In Part I of this near-random collection of jottings, I remarked that Edward Gibbon, despite his near-obsessive concern with politeness and polish, tells you more about the sex lives of historical figures than virtually any modern historian. I also remarked that his modern-day fans, despite their frequently amazing levels of erudition and enthusiasm, studiously avoid the slightest mention of this aspect of his great work. Having done “Gibbon on Sex,” I decided to do “Gibbon on Everything Else” as well, which, for whatever reason, turned out to be more demanding than I expected. Today’s piece, which begins, rather confusingly, by talking about John Milton and Samuel Johnson, is the fourth in a series of seven. Part III is here.
When I first read Paradise Lost I wondered if anyone who hadn’t studied Latin could understand it, because it read like a great translation of some forgotten epic. Johnson, far more a talker than a writer, weakened his prose by mechanically and compulsively substituting Latinate forms for Anglo-Saxon ones: The charming “It has not wit enough to keep it sweet” becomes the abysmal “It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction”—one reason why his prose so rarely equaled his conversation.1
Milton, writing more than a century before Gibbon, can certainly sound stranger to the modern ear. The English language itself has changed, of course, but the flow of thought is different as well. Milton in his prose, and even more Hobbes, seem to leap from thought to thought like mountain goats.2 Gibbon, though writing firmly within the eighteenth-century conventions—the restricted, “elegant” vocabulary, the incessant parallelism—seems to be writing a language that is only incidentally English.
Parallelism is very close to being the core of Gibbon’s prose. A sentence with a single subject—or, even worse, a single verb—is very close to being naked. But Gibbon’s parallelism is far more studied than the mere doubling of which Shakespeare was so fond—“knotted and combined locks.” For example, speaking of the decision of Caesar Augustus to halt the expansion of the Roman Empire, Gibbon remarks “Inclined to peace by his temper and situation, it was easy for him to discover that Rome, in her present exalted situation, had much less to hope than to fear from the chance of arms; and that, in the prosecution of remote wars, the undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious, and less beneficial.”
“Temper and situation” are complementary: Augustus is determined by both his inner nature and his outer surroundings. “Less to hope than to fear” are simple opposites, but “the undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious, and less beneficial” carefully enumerates the various and distinct disadvantages of “remote wars.”
Gibbon’s parallelism is closely related to his celebrated irony, which—almost inevitably, it seems—also rubbed me the wrong way. Parallelism provides an enduring groundwork for wit, for similarity of formal structure coupled with a dissimilarity of meaning can be relied upon to give the reader a start. Thus, Pope’s remark, that “wretches hang that jurymen may dine”, or the legendary Parliamentary sally “the gentleman relies upon his memory for his wit and his imagination for his facts”. In his discussion of the one exception to Augustus’ wise policy, the conquest of Britain, Gibbon’s wit naturally finds much nourishment: “After a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid, maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors [Claudius, Nero, and Domitian], the far greater part of the island submitted to the Roman yoke.” However, a fraction did remain free: “The native Caledonians preserved in the northern extremity of the island their wild independence, for which they were not less indebted to their poverty than to their valour. Their incursions were frequently repelled and chastised; but their country was never subdued. The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths, over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians.”3
While Gibbon’s irony often merely takes the form of an agreeable and ornamental wit, the relentlessness with which he pursues it can be exhausting. You needn’t make every sentence a punch line, dude! Prose should breathe!
But of course Gibbon’s irony frequently cuts much deeper than mere wit, as in his most famous thrust, summing up the collapse of the Western Empire, “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.” The deliberate flippancy of the remark makes the assault all the more wounding.
Gibbon drew much of his ironic tone from his beloved classic authors (both Latin and Greek), which were a source not merely of “polish” but an entire philosophy of life, which was both elegant and deeply felt. With a few, notable exceptions, the classic authors reflected a deeply aristocratic bias, with which Gibbon strongly agreed. He is constantly aware of “birth” throughout the ages and takes it for granted that someone who is “basely born” is in some manner “base.” He uses words like “noble” and “pure” in cases where they can have no objective meaning, though it’s clear that the meaning he attaches to them is strongly approbative. Speaking of “Mahomet,” he assures us that “the son of Abdallah [Mahomet] was educated in the bosom of the noblest race, in the use of the purest dialect of Arabia,” as though one could distinguish among the Arabian “races” on the basis of their nobility4 and as if one dialect could be “purer” than another and as if a “pure” dialect could be in any sense better than an “impure” one.5
- The other was that the emotionally tormented Johnson clung desperately to the belief that repression was virtue. Only by repressing our desires can we avoid being torn apart first by hopes of ecstatic triumph followed by the blind despair occasioned by the inevitable failure of those hopes. Never despair, yes! But never hope as well! ↩︎
- It is unfortunately the style with Hobbes to read only the first two books of Leviathan, which set forth his philosophy. The third and fourth books, “Of a Christian Commonwealth” (very largely, an attack on Protestant “fanatics” on whom Hobbes blamed the English Civil War) and “On the Kingdom of Darkness” (a furious assault on the Catholic Church), add immeasurably to understanding not only what Hobbes thought but why he thought it. ↩︎
- The English have never really gotten tired of making fun of the Scots, which may explain why the Scots are now threatening to leave. ↩︎
- Muhammad was born into a merchant clan and culture that, as far as I can tell, had none of the trappings of a formal aristocracy. The pagan virtues of Homer’s heroes—bravery, liberality, and loyalty—were praised if not practiced, rather in the manner of those naked barbarians the Scottish chiefs. ↩︎
- Gibbon, like so many others, naïvely took it for granted that the better your birth, the purer your speech. ↩︎
