SOURCE: White, Ian. “The Subject of Gibbon's History.” Cambridge Quarterly 3, no. 4 (autumn 1968): 299-309.

[In the following essay, White focuses on Gibbon's thematic concern with time in the Decline and Fall.]

Studies of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire have, it seems to me, generally failed to bring out the most persistent and characteristic moral impression of the work. Perhaps the point has been thought too obvious, or to belong necessarily to the subject rather than the author, or not to be sufficiently a moral one. But it is one of those great commonplaces of which we never weary, or cease to need reminding; it receives explicit emphasis in the History, and its fascination shows itself in Gibbon's other writings; it explains his final preference of the subject of Rome to others he thought of taking; and it is the lesson, moral or not, which History, rather than any other of the moral sciences, is especially qualified to teach. It may briefly be called the theme of time.

An historian's moral purpose is expressed in his choice of topic—a matter of extent as well as location—as much as in his treatment of it. Why did Gibbon not in the end write about the Swiss, or about Florence?—or rather, if he had written those histories, what would they have failed to convey that is conveyed by the Decline and Fall of Rome? Tillyard's answer (in The English Epic and its Background) is nothing:

The general truths that Gibbon had to convey through the Decline and Fall had no exclusive connexion with that theme. Had he settled on the rise of the Swiss nation, or on the history of Florence under the Medicis, they would have been the same.

He then says what he takes these general truths to be:

And they were simply the great commonplaces he inherited from the revolution of 1688, that were the moral and intellectual staple of the section of society in the late eighteenth century to which he belonged.

Is such an account likely to do justice to the moral significance of a great historian, or to that of any great writer? The implication is that it is a matter of “merely”: the moral is easily extracted, and when it has been, it turns out to be nothing but the common stuff of that time and place.

Mr. Harold L. Bond (in The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon) starts with a similar conception of Gibbon's purpose, having himself inherited some of those great commonplaces of the 1688 Revolution (tinctured as they ran with that of 1776) which are professed by the society to which he belongs. He is similarly impressed by the suitability of the subject of Switzerland for demonstrating them; and by the analogy between the rise of the Caesars in Rome and the rise of the Medicis in Florence. He takes the analogy too far, as if he thought the fall of the Republic, and not of the Empire, were Gibbon's subject.

Perhaps the original suggestion of The History of the Decline and Fall is contained in Bolingbroke's lament over the lost books of Livy: “I should be glad to exchange, if it were possible, what we have of this history for what we have not. Would you not be glad, my lord, to see in one stupendous draught the whole progress of that government from liberty to servitude?”

But the lost books of Livy covered quite another portion of the history of Rome than do the volumes of Gibbon. As Lord Bolingbroke said,

Livy employed five-and-forty books to bring his history down to the end of the sixth century and the breaking out of the third Punic war: but he employed ninety-five to bring it down from thence to the death of Drusus; that is, through the course of one hundred and twenty or thirty years.

Gibbon began “In the second century of the Christian era”—or, at the earliest, where Livy finished.

To those who put Gibbon down as a representative of the Enlightenment, it does not appear so remarkable as it ought, that he chose the subject he did. How different is Gibbon's approach to history from Voltaire's, as the latter expresses it in the first chapter of Le Siécle de Louis XIV:

Tous les tems ont produit des héros et des politiques. tous les peuples ont éprouvé des révolutions. toutes les histoires sont presque égales pour qui ne veut mettre que des faits dans sa mémoire. mais quiconque pense, & ce qui est encor plus rare, quiconque a du goût, ne compte que quatre siécles dans l'histoire du monde, ces quatre âges heureux, sont ceux où les arts ont été perfectionnés, & qui servant d'époque à la grandeur de l'esprit humain, sont l'exemple de la postérité.

He names these four ages as that of ancient Athens, that of Augustus, the Renaissance, and that of Louis XIV. In this preoccupation he was more philosophe than historian: the study of these ages gratifies other tastes than the historical. Yet Gibbon chose, as the subject of twenty years' study, as the topic, not only for a history, but for a philosophical history, the interval between two of these ages. He had a very different notion of philosophical history: it did not mean for him the history of philosophical times. How did he come to select so ungrateful a theme?

There is a radical difference between the histories Gibbon considered writing and the one that he wrote. The usurpation of the Medicis in Florence, or indeed that of the Caesars in Rome—like the course of any great event, of a single age, or of a revolution—is a subject of what may be called acute history; Gibbon's is the supreme example of chronic history. A history such as Clarendon's has a beginning, a middle, and an end: it is an episode that may be isolated from the endless stream of time. The history of a man, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, or of a nation, such as the Swiss, though it may be more extended, is similarly self-contained. Moreover, it displays the predominance of a single idea. Even world history, as treated in the Aeneid or in Paradise Lost, is given in each case from a single point of view. Gibbon's history, on the other hand, begins in a world whose great history is already past, and finishes in one which has Gibbon's time, and our time, still to come: at every point we are reminded how much has happened, and how much will happen. Again, it shows, not the dominance of one idea, but the replacement of one view of the world by another, and the rise and decline of a third.

Those who survey with a curious eye the revolutions of mankind, may observe, that the gardens and circus of Nero on the Vatican, which were polluted with the blood of the first Christians, have been rendered still more famous, by the triumph and by the abuse of the persecuted religion.

(Chapter XVI)

But for the success of Charles Martel,

Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

(Chapter LII)

Gibbon's idea of philosophical history is very different from Bolingbroke's or even Hume's. Bolingbroke's remark that “History is philosophy teaching by examples”, and Hume's view that history is so many experiments for the moral scientist, both suggest a use of history as a quarry of materials, ornaments, instances, and analogies, a mere collection of instructive incidents. According to Gibbon, “the philosophical historian sees a system, order, relationships.” “General pictures” are “the use and ornament of remote history.” The Decline and Fall might be called Gibbon's Connexion. The deepest underlying system, order, and relationship of historical events is, of course, the passage of time. The matter of history expresses the form of time on a large scale, as that of music expresses time on a small scale, or as that of architecture expresses space.

The elapse of great periods of time fascinated Gibbon in his childhood. He recollects in his Autobiography a favourite tale of his schooldays in Kingston:

… the cavern of the winds, the palace of Felicity, and the fatal moment at the end of three months or centuries, when Prince Adolphus is overtaken by Time, who had worn out so many pair of wings in the pursuit.

Professor Bonnard has reprinted the episode in his notes, from which I quote it:

King Adolph, losing his way in hunting, arrived at the Cave of the Winds. Zephyrus bore him away to the Isle of Felicity, where he was entertained by the Princess. One day she asked him how long he thought he had been there. “I think it cannot be much less than three months,” he replied. She burst out laughing. “Dear Adolph,” said she with a very serious air, “you must know it is no less than three hundred years.” He was struck with shame at having done no glorious action in all that time, and insisted on leaving her to render himself more worthy of her favours. She gave him a horse which would bear him safely home so long as he did not touch the ground before he reached his own country. In the way lay a cart overthrown, laden with wings of divers shapes and sizes, and by it the carter, a very old man, who called for help. The King alighted, when up sprang the old man, calling out: “At last I have met you. My name is Time. I have been in search of you these three ages. I have worn out all these wings to find you out.”

This would serve as a simile for history. It would have been characteristic of Gibbon to describe himself as being oblivious of time when in the embraces of a narrative. History seems to give us a greater span of existence, and yet time catches up in the end, and the historian is reminded of his mortality.

… whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.

Our ability to comprehend a great span of time in a small one is thus referred to in the Decline and Fall:

A being of the nature of man, endowed with the same faculties, but with a longer measure of existence, would cast down a smile of pity and contempt on the crimes and follies of human ambition, so eager, in a narrow span, to grasp at a precarious and short-lived enjoyment. It is thus that the experience of history exalts and enlarges the horizon of our intellectual view. In a composition of some days, in a perusal of some hours, six hundred years have rolled away, and the duration of a life or a reign is contracted to a fleeting moment.

(Chapter XLVIII)

We conceive of times, as of spaces, that are greater than we can experience, by means of maps. History is not only a description of the succession of events, it is a scaled representation: it sets one scale of time alongside another. Having written his History, Gibbon wrote his Life; he tells us in the former that writing the narrative of fourteen centuries has “amused and exercised near twenty years of his life”; and records in the latter the moment of conception, and moment of deliverance from his task. In the composition of his History, his own life has rolled away.

He dwells in the History on the story of the Seven Sleepers, who are said to have fallen asleep in the reign of the emperor Decius, who persecuted the Christians, to have awoken in the reign of the younger Theodosius, and then to have expired. He distinguishes it from the other miraculous fables of the time, compares it with similar stories of other nations and ages, and enlarges on the philosophical point that gives it its universal appeal.

We imperceptibly advance from youth to age, without observing the gradual, but incessant change of human affairs; and even in our larger experience of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions. But if the interval between two memorable eras could be instantly annihilated; if it were possible, after a momentary slumber of two hundred years, to display the new world to the eyes of a spectator, who still retained a lively and recent impression of the old, his surprise and his reflections would furnish the pleasing subject of a philosophical romance.

(Chapter XXXIII)

This circumstance itself contributes to historical change and decay, which progress, to use a favourite word of Gibbon's, “insensibly”: ideas and systems get a foothold from which they advance, and people accept, bit by bit, revolutions the total effect of which, presented at once, they would regard with surprise or horror. To those born too late to see the start of the process, its continuation is even more acceptable. Thus Gibbon remarks, after Tacitus, that by the death of Augustus few were still living who could remember their country's freedom.

The visit of the comet in the time of Justinian gives Gibbon an opportunity to make an even wider comparison between the states of mankind down the ages. The whole of human history is embraced in only seven such visits, at intervals of 575 years.

The first, which ascends beyond the Christian aera one thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven years, is coëval with Ogyges the father of Grecian antiquity … The second visit, in the year eleven hundred and ninety-three, is darkly implied in the fable of Electra the seventh of the Pleiads, who have been reduced to six since the time of the Trojan war … The fifth visit has been already ascribed to the fifth year of Justinian … The seventh phenomenon, of one thousand six hundred and eighty, was presented to the eyes of an enlightened age … Its road in the heavens was observed with exquisite skill by Flamsteed and Cassini; and the mathematical science of Bernoulli, Newton, and Halley investigated the laws of its revolutions.

(Chapter XLIII)

Gibbon has already carried us from the reign of Justinian, back to the time of Ogyges, and forward to the time of Newton; he then proceeds from his time, and from ours, to the twenty-third century a.d.:

At the eighth period, in the year two thousand two hundred and fifty-five, these calculations may perhaps be verified by the astronomers of some future capital in the Siberian or American wilderness.

Tillyard sees in this sketch of world history, the pride and confidence of the enlightenment; does it not primarily express a sense of the enormous scope but petty scale of human affairs?

Gibbon shares what he describes in his Autobiography as a “common principle in the minds of men”.

Our imagination is always active to enlarge the narrow circle in which Nature has confined us. Fifty or a hundred years may be allotted to an individual; but we stretch forwards beyond death with such hopes as Religion and Philosophy will suggest, and we fill up the silent vacancy that precedes our birth by associating ourselves to the authors of our existence.

A series of ancestors helps us to conceive the stretch of time before our birth.

In the vast equality of the Empire of China the posterity of Confucius has maintained above two thousand two hundred years its peaceful honours and perpetual succession …

He returns to the subject of time at the end of his Life:

The present is a fleeting moment; the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful.

He has a philosopher's interest in how we comprehend even the duration we experience:

The proportion of a part to the whole is the only standard by which we can measure the length of our existence. At the age of twenty, one year is a tenth part perhaps of the time which has elapsed within our conciousness and memory: at the age of fifty it is no more than a fortieth, and this relative value continues to decrease till the last sands are shaken by the hand of death. This reasoning may seem metaphysical; but on a tryal it will be found satisfactory and just.

The subject of Rome illustrates his theme better than would a general history of the world. The continuity of the Empire makes us the more conscious of its changes, in the same way as a series of ancestors does, or the revolutions of a comet, or the identity, over many years, of the self. In treating the later history of Byzantium as a mere scale to which other events may be related, Gibbon may be unjust to the empire, but he does not make it dispensable: it is still important to the point of his history that the man killed defending Constantinople in 1453 should be the successor of Augustus. The ruins of Rome, to which he returns in the last three chapters of the History, enforce the same moral. As continuity makes us conscious of change, so what remains makes us conscious of what has been lost.

The ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.

(Chapter LXXI)

This passage surprisingly resembles Imlac's observation on the ruins of Egypt, in Chapter XXIX of Rasselas:

… from the wonders which time has spared we may conjecture, though uncertainly, what it has destroyed.

Imlac goes on to vindicate the study of history, against the objections of Rasselas and Nekayah, on grounds which would support Gibbon.

The History may also be likened, in this and other respects, to Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial. The survival of the urns merely enforces the lesson of universal mortality.

The art of man is able to construct monuments far more permanent than the narrow span of his own existence: yet these monuments, like himself, are perishable and frail; and in the boundless annals of time, his life and his labours must equally be measured as a fleeting moment.

(Chapter LXXI)

Gibbon adds to Sir Thomas Browne's sense of the “great mutations of the world” already acted, the sense of as many still to come. He places us between an overwhelming past and an overwhelming future. He considers himself as having drawn a high prize in his historical, geographical, and social placing, but he is very aware of the boundless alternatives.

His awareness of the common lot of humanity probably needs to be emphasised. In his historical perspective, the distinctions of rank and ability are lost in the general principles of humanity. The narrowness of his sympathies has been much insisted on: it is implied that his dislike of the early Christians was founded on their neglect of the graces. But he despises them most for their rejection of activity and pleasure, on which depends a greater part of the happiness of life; and detests them most for their acts of inhumanity. His sympathies are surprisingly wide. He does not despise the “humble fisherman of Galilee”, only his claims to inspiration and dominion, by which he loses his humility and gives up his fishing. Gibbon's use of the word “humble” is warm: he refers to his own task as humble, with favourable irony; he speaks without a sneer of “the humble virtues of Jesus”: and his language is not unfriendly in describing the crazy but harmless enthusiasts who resorted to “the humble practice of grazing in the fields”. He is fond of the vegetable metaphor, in expressing a respect for the humblest forms of life. The destruction of the trees of the forest gives air and light for the “smaller and nutritive plants of the soil”. He contrasts the saint and martyr, not with the elegant philosopher and orator, but with the useful peasant. He contrasts the stony and sandy wastes of Arabia with a region commonly thought desolate:

Even the wilds of Tartary are decked, by the hand of nature, with lofty trees and luxuriant herbage; and the lonesome traveller derives a sort of comfort and society from the presence of vegetable life.

(Chapter L)

He suggests, at the end of the Life, a biologist's view of human generations:

In old age, the consolation of hope is reserved for the tenderness of parents who commence as new life in their children; etc.

It is not “a new life”—the renewal of the individual—but “as new life”—the continuation of the species. His much-criticised treatment of sex is associated with this feeling for the organic. His references, in the Life, to birth and puberty, and constant use of the metaphor of biological reproduction, express a serious idea.

Tillyard, Mr. Bond and others have neglected these aspects of Gibbon because they have been looking for the kind of moral which is easily extracted and conveyed in other than historical writing. They are, moreover, looking for the kind of moral that can be applied. In this Mr. Bond especially treats history in the spirit of Lord Bolingbroke, who regretted the loss of the latter part of Livy chiefly, one suspects, as so much political ammunition, “applicable to the present state of Britain”. But it would not be in accordance with Gibbon's view of the function of history, to use it in that way. A moral is not always of the kind that is applicable. What account in those terms could be given of the moral purpose of a tragedy? An account has no doubt been contrived, in which a tragedy is regarded as a warning. But the point of a tragedy, and of Gibbon's History, is what may be called a moral of reflection, not of application.

The moral of Gibbon, again, is likely to be one which only a history, and not a moral or political tract, is capable of fully conveying. It is bound up with the professional discipline of the historian. His interest in history as exhibiting the theme of time, is related to his approach to the writing of history through the problems of chronology, which exercised his youth. His survey of mankind in the mass, and his own place and prospects in it, is expressed in the terms of statistics.

… the double fortune of my birth in a free and enlightened country in an honourable and wealthy family is the lucky chance of a unit against millions. The general probability is about three to one that a new-born infant will not live to complete his fiftieth year. I have now passed that age … the laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular, still allow me about fifteen years …

Numerical and even arithmetical expression recur throughout the history. He delights in stating numbers in full prose form. In this he gratifies at once his desire for accuracy, and perhaps his feeling that, at a distance, we are all reduced to a pair of dates, and a unit in millions.

After recording, in his Autobiography, the personal compliment which, at the trial of Warren Hastings, Sheridan paid him “In the presence of the British nation”, he turns, in a footnote, to an oddly “mechanical circumstance”:

As I was waiting in the Managers' box, I had the curiosity to enquire of the shorthand writer, how many words a ready and rapid Orator might pronounce in an hour. From 7000 to 7500 was his answer. The medium of 7200 will afford one hundred and twenty words a minute, and two words in each second.

Thus an accurate detail is transmitted to history. At the conclusion of the Decline and Fall, the pilgrim approaching the steps of St. Peter's is detained, as is the attention of the historian, by an obelisk of Egyptian granite,

which rises between two lofty and perpetual fountains, to the height of one hundred and twenty feet.

(Chapter LXXI)

The past is now presented, like the comet, to the eyes of an exact and enlightened age, and a new race of pilgrims comes to measure, record, and reflect. The column, and the fountains, are in more than one way emblematical. The re-erected monuments of Rome revive its memory, its aqueducts are again a source of life and inspiration. The stone stands fixed beside the perpetual flow of the waters.