SOURCE: Craddock, Patricia. “‘Immortal Affectation’: Responses to Gibbon's Style.” Age of Johnson 1 (1987): 327-46.

[In the following essay, Craddock describes how critical assessments of Gibbon's literary style in the Decline and Fall have ranged from high praise to harsh denunciation, noting that the ongoing debate ultimately proves the work's lasting value.]

I should like to start with a little autobiography. My own work on Gibbon's style began in outrage, some twenty years ago. In Gilbert Highet's well-known and then recent book, The Classical Tradition, I encountered the following passage:

Then there is what has been called “the immortal affectation of [Gibbon's] unique style”. Yet it is not unique. Individuality was not one of the chief aims of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stylists. It has often been praised, and it is truly praiseworthy as a feat of will-power. The difficulty is that, as the lady in Boileau said of Chapelain's poetry, no one can read it. … [H]is sentences are monotonous. Two patterns, with minor variations, are his obsessions. He will say X; and Y. His next sentence will be X; and Y; and Z. Sometimes he will interpose X; but Y. Then, regularly and soporifically as waves on the beach, roll back X; and Y; and Z. … Gibbon overworked the two devices of antithesis and tricolon until they became almost synonymous with the Gibbonian manner.

(347)

What infuriated me about this passage, after I paid it the tribute of a reluctant laugh, was not just the difference in evaluation—I could hardly believe that anyone so undeniably literate as Professor Highet found Gibbon “impossible” or even difficult to read—but the unrecognizability of the description. To me Gibbon's style was clearly distinct from that of other writers of his age, and his syntax no more “monotonous” than Pope's iambic pentameter. In my innocence, I set out to combat this chimera with facts: I published an article in which I analyzed many features of Gibbon's syntax and rhetoric, comparing them with Robertson's as well as Johnson's. My sketch of Gibbon's style, I concluded, made its points laboriously and might need modification if more evidence were available. But at least it did not “leave the reader at the mercy of the critic's wit, or his taste, or his metaphors” (127).

Needless to say, my hope that my article would protect readers from such pernicious accounts of Gibbon's style was naive. Even though, in the twenty years since I wrote that article, others, such as Curtis Hayes and Louis T. Milic, have also analyzed Gibbon's style with objective linguistic techniques, writers have not ceased to see and discuss Gibbon's style impressionistically, and though those who continue to read Gibbon are usually those who admire his style, charges of obscurity, ornateness, and monotony monotonously continue to appear. Lately, I have been engaged in a project¹ which required that I read all the criticism of Gibbon from the beginning to the present. In that pursuit, I have discovered countless predecessors for Highet, for me, and for other recurrent and contradictory descriptions and appraisals of Gibbon's style. But I have not found a single aspect of Gibbon's style on which all commentators agree.

The consistent key to this inconsistency is the quality J. B. Bury memorably called both “immortal” and “affected” (I, lxvii). It is almost impossible to ignore Gibbon's style in responding to his work. Like the style of a poem, or of a novelist like Dickens, it openly “defamiliarizes”² its material; that is, by calling attention to its own status as literary language it requires us to respond to the material it presents as something strange or new, not just as familiar data or axioms, and it acknowledges that this material is being mediated by another intelligence as it reaches us. The effect of such a manner on readers depends in part on our assumptions about the relationship between historical accounts and their subject matter, in part on our assumptions about the relationship between style and character (how and what kind of person style reveals), and in part on our prior experiences as readers. Thus there are discernible chronological and even geographic developments in responses to Gibbon's style, but they are always subject to variation on the basis of the experience of particular readers.

Few of Gibbon's earliest readers—at least in Britain, France, and Italy—questioned his assumption that history required an openly literary style. But this assumption was challenged before the end of the eighteenth century, gave way to a view that history did not even permit literary style, and is still a subject of debate today. For his contemporaries, the issue was whether Gibbon had achieved a proper literary style, not whether a literary style was proper to history. In this discussion questions can be raised that resemble those posed by people who think a literary style inappropriate to history—obscurity vs. clarity, accuracy vs. ornamentation—but the goals are all openly aesthetic: harmony, decorum, magnificence, elegance. In 1776 the favored adjectives of admirers were “elegant” or “classical”; the favored adjectives of detractors were “laboured” or “harsh.” “Richness,” “animation” or “liveliness,” and “sweetness” were often attributed to Gibbon's style, the last quality being a particular favorite of those impressed against their will, who feared the “honied poison.” Boswell, it will be remembered, spoke of Gibbon's “mellifluous” style: “he should have warned us of our danger, before we entered his garden of flowery eloquence, by advertising, ‘Spring-guns and mentraps set here’” (20 March 1776; II, 447-48). Undoubtedly the most extreme instance of this type of response was that of the anonymous author of a narrative poem, the plot of which is summarized as follows by the Monthly Reviewer: “A young lady, daughter of the poet, allured by the beauty of Mr. Gibbon's style, imbibed his sentiments, and fell a melancholy victim to her incredulity” (76, 305). Now that is a tribute to a style!

Most contemporary responses to Gibbon's style were less drastic and imaginative than the poet's (or his daughter's). But they often emphasized delight. Many readers found Gibbon's manner not only impressive or vivid, but markedly clear and easy, despite objections to occasional French idioms. His sometime nemesis, the reviewers for the Gentleman's Magazine, called the style “animated and correct, and such as must interest every reader in the various characters and scenes described” (46, 366). The reviewer for Burke's Annual Register—Burke himself?—speaks of Gibbon's “rare talent of rendering … obscure times, and forgotten persons, engaging and delightful” (19, 2, 236). Even the long line of Christian defenders who immediately began to attack Gibbon usually admitted that the style was “elegant” and “vivacious,” though some tried to convert this praise to blame; East Apthorp, for example, says, “The author … adopted that entertaining but superficial manner of writing history … introduced by the Abbé de Vertot” (13). There is no notion in these comments that Gibbon's style could be thought boring, or too ornate, or difficult to follow, except occasionally in an excess of epigram. A Mr. Wallace wrote to W. Strahan, Gibbon's publisher, that the Decline and Fall seemed to him “incomparably the finest production in English, without any exception. I hardly had thought the language capable of arriving at his correctness, perspicuity, and strength” (2, 174).³

Gibbon himself assumed that an adequate style was not merely a desirable but an indispensable feature of philosophic history, believing that his failure with his French history of Switzerland was in part the result of his inability to find a suitable “mode of historical eloquence” in the French language. “I was conscious myself,” he says, “that my style, above prose and below poetry, degenerated into a verbose and turgid declamation” (142). He takes for granted a distinction between historical writing and other forms of discourse, including those not requiring “eloquence.” But he firmly rejects mere declamation, style for style's sake. Writing of his search for an appropriate style for the Decline and Fall, he says, “the style of an author should be the image of his mind: but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise: many experiments were made before I could hit the middle tone between a dull Chronicle and a Rhetorical declamation” (155). This description will justify the opinion that his style is in one sense affected, that is, carefully planned, openly artful, and neither unstudied nor “transparent”; but equal “affectation,” if that is what it is, is observable throughout the history, and most of it was sent without “any intermediate copy” directly to the printer (180). Moreover, accounts of his conversation repeatedly assert that his style in talk was as meditated, or studied, as his style in writing, and even the most informal of his private letters may strike some readers as cold and artful. Thus his style is not affected if “affectation” implies insincerity or replacement of a more spontaneous, personal, “genuine” manner. And at first few of his critics accused him or his style of affectation, perhaps because the studied qualities were to be found in other admired styles as well as Gibbon's.

Even before Gibbon's death, however, a new attitude began to emerge, one based on changed assumptions about both the status of historical writing as a kind of intellectual discourse and the relationship between style and personality. James Beattie, in 1788, explained to a correspondent that he could not give her an account of the celebrated history because he had only managed to read half a volume: “If any body would translate [Gibbon] into good classical English … I should read him with eagerness. … It is, I am told, the fashion to admire Gibbon's style; my opinion of it, however, is supported by great authorities.” He goes on to quote the Bishop of London's opinion that the style of the last three volumes “is more obscure and affected than ever” (56-57).

In the same year John Gillies was aware that Gibbon's style was controversial. But the controversy, he says, is favorable to Gibbon, for if his style were only peculiar, it would long since have ceased to be discussed. Those familiar with the classics and modern languages

will be … delighted with an author who pours from his horn of plenty the treasures of distant ages, and remote countries; whose images are borrowed sometimes from the Gothic tournaments, and sometimes from the games of Greece; and whose fancy has been ennobled by the sublimity of Homer, and enriched by the luxuriance of Ariosto.

The complaints against Gibbon's manner, Gillies goes on to say, are that it is “1. Artificial and pompous; 2. Obscure and incorrect”. It must be artificial, because it is art. But it is well within the suitable range for English: “richer in its imagery, [but] less intricate in its structure,” than Elizabethan English, and more appropriate for the majesty of history than is Addisonean familiarity. Gibbon is indeed sometimes obscure or even incorrect, like Tacitus, because he is always laboring to please—“the ungrateful reader forgets his obligations, and remembers one disappointment.” The defects “but faintly disfigure a work … which philosophers have approved, and Europe [has] admired … but which the serious Christian alone is justly entitled to treat with indignation” (79, 236-37).

These comments do not imply that Gibbon's prose is artificial or affected in the moral sense, the stylistic manifestation of personal vanity and hypocrisy. Yet detractors and even some admirers, consciously or unconsciously assuming very literally that “le style, c'est l'homme même,” have often transferred such moral faults from Gibbon's character (as inferred from his memoirs or his positions in the Decline and Fall) to his style, or from Gibbon's style to his character. An early example can be seen in an interesting letter of 1785 from Mirabeau to Samuel Romilly. Mirabeau had met and disliked Gibbon, with whom, of course, he disagreed politically. He wrote,

I have read Mr. Gibbon's elegant history, and that was enough. I say his ‘elegant,’ not his ‘estimable’ history, because, in my opinion, philosophy has never better brought together the lights that erudition can shed on ancient times and never arranged them in an easier and happier order. But, whether Mr. Gibbon was seduced, or only wished to appear seduced, by the grandeur of the Roman Empire, the number of its legions, the magnificence of its roads and cities, he has traced an odiously false picture of the felicity of that empire, which oppressed the world and did not make it happy. … [H]is style, always elegant and never energetic, announces the slave of an elector of Hanover, [rather than a “true” Englishman.]

(104, 257-58; my translation)

It is clear that Mirabeau's evaluation of Gibbon's style is significantly affected by his response to Gibbon's person and positions.

Politics thus joins religion as a source of objections to Gibbon which might affect evaluations of his style as well as his substance. But two other sources of negative re-evaluation were much more widespread. Incipient Romanticism began to lead readers to find Gibbon's markedly rhetorical style insufficiently passionate and personal, and therefore dull. The goal of “scientific” history, encouraged by Gibbon's and other successes in aspiring to referential reliability, was causing others to assume that the only appropriate style for history was one that was impersonal and invisible, entirely subordinated to the transfer of information. Simplicity, plainness, and unobtrusiveness were defined as “natural” by this group, and they therefore joined the Romantics in deploring Gibbon's artifice.

Some modern readers, it is true, have perceived certain Romantic traits in Gibbon's work, a finding anticipated by the European Magazine in its review of the last three volumes, in which the style of the Decline and Fall is said to be “ric to a degree of elegance hardly known before:—it is a paradise of sweets almost too powerful for the sense. … The … account of Alboin King of the Lombards possesses so much of the beautiful wildness of romance, that we are tempted to give it entire” (14, 19, 101). But to praise rich elegance and wild beauty in the same breath was already an old-fashioned view for many contemporary readers, for whom Sir James Mackintosh spoke in finding that William Robertson, though inferior to Gibbon intellectually, “far surpassed him in simplicity and perspicuity of narration, in picturesque and pathetic description, in the sober use of figurative language, and in the delicate perception of that scarcely discernible boundary which separates ornament from exuberance and elegance from affectation” (20, 316).

Still more readers objected, either in the name of history or in that of ease, to Gibbon's lack of plainness. Noah Webster says that “the false British taste for ornament” is nowhere more apparent than in the encomiums lavished on Gibbon on both sides of the Atlantic. What Gibbon wrote was less a history, Webster held, than a “Poetico-Historical Description of Certain Persons and Events, embellished with suitable Imagery and Episodes.” Gibbon “takes more pains to form his sentences, than to collect, arrange and express the facts in an easy and perspicuous manner” (367). His prose is pleasant for the ear, but hard to follow and remember. History should not have any ornaments, and there should be few reflections by the author. Gibbon uses too many epithets instead of names, and is sometimes epigrammatic at the expense of clarity. The best history is “a collection of all the material official papers, arranged in order of time, however dry and unentertaining to most readers” (373).

During the next twenty or thirty years, on both sides of the Atlantic, among liberals and conservatives alike, criticisms of Gibbon's style as insufficiently chaste or insufficiently passionate are recurrent. For the first time, accusations of dullness become widespread. Charles Brockden Brown's Monthly Magazine and American Review (1799) finds Gibbon's style inferior to both Hume's and Robertson's. Gibbon has the fault of dull indecency; his style is both monotonous and defective. “Artificial pomp and elaborate obscurity must be eminently obnoxious. No writer is more tiresome than Gibbon” (93). In another of Brown's journals (1805) the writer says that Gibbon “has confounded the diction of a poet with that of a historian.” His sentences are too similar in construction. “Although many of his characters are finely drawn, and many of his description are lively and beautiful, yet his verboseness frequently fatigues the attention, and his obscurity perplexes it.” He departs “in point of dignity of character [and] … propriety of expression, from the rules of correct composition” and is guilty of neologisms and French idiom (58-60).

This view was not confined to the colonies. T. D. Whitaker, in the Quarterly in 1815, finds Gibbon's style defective in being “less chaste and simple” than Hume's or Robertson's (370) and asserts with more hope than accuracy that this infidel author is “an English classic who now begins to sleep upon the shelf” (390). Alexander Chalmers, in 1807, finds Gibbon's style too “poetical and figurative, and highly coloured” for history in English, and sometimes too stiff. Yet, with all its defects, Chalmers assumes that the Decline and Fall “must ever be considered as one of the proudest triumphs of English literature” (x).

Coleridge was much less generous: “Gibbon's style is detestable,” he said in 1833.

[Gibbon's] work is little else but a disguised collection of all the splendid anecdotes which he could find in any book. … When I read a chapter in Gibbon I seem to be looking through a luminous haze or fog—figures come and go, I know not how or why, all larger than life, or distorted or discolored; nothing is real, vivid, true”.

(244-45)

For all this scorn, Coleridge condescended to plagiarize from Gibbon whenever he wrote on Gibbon's subjects.⁴ The Romantics in general (with the predictable exception of Byron) despised Gibbon, but relied on him for esoteric information.⁵

Though this tradition of complaining about Gibbon's lack of clarity and simplicity, or his coldness and lack of fire, became a cliché in the nineteenth century, some of the great prose writers of the century were not content with these criticisms. Coleridge we have already heard from. Carlyle had a complex series of reactions. After reading one volume, he finds the style “flowery; his sarcasms wicked, his notes oppressive, often beastly” (I, 127). But when he has finished the book, he praises both its “immense research and splendid execution” (I, 143). Five years later (1822) he urges Jane Welsh to continue her reading of the book:

It is a kind of bridge that connects the antique with the modern ages. And how gorgeously does it swing across the gloomy and tumultuous chasm of those barbarous centuries: Gibbon is a man whom one never forgets—unless oneself deserving to be forgotten: the perusal of his works forms an epoch in the history of one's own mind. I know you will admire Gibbon, yet I do not expect or wish that you should love him. He has but a coarse and vulgar heart, with all his keen logic, and glowing imagination, and lordly irony.

(II, 180)

In 1838, however, in a public lecture, he was far less generous: “With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more futile account … of human life than he has done of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; assigning no profound cause for these phenomena, nothing but diseased nerves, and all sorts of miserable motives, to the actors in them” (176-77). Again, dislike of style and attribution of moral deficiency go hand in hand. In this case, as in others, it is even hard to determine which is cause and which is effect. Does Gibbon's “swagger and bombast” prevent Carlyle from seeing the range of understanding of human life that more sympathetic readers see in the Decline and Fall, or does his assumption that Gibbon's “heart” is “coarse and vulgar” lead him to consider the style swaggering and bombastic?

In any case, Carlyle's position is charity itself in comparison to Ruskin's. Asked to explain why he had deleted Gibbon from Sir John Lubbock's list of 100 Best Books, Ruskin replied,

Primarily, [because] none but the malignant and weak study the Decline and Fall either of State or organism [he also deleted Darwin]. Dissolution and putrescence are alike common and unclean in all things; any wretch or simpleton may observe for himself, and experience himself, the processes of ruin; but good men study, and wise men describe, only the growth and standing of things—not their decay.

For the rest, Gibbon's is the worst English that was ever written by an educated Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic, he is alike incapable either of picturesqueness or of wit: his epithets are malicious without point, sonorous without weight, and have no office but to make a flat sentence turgid.

While it may be presumed that Poe would have agreed with this picture (forty years earlier he had written, “A few years hence, should anyone compose a mock heroic in the manner of the Decline and Fall, the poem will be torn apart … as an unwarrantable exaggeration of the principles of the burlesque”), another American, G. Monroe Royce, in the New Englander and Yale Review, aptly answered Ruskin, pointing out with telling effect that the portrayal of the subject of decline need not be decadent, any more than a painting of a slave ship (the subject of one of Ruskin's favorite Turners). Moreover, Gibbon's work, Royce is able to perceive, is about growth as well as decline: “There is constantly some new force appearing.” But to defend Gibbon, Royce believes, is as unnecessary as defending Shakespeare (45, 963).

And it remained the case that, throughout the nineteenth century, the detractors of Gibbon seemed to think they were tilting their lances at a giant. In popularizations and textbooks, it is true, writers cautiously spoke of admitted faults and virtues, but on both sides of the Atlantic, as of the Channel, the view that Gibbon's work was literally a classic challenged the assumption that the style was radically misguided. In 1833 Milman reviewed Guizot's new French edition of the Decline and Fall and recommended that there be a similar annotated English edition. The annotations, designed in part to “correct” Gibbon's religious views, also brought him up to date and even clarified or analyzed disputed points, as if his were in fact an ancient text, because no historian felt ready to challenge him on his own ground. Some of the greatest, indeed, deliberately and explicitly avoided Gibbon's territory.⁶ Milman himself might have sought to compete with Gibbon; instead, he edited him. In his review of Guizot, he explained why: “Gibbon's is the greatest of English historical classics, enjoys the most extensive European reputation, and is most likely to endure.” It would have been desirable for Gibbon to have had “a more free and natural style, a purer moral taste, and a philosophy superior to the narrow prejudices of its age” (50, 275); nevertheless, nothing can supplant the “vastness, yet harmony of design” (50, 286) of his work, and the fault of his treatment of Christianity is fundamentally not inaccuracy, but lack of sympathy: “Christianity alone receives no embellishment from the magic of Gibbon's language; his imagination is dead to its moral dignity” (50, 296).

In France, Sainte-Beuve to some extent continued the Romantic objections to the Decline and Fall even as he praised its elegance, “light,” and clarity and valued it for its accounts of the heroic spirits who came too late to save the empire. According to Sainte-Beuve, Gibbon's history is like a well-managed retreat: it lacks impetuosity and fire, but is admirable in tactics and order. But in both England and America there are signs, by mid-century, of a perception that Gibbon's artfulness might reveal and sustain both feeling and “truth,” instead of obscuring them with cold artifice. Writers begin to credit the history with sublimity, to see it not as failed romance or decorated science, but as epic. Fraser's Magazine declared that we must pardon the faults of the Decline and Fall “for the spirit-stirring narrative, the luminous disquisitions, the wit, the force, the imagination, the eloquence. … It is a sublime work, a towering pyramid in an intellectual desert” (46, 449). T. H. Shreve, in the Cincinnati Mirror and Western Gazette (1835), similarly held that

Gibbon's style is graceful, and always suited to the majesty of his subject. … His imagination is rich and throws over his descriptions the drapery of fiction, without implicating him in a departure from truth. … He unites the luminousness of Tacitus with the diligence of Herodotus—and we peruse his work with the same activity of imagination and engrossment of feeling which we experience when we read one of those magnificent epic poems which have glorified genius, and given to fictions … the vitality of truth.

(4, 129)

Even one of his Christian opponents, an American lecturing on the Evidences of Christianity (at the University of Virginia) asserted that Gibbon's “facility of expression … always rendered his meaning clear, notwithstanding a style somewhat elaborate in its structure, and gorgeous in its coloring,” and found that the history, “for excellence of arrangement, comprehensiveness of design, and vividness of impression,” entitled “its author to rank among the most eminent historians either of ancient or of modern times” (Hoge, 238).

Towards the end of the nineteenth century readers, becoming aware of the paradoxical tradition of response to this “classic” work, begin to approach Gibbon's style in some new ways. Some seek to analyze it, and others to evaluate it less in itself than as model or influence. For example, William Murto in 1872 anticipates Highet, Craddock, et al., in seeking to identify the “secret of the pregnancy” of Gibbon's style. It is, Murto believes, Gibbon's use of “descriptive and suggestive epithets,” which enable him to appear to remind but actually to inform the reader of some idea or fact (483-85). Many have continued to search for the “secret” of Gibbon's style, but many others have agreed with W. D. Howells that Gibbon's style “had better forever be left his own … its gorgeous textures are for the drapery of a theme uniquely vast and grand” (40). Nevertheless Howells's tribute to Gibbon's style is surely the most generous he had yet received on this side of the Atlantic; Howells recognized

in the greatest of historians one of the greatest of geniuses, a writer who possessed in prose, above any other Englishman of his time, the shaping hand; and who moulded the vast masses of his subject into forms of magnificent beauty, giving to their colossal pomp a finish for which there is no word but exquisite.

(5-6)

While these two discussions, of Gibbon's style as model and of its identifiable features, continue into the twentieth century, as does the issue of its “affectation,” perhaps the most typical discussion of our century concerns the relationship between the style and the undeniable “immortality” of the work itself. This discussion returns to the issue of the openly literary qualities of the Decline and Fall to argue that these qualities have a kind of residual value of their own, surviving the work's value as history, or that its value as a narrative is unaffected by its referential or factual value, or that Gibbon's historical insights were arrived at by and through literary techniques and excellence.

Some who praise the Decline and Fall as literature believe that Gibbon purchased stylistic excellences by sacrificing historical virtues. Walter Bagehot's famous quip, that Gibbon's “is not a style in which you can tell the truth”—Gibbon “cannot mention Asia Minor”(2, 28-29)—has been appropriated for other writers, but it still points to a problem experienced by some readers of Gibbon. J. B. Black, one of Gibbon's most thoughtful and influential admirers, complained in his 1926 study that, despite its surprising variety, Gibbon's

stiffly brocaded style cannot unbend sufficiently to grapple with simple things. When we read, for example that silk ‘composes the golden tomb from which a worm emerges in the form of a butterfly’ … we feel that whatever the merits of the grand style may be when applied to great events, it is not particularly informative about plain matters of fact.

(176)

As I rushed to point out twenty years ago, Black exaggerates; the golden tomb sentence begins, “I need not explain that silk is originally spun from the bowels of a caterpillar.” Even I must admit that Gibbon's style is not invariably an asset, though I am troubled to find that, as late as 1977, François Paschoud believed that a passion for literary form led Gibbon to write memorable phrases that were inaccurate and to prefer a Tillemont for actual use (243). I think one must at least concede J. B. Bury's claim, that Gibbon “is perhaps the clearest example that brilliance of style and accuracy of statement are perfectly compatible in an historian” (vii).

More troubling, because much more frequent, in the twentieth-century discussions of Gibbon's style, however, is the assumption that style, while not an obstacle to his historical accomplishments, is and perhaps always was his only or principal merit. The most extreme form of this view has gained little support. It was expressed by Hilaire Belloc in a series of articles in various journals, Catholic and non-Catholic, in the first quarter of this century. According to Belloc, Gibbon's is “far and away the most readable” English book he has encountered. “I verily believe there is not a dull line in the enormous work. Certainly there is not a dull page” (30, 591). Unfortunately, Gibbon was profoundly unhistorical, biased, unimaginative, careless, and unacquainted with the sources, a superb writer, but far from a great historian.

In a less extreme form, this view has been adopted by many admirers, especially other historians. We find accounts of Gibbon as holiday or bed-time reading, and many accounts that assume that Gibbon's accuracy was once a motive for admiring him, but now that his data are entirely superseded, only his style prevents his relegation to the shelf of unread historiographical classics. Such views are prevalent among those who demand systematic explanations from historians, or who espouse other forms of historical writing. One is tempted to observe that some historians believe that you cannot tell the truth with any style. Such critics no longer regard literary qualities as morally deplorable replacements for sincerity and passion, or objectivity and transparency, but they are still regarded as decorative and detachable, as productive only of the kind of object to which referentiality is irrelevant.

A few of Gibbon's best modern critics take this view, by implication, when they analyze the accomplishments of the Decline and Fall without concern for its factuality or explanatory adequacy. Bury prophetically warns against such views: “Gibbon has his place in literature not only as the stylist, who never lays aside his toga when he takes up his pen, but as the expounder of a large and striking idea in a sphere of intense interest to mankind.” His “immunity from the common lot of historical writers” is secured by the “bold and certain measure of his progress through the ages; his accurate vision, and his tact in managing perspective; his discreet reserves of judgment and timely scepticism” as well as “the immortal affection of his unique manner” (xxi). But Louis Kronenberger states unabashedly, “The Decline and Fall, being art, is a presentation rather than a reenactment; it stakes its all on a theme … rather than a theory; it shows no interest in depth, as it possesses no equal for span” (74). E. J. Oliver praises the “powerful plot, in which the reader's pleasurable anguish” is aroused by his attachment to the lingering glories of doomed Rome, and H. L. Bond, in the first book-length study of the Decline and Fall as literature, treats it in terms of two nonreferential genres, as a historical epic, unified by a tragic theme, and as an “epideictic oration” (57).

Three of Gibbon's most interesting readers of the 1970s and '80s also treat the book as if its referential value were either irrelevant or metaphorical. Leo Braudy's valuable book on narrative in Gibbon, Hume, and Fielding argues that Gibbon develops the character of the narrator as the source of a created and provisional ordering of the past into a literary artifact, reliable because it is personal, subject to revision, and openly the product of the perceiving mind as well as of the chaotic and meaningless facts it makes into history. I have no quarrel with this argument or the brilliant readings it makes possible, but it implies by its silence on the subject that the accuracy of the facts and the extratextual value of the proposed explanatory structures are irrelevant. To me this is to overlook the essential constitutive attribute of the genre Gibbon chose to work in. Just as in discussing poetry, we can set aside its metrical nature for some purposes but we cannot disregard it ultimately, so I think that in discussing historical style, we must ultimately allow for referentiality.

In his 1981 book, The Empire Unpossess'd, which argues that the Decline and Fall develops the theme that the existence of original, lost, paternal authority is a necessary fiction, Lionel Gossman makes a complex and revealing analysis of the relationships among style, form, and theme. In his judgment, “narrative mediates more effectively than scientific generalization between the two demands of intelligibility on the one hand, and concreteness or openness to experience on the other” to achieve “‘consistency’ and ‘interest’” (104). None of these goals is essentially referential, or demands extratextual verification. Michel Baridon in his encyclopedic study of Gibbon sees Gibbon's style as paralleling the qualities of his “thought,” but he sees those qualities as responsive to the age in which Gibbon lived, rather than to the ages of which he wrote. In his view, the Gothic revival and the American self-identification with the heroic barbarians of Tacitus inspired Gibbon to a counter-revival of “philosophy and taste,” a matter of style as well as ideas. Gibbon's intricate effects of balance and structural echo are comparable to Palladian architecture, and his use of metonymy enables him to establish an unchanging human nature and permanent patterns of psychological causation. This would be limiting, but fortunately he is also sensible of the beauty of humanistic pagan mythology. Thus his classicism has a poetic richness of atmosphere, incorporating the terrors and obscurity of barbarism and religion in appropriately sublime style, and yet this sublimity is always controlled by the measured regularity of the cadences of his prose. My summaries of these three rich and suggestive studies are unavoidably crude, but I hope they are just in indicating that the historicity of the Decline and Fall is not necessary to any of these critics. I believe it was necessary to Gibbon.

Probably the most important counter influence to these responses to Gibbon as literature has been that of H. R. Trevor-Roper. In 1963, he asserted that the Decline and Fall “is not merely a narrative, cast in a majestic eighteenth-century style, flavoured with pungent epigram, grave irony, and distinguished by constant skepticism. It is a great work of complex social explanation” (vii). So far, so good—but in later statements, he feels it necessary to repudiate the literary qualities of the Decline and Fall in order to defend its historical significance: “To the conservative Johnson, history was a branch of literature. … But to Gibbon, history had a much higher place. It was a branch of ‘philosophy,’ of thought” (493). I need hardly point out the prejudices against literature and Johnson that influence this statement. For my present purposes, the problem is that Trevor-Roper's position again divorces the literary qualities of the Decline and Fall from its historical merits. J. G. A. Pocock's absorbing studies of the ideas and themes of the Decline and Fall in terms of Machiavelli and Hume likewise find as little need to allow for Gibbon's stylistic and formal virtues as Braudy and Baridon to allow for his erudition, criticism of sources, and interpretation of evidence.⁷ In his most recent statement, however, Trevor-Roper comes to a more inclusive position: “Of the great ‘philosophical’ historians only Gibbon survives … [because] his imagination never slept” (367). As he looked at one event or situation, his mind ranged around all the rest of history, perceiving “analogies, contrasts, possibilities, to envisage or correct a generalization.” Ultimately, “it is the imagination of the historian, not his scholarship or his method (necessary though these are), which will discern the hidden forces of change” (368).

If style is the image of the writer's mind, the verbal manifestation of its imaginative powers, then a style which aspires to the status of literature may reveal, not usurp, the facts and connections that mind perceives in the external world. Scientific systems impose one kind of order on the data of experience and aim at one kind of truth; literature imposes another order and aims at another kind or aspect of truth. Philosophy and history share an ambivalent position in between. Many valuable works in both disciplines ignore one or other of their neighbors. But such works are exhaustible, superseded by others which absorb, correct, and extend their information and insights. Perhaps it is only works whose novelty is continually renewed by the estranging powers of literary language that continue to give the new insights into the extratextual world which are the special province of these disciplines. If so, it is in part to its “immortal affectation” that we owe the continuing historical value of the Decline and Fall.

Notes

1. For A Reference Guide to Edward Gibbon (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987). Portions of this essay, in a different form, will be found in the introduction to the reference guide, which abstracts some 2,000 discussions of Gibbon. The essay was first presented at the 1985 meeting of the Samuel Johnson Society of the Central Region.

2. See Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism, Four Essays, trans. Lemon and Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965) for this term and concept.

3. Wallace's view was not unusual. Horace Walpole, for example, said Volume I was a “truly classic work. … The style is as smooth as a Flemish picture, and the muscles are concealed and only for natural uses, not exaggerated like Michael Angelo's” (Letter to Mason, 18 February 1776, in the Yale Walpole, ed. W. S. Lewis, Grover Cronin Jr., and Charles H. Bennett [1955], xxiii, 243-44. In an essay published in Hamburg in 1789, Georg Forster went even further: “It would be too little to say that Gibbon's work surpassed the entire body of British literature for 1788, because it completed a history that is surpassed in no age or language” (Geschichte der Englishen Litteratur, vom Jahr 1788, in his Werke, ed. Gerhard Steiner, III, 77-78. My translation).

4. For examples see the notes and indices of the Bollingen Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton University Press).

5. T. E. Casson. “Edward Gibbon.” Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, 60 (1934), 23-44.

6. E.g., B. G. Niebuhr in Germany, and Charles Merivale in England. Chateaubriand's effort to compete apparently rested, with respect to scholarship, on unacknowledged borrowings from Gibbon himself. See Ernst Dick, Plagiats de Chateaubriand … II. comment Chateaubriand s'est servi de Gibbon (Bern: Philosophischen Fakultat, 1905), II, 56-80.

7. “Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian,” in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. Bowersock, Clive, and Graubard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977); “Gibbon's Decline and Fall and the World View of the Late Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1977), 287-303; “Gibbon and the Shepherds: the Stages of Society in the Decline and Fall, History of European Ideas, 2 (1981), 193-202; “Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon's History of Religion,” Eighteenth Century Life, n.s. 8 (October 1982), 83-94. To be collected and completed as Barbarism and Religion: Civil History in Gibbon's Decline and Fall.

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