IV.
Next to my Johnsoniana are my Gibbons--two editions, if you please,
for my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could
not resist getting a set of Bury's new six-volume presentment of the
History. In reading that book you don't want to be handicapped in
any way. You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume. You
are not to read it lightly, but with some earnestness of purpose and
keenness for knowledge, with a classical atlas at your elbow and a
note-book hard by, taking easy stages and harking back every now
and then to keep your grip of the past and to link it up with what
follows. There are no thrills in it. You won't be kept out of your
bed at night, nor will you forget your appointments during the day,
but you will feel a certain sedate pleasure in the doing of it, and
when it is done you will have gained something which you can never
lose--something solid, something definite, something that will make
you broader and deeper than before.
Were I condemned to spend a year upon a desert island and allowed
only one book for my companion, it is certainly that which I should
choose. For consider how enormous is its scope, and what food for
thought is contained within those volumes. It covers a thousand
years of the world's history, it is full and good and accurate, its
standpoint is broadly philosophic, its style dignified. With our
more elastic methods we may consider his manner pompous, but he
lived in an age when Johnson's turgid periods had corrupted our
literature. For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon's pomposity. A
paragraph should be measured and sonorous if it ventures to describe
the advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a Greek Senate. You
are wafted upwards, with this lucid and just spirit by your side
upholding and instructing you. Beneath you are warring nations, the
clash of races, the rise and fall of dynasties, the conflict of
creeds. Serene you float above them all, and ever as the panorama
flows past, the weighty measured unemotional voice whispers the true
meaning of the scene into your ear.
It is a most mighty story that is told. You begin with a description
of the state of the Roman Empire when the early Caesars were on the
throne, and when it was undisputed mistress of the world. You pass
down the line of the Emperors with their strange alternations of
greatness and profligacy, descending occasionally to criminal
lunacy. When the Empire went rotten it began at the top, and it
took centuries to corrupt the man behind the spear. Neither did a
religion of peace affect him much, for, in spite of the adoption of
Christianity, Roman history was still written in blood. The new
creed had only added a fresh cause of quarrel and violence to the
many which already existed, and the wars of angry nations were mild
compared to those of excited sectaries.
Then came the mighty rushing wind from without, blowing from the
waste places of the world, destroying, confounding, whirling madly
through the old order, leaving broken chaos behind it, but finally
cleansing and purifying that which was stale and corrupt. A
storm-centre somewhere in the north of China did suddenly what it
may very well do again. The human volcano blew its top off, and
Europe was covered by the destructive debris. The absurd point is
that it was not the conquerors who overran the Roman Empire, but it
was the terrified fugitives, who, like a drove of stampeded cattle,
blundered over everything which barred their way. It was a wild,
dramatic time--the time of the formation of the modern races of
Europe. The nations came whirling in out of the north and east like
dust-storms, and amid the seeming chaos each was blended with its
neighbour so as to toughen the fibre of the whole. The fickle Gaul
got his steadying from the Franks, the steady Saxon got his touch of
refinement from the Norman, the Italian got a fresh lease of life
from the Lombard and the Ostrogoth, the corrupt Greek made way for
the manly and earnest Mahommedan. Everywhere one seems to see a
great hand blending the seeds. And so one can now, save only that
emigration has taken the place of war. It does not, for example,
take much prophetic power to say that something very great is being
built up on the other side of the Atlantic. When on an Anglo-Celtic
basis you see the Italian, the Hun, and the Scandinavian being
added, you feel that there is no human quality which may not be
thereby evolved.
But to revert to Gibbon: the next stage is the flight of Empire from
Rome to Byzantium, even as the Anglo-Celtic power might find its
centre some day not in London but in Chicago or Toronto. There is
the whole strange story of the tidal wave of Mahommedanism from the
south, submerging all North Africa, spreading right and left to
India on the one side and to Spain on the other, finally washing
right over the walls of Byzantium until it, the bulwark of
Christianity, became what it is now, the advanced European fortress
of the Moslem. Such is the tremendous narrative covering half the
world's known history, which can all be acquired and made part of
yourself by the aid of that humble atlas, pencil, and note-book
already recommended.
When all is so interesting it is hard to pick examples, but to me
there has always seemed to be something peculiarly impressive in
the first entrance of a new race on to the stage of history. It has
something of the glamour which hangs round the early youth of a
great man. You remember how the Russians made their debut--came
down the great rivers and appeared at the Bosphorus in two hundred
canoes, from which they endeavoured to board the Imperial galleys.
Singular that a thousand years have passed and that the ambition
of the Russians is still to carry out the task at which their
skin-clad ancestors failed. Or the Turks again; you may recall the
characteristic ferocity with which they opened their career. A
handful of them were on some mission to the Emperor. The town was
besieged from the landward side by the barbarians, and the Asiatics
obtained leave to take part in a skirmish. The first Turk galloped
out, shot a barbarian with his arrow, and then, lying down beside
him, proceeded to suck his blood, which so horrified the man's
comrades that they could not be brought to face such uncanny
adversaries. So, from opposite sides, those two great races arrived
at the city which was to be the stronghold of the one and the
ambition of the other for so many centuries.
And then, even more interesting than the races which arrive are
those that disappear. There is something there which appeals most
powerfully to the imagination. Take, for example, the fate of those
Vandals who conquered the north of Africa. They were a German tribe,
blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, from somewhere in the Elbe country.
Suddenly they, too, were seized with the strange wandering madness
which was epidemic at the time. Away they went on the line of least
resistance, which is always from north to south and from east to
west. South-west was the course of the Vandals--a course which must
have been continued through pure love of adventure, since in the
thousands of miles which they traversed there were many fair
resting-places, if that were only their quest.
They crossed the south of France, conquered Spain, and, finally, the
more adventurous passed over into Africa, where they occupied the
old Roman province. For two or three generations they held it, much
as the English hold India, and their numbers were at the least some
hundreds of thousands. Presently the Roman Empire gave one of those
flickers which showed that there was still some fire among the
ashes. Belisarius landed in Africa and reconquered the province. The
Vandals were cut off from the sea and fled inland. Whither did they
carry those blue eyes and that flaxen hair? Were they exterminated
by the negroes, or did they amalgamate with them? Travellers have
brought back stories from the Mountains of the Moon of a Negroid
race with light eyes and hair. Is it possible that here we have some
trace of the vanished Germans?
It recalls the parallel case of the lost settlements in Greenland.
That also has always seemed to me to be one of the most romantic
questions in history--the more so, perhaps, as I have strained my
eyes to see across the ice-floes the Greenland coast at the point
(or near it) where the old "Eyrbyggia" must have stood. That was the
Scandinavian city, founded by colonists from Iceland, which grew to
be a considerable place, so much so that they sent to Denmark for a
bishop. That would be in the fourteenth century. The bishop, coming
out to his see, found that he was unable to reach it on account of a
climatic change which had brought down the ice and filled the strait
between Iceland and Greenland. From that day to this no one has been
able to say what has become of these old Scandinavians, who were
at the time, be it remembered, the most civilized and advanced
race in Europe. They may have been overwhelmed by the Esquimaux,
the despised Skroeling--or they may have amalgamated with them--or
conceivably they might have held their own. Very little is known yet
of that portion of the coast. It would be strange if some Nansen or
Peary were to stumble upon the remains of the old colony, and find
possibly in that antiseptic atmosphere a complete mummy of some
bygone civilization.
But once more to return to Gibbon. What a mind it must have been
which first planned, and then, with the incessant labour of twenty
years, carried out that enormous work! There was no classical author
so little known, no Byzantine historian so diffuse, no monkish
chronicle so crabbed, that they were not assimilated and worked into
their appropriate place in the huge framework. Great application,
great perseverance, great attention to detail was needed in all
this, but the coral polyp has all those qualities, and somehow in
the heart of his own creation the individuality of the man himself
becomes as insignificant and as much overlooked as that of the
little creature that builds the reef. A thousand know Gibbon's work
for one who cares anything for Gibbon.
And on the whole this is justified by the facts. Some men are
greater than their work. Their work only represents one facet of
their character, and there may be a dozen others, all remarkable,
and uniting to make one complex and unique creature. It was not so
with Gibbon. He was a cold-blooded man, with a brain which seemed to
have grown at the expense of his heart. I cannot recall in his life
one generous impulse, one ardent enthusiasm, save for the Classics.
His excellent judgment was never clouded by the haze of human
emotion--or, at least, it was such an emotion as was well under
the control of his will. Could anything be more laudable--or less
lovable? He abandons his girl at the order of his father, and sums
it up that he "sighs as a lover but obeys as a son." The father
dies, and he records the fact with the remark that "the tears of
a son are seldom lasting." The terrible spectacle of the French
Revolution excited in his mind only a feeling of self-pity because
his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the unhappy refugees, just
as a grumpy country gentleman in England might complain that he
was annoyed by the trippers. There is a touch of dislike in all
the allusions which Boswell makes to Gibbon--often without even
mentioning his name--and one cannot read the great historian's life
without understanding why.
I should think that few men have been born with the material for
self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than
Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have,
an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry,
a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which
enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial
critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked
upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but
his views are familiar to modern philosophy, and would shock no
susceptibilities in these more liberal (and more virtuous) days.
Turn him up in that Encyclopedia, and see what the latest word is
upon his contentions. "Upon the famous fifteenth and sixteenth
chapters it is not necessary to dwell," says the biographer,
"because at this time of day no Christian apologist dreams of
denying the substantial truth of any of the more important
allegations of Gibbon. Christians may complain of the suppression
of some circumstances which might influence the general result, and
they must remonstrate against the unfair construction of their case.
But they no longer refuse to hear any reasonable evidence tending to
show that persecution was less severe than had been once believed,
and they have slowly learned that they can afford to concede the
validity of all the secondary causes assigned by Gibbon and even of
others still more discreditable. The fact is, as the historian has
again and again admitted, that his account of the secondary causes
which contributed to the progress and establishment of Christianity
leaves the question as to the natural or supernatural origin of
Christianity practically untouched." This is all very well, but in
that case how about the century of abuse which has been showered
upon the historian? Some posthumous apology would seem to be called
for.
Physically, Gibbon was as small as Johnson was large, but there was
a curious affinity in their bodily ailments. Johnson, as a youth,
was ulcerated and tortured by the king's evil, in spite of the Royal
touch. Gibbon gives us a concise but lurid account of his own
boyhood.
"I was successively afflicted by lethargies and fevers, by
opposite tendencies to a consumptive and dropsical habit,
by a contraction of my nerves, a fistula in my eye, and the
bite of a dog, most vehemently suspected of madness. Every
practitioner was called to my aid, the fees of the doctors
were swelled by the bills of the apothecaries and surgeons.
There was a time when I swallowed more physic than food, and
my body is still marked by the indelible scars of lancets,
issues, and caustics."
Such is his melancholy report. The fact is that the England of that
day seems to have been very full of that hereditary form of chronic
ill-health which we call by the general name of struma. How far
the hard-drinking habits in vogue for a century or so before had
anything to do with it I cannot say, nor can I trace a connection
between struma and learning; but one has only to compare this
account of Gibbon with Johnson's nervous twitches, his scarred face
and his St. Vitus' dance, to realize that these, the two most solid
English writers of their generation, were each heir to the same
gruesome inheritance.
I wonder if there is any picture extant of Gibbon in the character
of subaltern in the South Hampshire Militia? With his small frame,
his huge head, his round, chubby face, and the pretentious uniform,
he must have looked a most extraordinary figure. Never was there so
round a peg in a square hole! His father, a man of a very different
type, held a commission, and this led to poor Gibbon becoming a
soldier in spite of himself. War had broken out, the regiment was
mustered, and the unfortunate student, to his own utter dismay, was
kept under arms until the conclusion of hostilities. For three years
he was divorced from his books, and loudly and bitterly did he
resent it. The South Hampshire Militia never saw the enemy, which is
perhaps as well for them. Even Gibbon himself pokes fun at them; but
after three years under canvas it is probable that his men had more
cause to smile at their book-worm captain than he at his men. His
hand closed much more readily on a pen-handle than on a sword-hilt.
In his lament, one of the items is that his colonel's example
encouraged the daily practice of hard and even excessive drinking,
which gave him the gout. "The loss of so many busy and idle hours
were not compensated for by any elegant pleasure," says he; "and my
temper was insensibly soured by the society of rustic officers, who
were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners
of gentlemen." The picture of Gibbon flushed with wine at the
mess-table, with these hard-drinking squires around him, must
certainly have been a curious one. He admits, however, that he
found consolations as well as hardships in his spell of soldiering.
It made him an Englishman once more, it improved his health, it
changed the current of his thoughts. It was even useful to him as
an historian. In a celebrated and characteristic sentence, he says,
"The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a
clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legions, and the captain of
the Hampshire Grenadiers has not been useless to the historian of
the Roman Empire."
If we don't know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote
no fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from
the other, and all equally bad. A man must have more heart and
soul than Gibbon to write a good autobiography. It is the most
difficult of all human compositions, calling for a mixture of tact,
discretion, and frankness which make an almost impossible blend.
Gibbon, in spite of his foreign education, was a very typical
Englishman in many ways, with the reticence, self-respect, and
self-consciousness of the race. No British autobiography has ever
been frank, and consequently no British autobiography has ever been
good. Trollope's, perhaps, is as good as any that I know, but of
all forms of literature it is the one least adapted to the national
genius. You could not imagine a British Rousseau, still less a
British Benvenuto Cellini. In one way it is to the credit of the
race that it should be so. If we do as much evil as our neighbours
we at least have grace enough to be ashamed of it and to suppress
its publication.
There on the left of Gibbon is my fine edition (Lord Braybrooke's)
of Pepys' Diary. That is, in truth, the greatest autobiography in
our language, and yet it was not deliberately written as such. When
Mr. Pepys jotted down from day to day every quaint or mean thought
which came into his head he would have been very much surprised
had any one told him that he was doing a work quite unique in our
literature. Yet his involuntary autobiography, compiled for some
obscure reason or for private reference, but certainly never meant
for publication, is as much the first in that line of literature
as Boswell's book among biographies or Gibbon's among histories.
As a race we are too afraid of giving ourselves away ever to produce
a good autobiography. We resent the charge of national hypocrisy,
and yet of all nations we are the least frank as to our own
emotions--especially on certain sides of them. Those affairs of the
heart, for example, which are such an index to a man's character,
and so profoundly modify his life--what space do they fill in any
man's autobiography? Perhaps in Gibbon's case the omission matters
little, for, save in the instance of his well-controlled passion
for the future Madame Neckar, his heart was never an organ which
gave him much trouble. The fact is that when the British author
tells his own story he tries to make himself respectable, and the
more respectable a man is the less interesting does he become.
Rousseau may prove himself a maudlin degenerate. Cellini may stand
self-convicted as an amorous ruffian. If they are not respectable
they are thoroughly human and interesting all the same.
The wonderful thing about Mr. Pepys is that a man should succeed in
making himself seem so insignificant when really he must have been
a man of considerable character and attainments. Who would guess
it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what
he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences--all the more
interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is
of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious,
blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud,
trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed
always in trifles. And yet, though this was the day-by-day man,
the year-by-year man was a very different person, a devoted civil
servant, an eloquent orator, an excellent writer, a capable
musician, and a ripe scholar who accumulated 3000 volumes--a large
private library in those days--and had the public spirit to leave
them all to his University. You can forgive old Pepys a good deal of
his philandering when you remember that he was the only official of
the Navy Office who stuck to his post during the worst days of the
Plague. He may have been--indeed, he assuredly was--a coward, but
the coward who has sense of duty enough to overcome his cowardice
is the most truly brave of mankind.
But the one amazing thing which will never be explained about Pepys
is what on earth induced him to go to the incredible labour of
writing down in shorthand cipher not only all the trivialities of
his life, but even his own very gross delinquencies which any other
man would have been only too glad to forget. The Diary was kept for
about ten years, and was abandoned because the strain upon his eyes
of the crabbed shorthand was helping to destroy his sight. I suppose
that he became so familiar with it that he wrote it and read it as
easily as he did ordinary script. But even so, it was a huge labour
to compile these books of strange manuscript. Was it an effort to
leave some memorial of his own existence to single him out from all
the countless sons of men? In such a case he would assuredly have
left directions in somebody's care with a reference to it in the
deed by which he bequeathed his library to Cambridge. In that way
he could have ensured having his Diary read at any date he chose to
name after his death. But no allusion to it was left, and if it had
not been for the ingenuity and perseverance of a single scholar
the dusty volumes would still lie unread in some top shelf of the
Pepysian Library. Publicity, then, was not his object. What could it
have been? The only alternative is reference and self-information.
You will observe in his character a curious vein of method and
order, by which he loved, to be for ever estimating his exact
wealth, cataloguing his books, or scheduling his possessions. It is
conceivable that this systematic recording of his deeds--even of his
misdeeds--was in some sort analogous, sprung from a morbid tidiness
of mind. It may be a weak explanation, but it is difficult to
advance another one.
One minor point which must strike the reader of Pepys is how musical
a nation the English of that day appear to have been. Every one
seems to have had command of some instrument, many of several.
Part-singing was common. There is not much of Charles the Second's
days which we need envy, but there, at least, they seem to have
had the advantage of us. It was real music, too--music of dignity
and tenderness--with words which were worthy of such treatment.
This cult may have been the last remains of those mediaeval
pre-Reformation days when the English Church choirs were, as I have
read somewhere, the most famous in Europe. A strange thing this for
a land which in the whole of last century has produced no single
master of the first rank!
What national change is it which has driven music from the land? Has
life become so serious that song has passed out of it? In Southern
climes one hears poor folk sing for pure lightness of heart. In
England, alas, the sound of a poor man's voice raised in song means
only too surely that he is drunk. And yet it is consoling to know
that the germ of the old powers is always there ready to sprout
forth if they be nourished and cultivated. If our cathedral choirs
were the best in the old Catholic days, it is equally true, I
believe, that our orchestral associations are now the best in
Europe. So, at least, the German papers said on the occasion of the
recent visit of a north of England choir. But one cannot read Pepys
without knowing that the general musical habit is much less
cultivated now than of old.
