As if in recreation from such laborious scholarship, Walpole composed a medieval romance, The Castle of Otranto (1764), which became the mother of a thousand stories of supernatural wonders and terrors. He combined mystery with history in Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III. He contended, like others after him, that Richard had been maligned by tradition and Shakespeare; Hume and Gibbon called his arguments unconvincing; Walpole repeated them till his death. Turning to events of which he had firsthand knowledge, he composed memoirs of the reigns of George II and George III; they are illuminating but partisan. Imprisoned in his prejudices, he took a dark view of his time: “treacherous ministers, mock patriots, complacent parliaments, fallible princes.”34 “I see my country going to ruin, and no man with brains enough to save it”;35 this was written in 1768, when Chatham had just created the British Empire. Fourteen years later, when the King and Lord North seemed to have ruined it, Walpole concluded: “We are totally degenerated in every respect, which I suppose is the case of all falling states”;36 a generation later the little island defeated Napoleon. All mankind seemed to Walpole a menagerie of “pigmy, short-lived, … comical animals.”37 He found no comfort in religion. He supported the Established Church, for it upheld the government that paid his sinecures, but he frankly termed himself an infidel.38 “I begin to think that folly is matter, and cannot be destroyed. Destroy its form, it takes another.”39
For a while he thought he could find stimulation in France (September, 1765). All doors were opened to him; Mme. du Deffand welcomed him as a replacement for d’Alembert. She was sixty-eight, Walpole was forty-eight, but the interval disappeared as their kindred souls met in an affectionate exchange of despair. She was pleased to find that Walpole agreed with most of what Voltaire said, but would have gone to the stake to prevent him from saying it; for he trembled to think what would happen to Europe’s governments if Christianity collapsed. He deprecated Voltaire, but he ridiculed Rousseau. It was on this trip to Paris that he wrote the letter, supposedly from Frederick the Great, inviting Rousseau to come to Berlin and enjoy more persecutions. “The copies have spread like wildfire,” and “behold me à la mode!”40—he succeeded Hume as the lion of the salons. He learned to love the gay and merciless excitement of Paris, but he was consoled to find “the French ten times more contemptible than we [English] are.”41
After reaching home (April 22, 1766) he began his long correspondence with Mme. du Deffand. We shall see later how he fretted lest her affection make him ridiculous; yet it was probably to see her again that he revisited Paris in 1767, 1769, 1771, 1775. Her love made him forget his age, but the death of Gray (July 30, 1771) reminded him of his own mortality. He surprised himself by surviving till 1797. He had no financial worries; he had in 1784 an income of £ 8,000 ($200,000?) a year;42 and in 1791 he succeeded to the title of Lord Orford. But his gout, which had begun when he was twenty-five, continued to be his tribulation till the end. Sometimes, we are told, accumulations of “chalk” broke out from his fingers.43 He grew parched and stiff in his final years, and occasionally he had to be carried by his servants from room to room; but he kept on working and writing, and when visitors came they marveled at the bright interest in his eyes, the alertness of his courtesy, the gaiety of his speech, the alacrity and clarity of his mind. Almost every day distinguished people came to see his famous home and varied collection; Hannah More in 1786, Queen Charlotte in 1795.
Yet it was not at Strawberry Hill, but at his town house in Berkeley Square that he passed away, March 2, 1797, in his eightieth year. As if regretting that his memoirs and letters contained so many lines with a sting, he ordered his manuscripts to be locked in a chest not to be opened “till the first Earl of Waldegrave that shall attain the age of thirty-five years shall demand it.”44 So the memoirs came to be published only in or after 1822, when all who might have taken offense would be dead. Some of the letters were published in 1778, more in 1818, 1820, 1840, 1857. … All over the English-reading world there are men and women who have read every word of those letters, and who treasure them as among the most delightful legacies of the illuminating century.
V. EDWARD GIBBON
“Good historians,” Walpole wrote to one of them, Robertson, “are the most scarce of all writers, and no wonder! A good style is not very common; thorough information is still more rare; and if these meet, what a chance that impartiality should be added to them!”45 Gibbon did not quite meet the last test, but neither did Tacitus, who alone can stand with him among the supreme historians.
1. Preparation
Gibbon wrote or began six autobiographies, which his literary executor, the first Earl of Sheffield, sewed into remarkably well-knit, but unduly purified, Memoirs (1796), sometimes known as his Autobiography. Also Gibbon kept a journal, begun in 1761 and continued under diverse titles till January 28, 1763. These prime sources for his development have been judged reasonably accurate, except for his pedigree.
He spent eight pages detailing a distinguished ancestry; cruel genealogists have taken it from him.46 His grandfather, Edward Gibbon I, was among those directors of the South Sea Company who were arrested for malfeasance after that “Bubble” exploded (1721). Of his estate, which he reckoned at £ 106,543, all was confiscated except £ 10,000; on this, the historian tells us, he “erected the edifice of a new fortune … not much inferior to the first.”47 He did not approve the marriage of his son, Edward II; hence his will left the major part of his wealth to his daughters, Catherine and Hester. Catherine’s daughter married Edward Eliot, who later bought a seat in Parliament for Edward Gibbon III; Hester became a rich devotee of William Law,48 and long vexed her nephew by her dilatory dying. Edward II was tutored by Law, passed through Winchester School and Cambridge, married Judith Porten, and had seven children, of whom only Edward III survived childhood.
He was born at Putney in Surrey, May 8, 1737. His mother died in 1747 of her seventh pregnancy. The father moved to a rural estate at Buriton, in Hampshire, fifty-eight miles from London, leaving the boy to be cared for by an aunt in the grandfather’s house in Putney. There the future scholar made much use of the well-stored library. His frequent illnesses interrupted his progress at Winchester School, but he occupied his convalescent days with eager reading, mostly of history, especially of the Near East. “Mahomet and his Saracens soon fixed my attention; … I was led from one book to another, till I had ranged round the circle of Oriental history. Before I was sixteen I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks.”49 Hence those fascinating chapters on Mohammed and the early caliphs, and the capture of Constantinople.
When, aged fifteen, he was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, “I arrived with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.” He was too sickly to engage in sports, too shy to mingle at ease with other students. He would have been an apt pupil to a competent teacher. But, eager to learn, he found no professor eager to teach. Most of the faculty allowed their scholars to attend the lectures or not, and to spend half their time in “the temptations of idleness.”50 They indulged his “improprieties of conduct, ill-chosen company, late hours, and inconsiderate expense”—even excursions to Bath or London. However, he “was too young and bashful to enjoy, like a manly Oxonian in town, the taverns and bagnios of Covent Garden.”51
The faculty members were all clergymen, who taught and took for granted the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church. Gibbon was combative and questioned his teachers. It seemed to him that the Bible and history justified the Catholic Church in its claim to a divine origin. A Catholic acquaintance procured him some unsettling books, chiefly Bossuet’s Exposition of the Catholic Doctrine and the History of the Protestant Variations; these “achieved my conversion, and I surely fell by a noble hand.”52 With youthful precipitation he confessed to a Catholic priest, and was received into the Church of Rome (June 8, 1753).
He notified his father, and was not surprised to be summoned home, for Oxford accepted no Catholic students, and, according to Blackstone, for a Protestant to be converted to Roman Catholicism was “high treason.” The scandalized parent hastily banished the youth to Lausanne, and arranged to have him stay with a Calvinist pastor. There Edward lived at first in a mood of sullen obstinacy. But M. Pavilliard, though not indulgent, was kind, and the boy slowly warmed to him. Moreover, the pastor was a good classical scholar. Gibbon learned to read and write French as readily as English, and acquired an easy familiarity with Latin. Soon he was received into cultured families, whose manners and conversation were a better education than Oxford had given him.
As his French improved he felt the breezes of French rationalism blowing into Lausanne. When only twenty (1757) he attended with delight the plays presented by Voltaire in nearby Monrion. “I sometimes supped with the actors.”53 He met Voltaire, he began to read Voltaire, he read Voltaire’s recently published Essai sur l’histoire générale (Essai sur les moeurs). He pored over Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (1748), and the Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734) became the starting point of the Decline and Fall. In any case the influence of the French philosophers, added to his reading of Hume and the English deists, undermined Gibbon’s Christianity as well as his Catholicism, and M. Pavilliard’s victory for the Reformation was canceled by Gibbon’s secret acceptance of the Enlightenment.
It must have been exhilarating to meet, in the same year (1757), both Voltaire and Suzanne Curchod. She was twenty, blond, beautiful, gay, and lived with her Protestant parents it Crassy, four miles from Lausanne. She was the leading spirit in the Société du Printemps—a group of fifteen or twenty young women who met at one another’s homes, sang, danced, acted comedies, and flirted judiciously with young men; Gibbon assures us that “their virgin chastity was never sullied by the breath of scandal or suspicion.” Let him tell the story.
In her short visits to some relations at Lausanne the wit, the beauty, and erudition of Mlle. Curchod were the theme of universal applause. The report of such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. I found her learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners. … Her fortune was humble, but her family was respectable. … She permitted me to make her two or three visits at her father’s house. I passed some happy days there, … and her parents honorably encouraged the connection.... I indulged my dream of felicity.54
Apparently they were formally engaged in November, 1757,55 but Suzanne’s consent was conditional on Gibbon’s promise to live in Switzerland.56
Meanwhile his father, confident that his son was now a good Protestant, bade him return home and .hear the plans that had been made for him. Gibbon was not eager to go back, for the father had taken a second wife; but he obeyed, and reached London May 5, 1758. “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.”57 He conveyed this sigh to Suzanne by a letter of August 24. His father settled upon him an annuity of £ 300. His stepmother earned his gratitude by bearing no children, and soon he developed an affection for her. He spent a large part of his income on books, and “gradually formed a numerous and select library, the foundation of my works, and the best comfort of my life.”58
He had begun at Lausanne, he finished at Buriton (where he spent his summers), an Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, which was published in London in 1761 and in Geneva in 1762. Written in French, and dealing chiefly with French literature and philosophy, it made no stir in England, but was received on the Continent as a remarkable performance for a youth of twenty-two. It had some significant ideas on the writing of history. “The history of empires is that of the misery of man. The history of knowledge is that of his greatness and happiness.... A host of considerations makes the last order of study precious in the eyes of the philosopher.”59 Hence, “if philosophers are not always historians, it is at least desirable that historians should be philosophers.”60 In his Memoirs Gibbon added: “From earliest youth I aspired to the character of an historian.”61 He cast about for a subject that would lend itself to philosophy and literature as well as to history. In the eighteenth century history made no pretense to be a science; rather, it longed to be an art. Gibbon felt that it was as a philosopher and an artist that he wished to write history: to deal with large subjects in a large perspective, and to give to the chaos of materials philosophical significance and artistic form.
Suddenly he was called from scholarship to action. During the Seven Years’ War England had been repeatedly in danger of invasion from France. To prepare against such an emergency the English gentry formed a militia for defense against invasion or rebellion. Only propertied persons could serve as officers. Gibbon Senior and Junior were commissioned as major and captain in June, 1759. Edward III joined his company in June, 1760, and stayed with it, on and off, till December, 1762, moving from camp to camp. He was ill suited to military life, and “tired of companions who had neither the knowledge of scholars nor the manners of gentlemen.”62 Amid his military career he found his scrotum expanding with fluid. “I was obliged today [September 6, 1762] to consult Mr. Andrews, a surgeon, in relation to a complaint I had neglected for some time; it was a swelling in my left testicle, which threatens being a serious affair.”63 He was bled and physicked, with only temporary relief. This “hydrocele” was to torment him until it caused his death.
On January 25, 1763, he set out upon a Continental tour. He stopped some time in Paris, where he met d’Alembert, Diderot, Raynal, and other luminaries of the Enlightenment. “Four days in a week I had a place … at the hospitable tables of Mesdames Geoffrin and Boccage, of the celebrated Helvétius, and of the Baron d’Olbach. … Fourteen weeks insensibly stole away; but had I been rich and independent I should have prolonged, and perhaps have fixed, my residence at Paris.”64
In May, 1763, he reached Lausanne, where he remained almost a year. He saw Mlle. Curchod, but, finding her well courted, he made no attempt to renew his friendship with her. In this second stay in Switzerland, he confesses, “the habits of the militia and the example of my countrymen betrayed me into some riotous intemperance; and before my departure I had deservedly forfeited the public opinion which had been acquired by my better days.”65 He lost substantial sums in gambling. But he continued his studies in preparation for Italy, poring over ancient medals, coins, itineraries, and maps.
In April, 1764, he crossed the Alps. He spent three months in Florence, then went on to Rome. “In the daily labor of eighteen weeks” a Scotch expatriate guided him among the remains of classical antiquity. “It was at Rome, on the fifteenth 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. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the Empire.”66 He came to think of that fateful disintegration as “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind.”67 After visiting Naples, Padua, Venice, Vicenza, and Verona he returned through Turin and Lyons and Paris (“another happy fortnight”) to London (June 25, 1765).
Spending most of his time now at Buriton, he let himself be diverted into beginning, in French, a history of Switzerland. Hume, having seen the manuscript in London, wrote to Gibbon (October 24, 1767) begging him to use English, and predicting that English would soon surpass the French language in spread and influence; moreover, he warned Gibbon that his use of the French tongue had led him “into a style more poetical and figurative and more highly colored, than our language seems to admit of in historical productions.”68 Gibbon later admitted: “My ancient habits … encouraged me to write in French for the continent of Europe, but I was conscious myself that my styl
e, above prose and below poetry, degenerated into a verbose and turgid declamation.”69
The death of his father (November 10, 1770) left him an ample fortune. In October, 1772, he took up permanent residence in London. “No sooner was I settled in my house and library than I undertook the composition of the first volume of my history.”70 He allowed himself many distractions-evenings at White’s, attendance at Johnson’s “Club,” trips to Brighton, Bath, Paris. In 1774 he was elected to Parliament from a “pocket borough” controlled by a relative. He kept silence amid the debates in the House of Commons. “I am still mute,” he wrote (February 25, 1775); “it is more tremendous than I imagined; the great speakers fill me with despair, the bad ones with terror”;71 but: the “eight sessions that I sat in Parliament were a school of civil prudence, the first and most essential virtue of an historian.”72 Surrounded by the controversy on America, he voted regularly for the policy of the government; he addressed to the French nation a Mémoire justificatif (1779) presenting England’s case against her revolting colonies; and he received as reward a seat on the Board of Trade and Plantations, bringing him £ 750 a year. Fox accused him of profiting by the same kind of political corruption which he indicated as one cause of the decline of Rome.73 The wits said George III had bought Gibbon lest the author record the decline and fall of the British Empire.74