by Will Durant
Partly to escape the French Revolutionary army that was nearing Lausanne, partly to seek English surgery, and proximately to comfort Lord Sheffield on the death of his wife, Gibbon left Lausanne (May 9, 1793) and hurried to England. There he found Sheffield so busy with politics as to have rapidly recovered from his grief; “the patient was cured,” Gibbon wrote, “before the arrival of the doctor.”119 The historian himself now submitted to the physicians, for his hydrocele had grown “almost as big as a small child.... I crawl about with some labor and much indecency.”120 One operation drained four quarts of “transparent watery liquid” from the affected testicle. But the fluid collected again, and a second tapping drew three quarts. Gibbon was temporarily relieved, and resumed dining out. Once more the hydrocele formed; now it became septic. On January 13, 1794, a third tapping was made. Gibbon seemed to be recovering rapidly; the doctor allowed him meat; Gibbon ate some chicken, and drank three glasses of wine. He was seized with severe gastric pains, which, like Voltaire, he sought to ease with opium. On January 16 he died, aged fifty-six.
4. The Historian
Gibbon was not inspiring in his visible person, character, or career; his greatness was poured into his book, into the grandeur and courage of its conception, the patience and artistry of its composition, the luminous majesty of the whole.
Yes, Sheridan’s word was right. Gibbon’s style is as luminous as irony would allow, and it shed light wherever it turned, except where prejudice darkened his view. His diction was molded by his Latin and French studies; he found simple Anglo-Saxon words unsuitable to the dignity of his manner, and often he wrote like an orator—Livy sharpened with the satire of Tacitus, Burke brightened with the wit of Pascal. He balanced clauses with the skill and delight of a juggler, but played the game so often that sometimes it neared monotony. If his style seems pompous, it fitted the reach and splendor of his theme—the thousand-year crumbling of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The venial sins of his style are lost in the masculine march of the narrative, the vigor of the episodes, the revealing portraits and descriptions, the magisterial summations that cover a century in a paragraph, and marry philosophy to history.
Having undertaken so extensive a subject, Gibbon felt justified in narrowing its limits. “Wars, and the administration of public affairs,” he said, “are the principal subjects of history.”121 He excluded the history of art, science, and literature; so he had nothing to say about Gothic cathedrals or Moslem mosques, about Arabic science or philosophy; he crowned Petrarch, but passed Dante by. He paid almost no attention to the condition of the lower classes, the rise of industry in medieval Constantinople and Florence. He lost interest in Byzantine history after the death of Heraclius (641). “He failed,” in the judgment of Bury, “to bring out the momentous fact that [till] the twelfth century the [Eastern Roman] Empire was the bulwark of Europe against the East; nor did he appreciate its importance in preserving the heritage of Greek civilization.”122 Within his set limits Gibbon achieved greatness by connecting effects with natural causes, and by reducing the immensity of his materials to intelligible order and a guiding perspective of the whole.
His scholarship was immense and detailed. His footnotes are a treasury of learning lightened with wit. He studied the most recondite aspects of classical antiquity, including roads, coins, weights, measures, laws. He made mistakes which specialists have corrected, but the same Bury who pointed out his errors added: “If we take into account the vast range of his work, his accuracy is amazing.”123 He could not (like professional historians confining themselves to a small area of subject, place, and time) burrow into unprinted original sources; to get his work done he restricted himself to printed material, and frankly relied in part on secondary authorities like Ockley’s History of the Saracens or Tillemont’s Histoire des empereurs and Histoire ecclésiastique; and some of the authorities he relied upon are now rejected as untrustworthy.124 He declared his sources in honest detail, and thanked them; so, when he passed beyond the time that Tillemont treated, he said in a footnote: “Here I must take leave forever of that incomparable guide.”125
What conclusions did Gibbon reach from his study of history? Sometimes he followed the philosophes in accepting the reality of progress: “We may acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age in the world has increased and still increases the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.”126 But in less amiable moments—and perhaps because he had taken war and politics (and theology) as the substance of history—he judged history to be “indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”* 127 He saw no design in history; events are the outcome of unguided causes; they are the parallelogram of forces of different origin and composite result. In all this kaleidoscope of events human nature seems to remain unchanged. Cruelty, suffering, and injustice have always afflicted mankind, and always will, for they are written in the nature of man. “Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.”129
Child of the Enlightenment, Gibbon longed to be a philosopher, or at least to write history en philosophe. “An enlightened age requires from the historian some tincture of philosophy and criticism.”130 He loved to interrupt his narrative with philosophical comments. But he did not profess to reduce history to laws, or to formulate a “philosophy of history.” On some basic questions, however, he took a stand: he confined the influence of climate to the early stages of civilization; he rejected race as a determining factor;131 and he acknowledged, within limits, the influence of exceptional men. “In human life the most important scenes will depend upon the character of a single actor. … An acrimonious humor falling upon a single fiber of one man may prevent or suspend the misery of nations.”132 When the Koreish could have assassinated Mohammed “the lance of an Arab might have changed the history of the world.”133 If Charles Martel had not defeated the Moors at Tours (732) the Moslems might have overrun all Europe; “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet. From such calamities was Christendom delivered by the genius and fortune of one man.”134 However, for maximum influence on his time, the exceptional individual must stand upon some wide support. “The effects of personal valor are so inconsiderable, except in poetry or romance, that victory … must depend upon the degree of skill with which the passions of the multitude are combined and guided for the service of a single man.”135
All in all, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire may be ranked as the supreme book of the eighteenth century, with Montesquieu’s L’ Esprit des lois as its closest competitor. It was not the most influential; it could not compare in effect upon history with Rousseau’s Social Contract or Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. But as a work of literary art it was unsurpassed in its time or kind. When we ask how Gibbon came to produce such a masterpiece, we perceive that it was the accidental combination of ambition with money, leisure, and ability; and we wonder how soon such a combination can be expected to recur. Never, said another historian of Rome, Barthold Niebuhr; “Gibbon’s work will never be excelled.”136
VI. CHATTERTON AND COWPER
Who would now suppose that in 1760 the most popular of living English poets was Charles Churchill? Son of a clergyman, and himself ordained an Anglican priest, he took to the pleasures of London, dismissed his wife, rolled up debts, and wrote a once famous poem, The Rosciad (1761), which enabled him to pay his debts, to settle an allowance on his wife, and to “set up in glaringly unclerical attire as a man about town.”137 His poem took its name from Quintus Roscius, who had dominated the Roman theater in Caesar’s day; it satirized the leading actors of London, and made Garrick wince; one victim “ran about the town like a stricken deer.”138 Churchill joined Wilkes in the ribald rites of Medmenham Abbey, helped him write
The North Briton, and went to France to share Wilkes’s exile; but he died at Boulogne (1764) of a drunken debauch, and “with epicurean indifference.”139
Another clergyman, Thomas Percy, lived up to his cloth, became bishop of Dromore in Ireland, and made a mark on European literature by rescuing, from the hands of a housemaid who was about to burn it, an old manuscript that provided one source for his Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765). These ballads from medieval Britain appealed to old memories, and encouraged the romantic spirit—so long subdued by rationalism and the classic temper—to express itself in poetry, fiction, and art. Wordsworth dated from these Reliques the rise of the Romantic movement in English literature. Macpherson’s Ossian, Chatterton’s poems, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Strawberry Hill, Beckford’s Vathek and Fonthill Abbey, were varied voices joining in the cry for feeling, mystery, and romance. For a time the Middle Ages captured the modern soul.
Thomas Chatterton began his attempt to medievalize himself by brooding over old parchments which his uncle had found in a Bristol church. Born in that city (1752) soon after his father’s death, the sensitive and imaginative boy grew up in a world of his own historic fancies. He studied a dictionary of Anglo-Saxon words, and composed, in what he thought was fifteenth-century language, poems which he pretended to have found in St. Mary Radcliffe Church, and which he ascribed to Thomas Rowley, an imaginary fifteenth-century monk. In 1769, aged seventeen, he sent some of these “Rowley poems” to Horace Walpole—who had himself published Otranto as a medieval original five years before. Walpole praised the poems and invited more; Chatterton sent more, and asked for help in finding a publisher, and some remunerative employment in London. Walpole submitted the verses to Thomas Gray and William Mason, both of whom pronounced them forgeries. Walpole wrote to Chatterton that these scholars “were by no means satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed MSS;” and he advised him to put poetry aside until he could support himself. Then Walpole went off to Paris, forgetting to return the poems. Chatterton wrote three times for them; three months passed before they came.140
The poet went to London (April, 1770) and took an attic room in Brook Street, Holborn. He contributed pro-Wilkes articles, and some of the Rowley poems, to various periodicals, but was so poorly paid (eightpence per poem) that he could not sustain himself on the proceeds. He tried and failed to secure a post as surgeon’s assistant on an African trader. On August 27 he composed a bitter valedictory to the world:
Farewell, Bristolia’s dingy piles of brick,
Lovers of Mammon, worshipers of trick!
Ye spurned the boy who gave you antique lays,
And paid for learning with your empty praise.
Farewell, ye guzzling aldermanic fools,
By nature fitted for corruption’s tools! . . .
Farewell, my mother!—cease, my anguish’d soul,
Nor let distraction’s billows o’er me roll!
Have mercy, Heaven! when here I cease to live,
And this last act of wretchedness forgive.
Then he killed himself by drinking arsenic. He was seventeen years and nine months old. He was buried in a pauper’s grave.
His poems now fill two volumes. Had he called them imitations instead of originals he might have been recognized as a genuine poet, for some of the Rowley pieces are as good as most originals of the same genre. When he wrote in his own name he could indite satiric verses almost rivaling Pope’s, as in “The Methodist”141 or—bitterest of all—seventeen lines lashing Walpole as a heartless sycophant.142 When his surviving manuscripts were published (1777) the editor charged Walpole as partly responsible for the poet’s death; Walpole defended himself on the ground that he had felt no obligation to help a persistent impostor.143 Some warmhearted souls like Goldsmith insisted that the poems were genuine; Johnson laughed at his friend, but said: “This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.”144 Shelley briefly commemorated the boy in Adonais,145 and Keats inscribed Endymion to his memory.
Chatterton escaped from the rugged realities of Bristol and London via medieval legends and arsenic; William Cowper fled from the London that Johnson loved into rural simplicity, religious faith, and periodic insanity. His grandfather was acquitted of murder and became a judge; his father was an Anglican clergyman; his mother belonged to the same family that had produced John Donne. She died when he was six, leaving him melancholy memories of fond solicitude; fifty-three years later, when a cousin sent him an old picture of her, he recalled, in a tender poem,146 the efforts she often made to calm the fears that darkened his childhood nights.
From those indulgent hands he passed, in his seventh year, to a boarding school where he became the timid fag of a bully who spared him no humiliating task. He suffered from inflammation of the eyes, and for years he had to be under an oculist’s care. In 1741, aged ten, he was sent off to Westminster School in London. At seventeen he began three years’ service as clerk in a solicitor’s office in Holborn. He was ripe now for romance; as his cousin Theodora Cowper lived nearby, she became the idol of his daydreams. At twenty-one he took quarters in the Middle Temple, and at twenty-three he was admitted to the bar. Disliking law, and timid before courts, he fell into a mood of hypochondria, which was deepened when Theodora’s father forbade her any further association with her cousin. Cowper never saw her again, never forgot her, and never married.
In 1763, faced with the necessity to appear before the House of Lords, he broke down, became deranged, and tried to kill himself. Friends sent him to an asylum at St. Albans. After eighteen months he was released, and took to an almost solitary life at Huntingdon, near Cambridge; now, he said, he “desired no other communion than with God and Jesus Christ.”147 He accepted the Calvinist creed literally, and thought much of salvation and damnation. By some happy chance he fell in with a local family whose religion brought peace and kindness rather than fear: the Reverend Morley Unwin, his wife Mary, his son William, and his daughter Susannah. Cowper compared the father with Parson Adams in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews; he saw a second mother in Mrs. Unwin, who was seven years his senior. She and the daughter treated him as son and brother, and gave him delicate feminine attentions that almost made him love life again. They invited him to live with them; he did (1765), and found healing in their simple life.
This bliss was suddenly ended when the father was killed by a fall from a horse. The widow and her daughter, taking Cowper with them, moved to Olney in Buckinghamshire, to be near the famous evangelical preacher John Newton. He persuaded Cowper to join him in visiting the sick and writing hymns. One of these “Olney Hymns” contained famous lines:
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.148
But Newton’s hellfire sermons, which had “thrown more than one of his parishioners off their balance,” intensified rather than allayed the poet’s theological fears.149 “God,” said Cowper, “is always formidable to me but when I see Him disarmed of His sting by having sheathed it in the body of Christ Jesus.”150 He proposed to Mrs. Unwin, but a second attack of insanity (1773) prevented the marriage; he recovered after three years of loving care. In 1779 Newton left Olney, and Cowper’s piety took a milder turn.
Other women helped Mary Unwin to keep the poet in contact with earthly things. Lady Austin, widowed but merry, gave up her London house, moved to Olney, associated with the Unwins, and brought gaiety where there had been too long a concentration on the occasional tragedies of life. It was she who told Cowper the story which he turned into “The Diverting History of John Gilpin”151 and his wild unwilling ride. A friend of the family sent the rollicking ballad to a newspaper; an actor who had succeeded Garrick at the Drury Lane Theatre recited it there; it became the talk of London, and Cowper had his first taste of renown. He had never taken himself seriously as a poet; now Lady Austi
n urged him to write some substantial work. But on what; subject? On anything, she answered; and, pointing to a sofa, she assigned him the task of celebrating it in verse. Pleased to be commanded by a charming woman, Cowper wrote The Task. Published in 1785, it found welcome among people who were tired of war and politics and city strife.
It would be a real task to write or read six “books” about a sofa unless one had the morals of Crébillon fils;152 Cowper was sane enough to use it only as a starting post. After making it the climax in a humorous history of chairs, he slipped into his favorite subject, which might be summed up in the poem’s most famous line: “God made the country, and man made the town.”153 The poet admitted that art and eloquence flourished in London; he praised Reynolds and Chatham, and marveled at the science that “measures an atom and now girds the world”;154 but he reproached the “queen of cities” for punishing some small thefts with death while lavishing honors on “peculators of the public gold.”
Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumor of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more! My ear is pain’d,
My soul is sick, with every day’s report
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.155
He was horrified by the traffic in slaves; his was one of the first English voices to denounce the man who
finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colored like his own; and having power
To enforce the wrong, . . .
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey. . . .
