the literary recluse among the crowds of London: “While coaches were rattling through Bond Street, I have passed many a solitary evening in my lodging with my books. My studies were sometimes interrupted with a sigh, which I breathed towards Lausanne; and on the approach of spring I withdrew without reluctance from the noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure.” He renewed former acquaintance, however, with the “poet” Mallet, and through him gained access to Lady Hervey’s circle, where a congenial admiration, not to say affectation, of French manners and literature made him a welcome guest. It ought to be added that in each of the twenty-five years of his subsequent acquaintance with London “the prospect gradually brightened,” and his social as well as his intellectual qualities secured him a wide circle of friends. In one respect Mallet gave him good counsel in those early days. He advised him to addict himself to an assiduous study of the more idiomatic English writers, such as Swift and Addison—with a view to unlearn his foreign idiom and recover his half-forgotten vernacular—a task, however, which he never perfectly accomplished. Much as he admired these writers, Hume and Robertson were still greater favourites, as well from their subject as for their style. Of his admiration of Hume’s style, of its nameless grace of simple elegance, he has left us a strong expression, when he tells us that it often compelled him to close the historian’s volumes with a mixed sensation of delight and despair.
In 1761 Gibbon, at the age of twenty-four, after many delays, and with many flutterings of hope and fear, gave to the world, in French, his maiden publication, an Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, which he had composed two years before. It was published partly in compliance with his father’s wishes, who thought that the proof of some literary talent might introduce him favourably to public notice, and secure the recommendation of his friends for some appointment in connexion with the mission of the English plenipotentiaries to the congress at Augsburg which was at that time in contemplation. But in yielding to paternal authority, Gibbon frankly owns that he “complied, like a pious son, with the wish of his own heart.”
The subject of this youthful effort was suggested, its author says, by a refinement of vanity—“the desire of justifying and praising the object of a favourite pursuit,” namely, the study of ancient literature. Partly owing to its being written in French, partly to its character, the Essai excited more attention abroad than at home. Gibbon has criticized it with the utmost frankness, not to say severity; but, after every abatement, it is unquestionably a surprising effort for a mind so young, and contains many thoughts which would not have disgraced a thinker or a scholar of much maturer age. His account of its first reception and subsequent fortunes in England deserves to be cited as a curious piece of literary history. “In England,” he says, “it was received with cold indifference, little read, and speedily forgotten. A small impression was slowly dispersed; the bookseller murmured, and the author (had his feelings been more exquisite) might have wept over the blunders and baldness of the English translation. The publication of my history fifteen years afterwards revived the memory of my first performance, and the essay was eagerly sought in the shops. But I refused the permission which Becket solicited of reprinting it; the public curiosity was imperfectly satisfied by a pirated copy of the booksellers of Dublin; and when a copy of the original edition has been discovered in a sale, the primitive value of half-a-crown has risen to the fanciful price of a guinea or thirty shillings.”[4]
Some time before the publication of the essay, Gibbon had entered a new and, one might suppose, a very uncongenial scene of life. In an hour of patriotic ardour he became (June 12, 1759) a captain in the Hampshire militia, and for more than two years (May 10, 1760, to December 23, 1762) led a wandering life of “military servitude.” Hampshire, Kent, Wiltshire and Dorsetshire formed the successive theatres of what he calls his “bloodless and inglorious campaigns.” He complains of the busy idleness in which his time was spent; but, considering the circumstances, so adverse to study, one is rather surprised that the military student should have done so much, than that he did so little; and never probably before were so many hours of literary study spent in a tent. In estimating the comparative advantages and disadvantages of this wearisome period of his life, he has summed up with the impartiality of a philosopher and the sagacity of a man of the world. Irksome as were his employments, grievous as was the waste of time, uncongenial as were his companions, solid benefits were to be set off against these things; his health became robust, his knowledge of the world was enlarged, he wore off some of his foreign idiom, got rid of much of his reserve; he adds—and perhaps in his estimate it was the benefit to be most prized of all—“the discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion, and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire.”
It was during this period that he read Homer and Longinus, having for the first time acquired some real mastery of Greek; and after the publication of the Essai, his mind was full of projects for a new literary effort. The Italian expedition of Charles VIII. of France, the crusade of Richard I., the wars of the barons, the lives and comparisons of Henry V. and the emperor Titus, the history of the Black Prince, the life of Sir Philip Sidney, that of Montrose, and finally that of Sir W. Raleigh, were all of them seriously contemplated and successively rejected. By their number they show how strong was the impulse to literature, and by their character, how determined the bent of his mind in the direction of history; while their variety makes it manifest also that he had then at least no special purpose to serve, no preconceived theory to support, no particular prejudice or belief to overthrow.
The militia was disbanded in 1762, and Gibbon joyfully shook off his bonds; but his literary projects were still to be postponed. Following his own wishes, though with his father’s consent, he had early in 1760 projected a Continental tour as the completion “of an English gentleman’s education.” This had been interrupted by the episode of the militia; now, however, he resumed his purpose, and left England in January 1763. Two years were “loosely defined as the term of his absence,” which he exceeded by half a year—returning June 1765. He first visited Paris, where he saw a good deal of d’Alembert, Diderot, Barthélemy, Raynal, Helvétius, Baron d’Holbach and others of that circle, and was often a welcome guest in the saloons of Madame Geoffrin and Madame du Deffand.[5] Voltaire was at Geneva, Rousseau at Montmorency, and Buffon he neglected to visit; but so congenial did he find the society for which his education had so well prepared him, and into which some literary reputation had already preceded him, that he declared, “Had I been rich and independent, I should have prolonged and perhaps have fixed my residence at Paris.”
From France he proceeded to Switzerland, and spent nearly a year at Lausanne, where many old friendships and studies were resumed, and new ones begun. His reading was largely designed to enable him fully to profit by the long-contemplated Italian tour which began in April 1764 and lasted somewhat more than a year. He has recorded one or two interesting notes on Turin, Genoa, Florence and other towns at which halt was made on his route; but Rome was the great object of his pilgrimage, and the words in which he has alluded to the feelings with which he approached it are such as cannot be omitted from any sketch of Gibbon, however brief. “My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to affect. But at the distance of twenty-five years I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the Eternal City. After a sleepless night, I trod with a lofty step the ruins of the forum; each memorable spot, where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation.” Here at last his long yearning for some great theme worthy of his historic genius was gratified. The first conception of the Decline and Fall arose as he lingered one evening amidst the vestiges of ancient glory. “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”