SOURCE: Day, Robert Adams. “Gibbon and the Language of History.” Études Anglaises 41, no. 2 (April-June 1988): 155-64.

[In the following essay, Day analyzes the vocabulary, sentence structure, and rhythms of a sample of Gibbon's prose from the Decline and Fall to show what devices Gibbons consciously used to convey his message to readers.]

As recently as September 1985 a reviewer in the London Times Literary Supplement, praising J. W. Burrow's newly-published Gibbon, said that

the student will get a sharper sense of where the true vitality of the Decline and Fall resides from Burrow's book than from any comparable study,

but went on to complain:

However, although Burrow helps us to see where we may find the life of the Decline and Fall, he is not equally illuminating about the forms that life takes. There is an imbalance in his handling of the competing claims of text and context. We are given fine accounts of ideas. … But we are not shown how those ideas and terms are inflected when drawn into the Decline and Fall. Too often the quotations from Gibbon's text feel subordinate; it is as if they were being introduced merely to illustrate the context.

(Womersley)

Anyone who surveys twentieth-century scholarship on Gibbon may well echo these sentiments. Studies of Gibbon's life, the formative influences on his thought, his use of sources, and so on, abound; but extended and detailed analyses of his prose style—the poetic or rhetorical devices by which Gibbon “inflects” his ideas—are few indeed.¹ The purpose of what follows is to attempt a small redress of that “imbalance” by considering some of the devices of tone—the author's registering of his attitude toward both his subject and his audience—in Gibbon's famous account of Athanasius, archbishop of Alexandria, in ch. 21: a passage of which he was later to say, “May I presume to add that the portrait of Athanasius is one of the passages of my history with which I am least dissatisfied?” (Decline and Fall 6: 212n101).

If history nowadays goes unread by the general public, in the eighteenth century, an era when David Hume could write (in 1769) to Hugh Blair, “History is, I think, the favourite reading,” (Letters 2: 196) every man of moderate education, and many women, devoured it. Gibbon could observe, with no particular astonishment, “My book was on every table, and on almost every toilette; the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day” (Autobiography 145).

Changes in taste have many causes; but surely the invertebrate prose of too many modern historians has fostered the prevailing notion that history is not a good read. The rediscovery of a historian who is also a literary artist is thus worth the trouble; and the careful examination of a small specimen of Gibbon's prose immensely deepens our respect for him, and adds to our appreciation of his intellect, his humanity, and his meditative artistry.

Though the history of Athanasius contains a great variety of scenes and events, ranging from palace intrigues to ecclesiastical synods, the armed invasion of the primate's basilica, and his flight to the deserts of the Thebaid, its brevity and unity permit it to be detached from the chronicle as a whole without losing its significance or force. It is also an ideal specimen for our purpose because it so well illustrates Gibbon's salient qualities of mind: rationality, hatred of bigotry and hypocrisy, cool penetration of human motives, and a fondness for proverbial reflections on life and human nature. Bound by the facts of history, Gibbon was nevertheless freed by the resources of emphasis and expression to cultivate his celebrated characteristics of lofty detachment, dignity and weight, precision and clarity, and the famous “solemn sneer.”

Gibbon clearly admired Athanasius for his powers of mind and firmness of purpose; nevertheless, in spite of the bishop's inflexible spirit and endurance of great hardships, his sanctity and the justness of his cause, the historian could not feel unmixed admiration. His esteem was modified by the reflection that no man is perfect; and from time to time he injects hints that Athanasius was narrow-minded, fanatical, and often rather ridiculous. Gibbon's contempt for the emperor Constantius was uniform; his feeling for the other figures who shaped the bishop's history ranged from tolerantly lofty acceptance of their venality to condemnation of their perfidy and malice.

All through the narrative runs the melancholy attitude that no man is able to maintain or even to reach the ideal state of reason and virtue; that human nature is devious and complex; that history is a record of crimes and follies. Moreover, the whole story is a part of the larger history of the homoousian-homoiousian controversy, which Gibbon could not but regard as a typically human and typically unreasonable quarrel over an absurd and non-essential trifle.

Gibbon conveys these melancholy convictions, and produces his dignified and cynical effects, by devices of tone which may be ranged under two heads: the construction of sentences, and the selection and arrangement of individual words. The Gibbonian sentence is long, and uniformly long; perhaps the shortest sentence in the passage we are considering is of fifteen words or so, while the longest is of sixty, seventy, or more. This length alone produces an effect of dignity and weight; but a sentence of this length is inevitably a complex structure, and invariably contains at least three or four ideas of varying complexity and in varying degrees of subordination to one another. Therefore no sentence can be rushed over by the reader, but must be dwelt upon. To take an example:

Six-and-twenty months had elapsed, during which the Imperial court secretly laboured, by the most insidious arts, to remove him from Alexandria, and to withdraw the allowance which supplied his popular liberality.

(2: 397)

Here we have the mention of a passage of time, the announcement of the subject of the sentence, a qualifying and characterizing phrase, the object of the sentence, a second object, and a further modification, with the additional information that the bishop was liberal. Thus several areas of thought are rapidly touched upon, and both the court and Athanasius are pictured with the contrasted coloring that Gibbon wishes to give them. It would be difficult or impossible to reduce a sentence of even this relative simplicity to a few words; Gibbon does not use waste verbiage.

Another device, which Gibbon employs simultaneously to impede the reader's progress through the sentence (thereby increasing the feeling of weight and matter, or better, Auden's “mass and majesty of this world, all / That carries weight, and always weighs the same”) and to delve into the complexities of his subject, is a process of continual qualification. Gibbon rarely states a fact without going into considerable detail of phrases, clauses, and adjectives to tell us exactly how it happened. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this process will be to reproduce a sentence, divided into sections and with the qualifying details indicated by parentheses:

Persuasion (and violence) / were employed to extort / the (reluctant) signature / of the (decrepit) bishop (of Cordova), / whose strength (was broken) / and whose faculties were (perhaps) impaired / by the weight of (an hundred) years; / and the (insolent) triumph / of the Arians / provoked (some) of the (orthodox) party / to treat (with inhuman severity) / the character (or rather the memory), / of an (unfortunate old) man, / to whose (former) services / Christianity (itself) / was (so deeply) indebted.

(2: 308)

Another characteristic of Gibbon's sentences, which gives them the isolated grandeur of a series of megaliths standing on a plain, is the fact that they are usually not closely related to one another by subordination or modification. The sequence of ideas is usually temporal or spatial, but there is no real flow from one unit to the next; it is a rare sentence that depends for more than a small part of its meaning on its neighbors. The reader therefore comes to a distinct stop at the end of a sentence, and the beginning of the next usually transports him to a point some distance from where he had stopped. Thus Gibbon says:

But the voice of reason (if reason was indeed on the side of Athanasius) was silenced by the clamors of a factious or venal majority; and the councils of Arles and Milan were not dissolved till the archbishop of Alexandria had been solemnly condemned and deposed by the judgment of the Western, as well as of the Eastern, church. / The bishops who had opposed were required to subscribe the sentence; and to unite in a religious communion with the leaders of the adverse party. / A formulary of consent was transmitted by the messengers of state to the absent bishops; and all those who refused to submit their private opinion to the public and inspired wisdom of the councils of Arles and Milan were immediately banished by the emperor, who affected to execute the decrees of the catholic church.

(2: 395)

Each of these three sentences has a unity which partially (though not entirely, of course) makes it independent of the others. We are presented with the conclusion of the councils; the treatment of their members; and the compulsion of the absent bishops. Each sentence presents a scene which is distinct, and has its own coloring and atmosphere.

Thus far we have considered the sentences as wholes; but in reality most of them (the longer ones) are composed of units which in themselves amount to miniature sentences. These phrases and clauses are judiciously varied in length, weight, and rhythm, so that the movement of the sentences is continuously changing, and monotony is obviated. Sentences rise to a climax, or two or three, in a succession of long and mellifluous words, arranged in lengthy phrases; these are then capped or stopped by a short, brittle phrase or two; another gradual rise takes place, assisted by the devices of alliteration, assonance, and antithesis, and the period is lowered and brought to a close by a few short or commonplace words of what might be called “low intensity.” This process of raising and lowering is reinforced by rhythm and accent, which are sometimes used in phrases whose approximately equal length and parallel accentuation approach the technique of verse—in fact, the prosody of three or four alliterating beats per line that undergirds English verse and prose from Beowulf onward, which is found even in Pope, and which often contributes to the muscularity of Johnson's prose.² Such a sentence might be diagrammed as follows:

The eminent station of Liberius,
who governed the capital of the empire;
the personal merit
and long experience
of the venerable Osius,
who was revered as the favourite of the great Constantine, and the father
of the Nicene faith,
placed these prelates
at the head of the Latin Church;
and their example,
either of submission or resistance,
would probably be imitated
by the episcopal
crowd.

(2: 395-96)

This rising and falling in intensity has its obvious effect purely as prose rhythm; but it serves a secondary and no less important purpose. The variations in speed and sound often serve as background to what is being described; they echo the action. Consider the following sentence:

The archbishop of Alexandria, for whose safety they eagerly devoted their lives, was lost among a uniform and well disciplined multitude; / and on the nearer approach of danger, he was swiftly removed, by officious hands, from one place of concealment to another, / till he reached the formidable deserts, which the gloomy and credulous temper of superstition had peopled with demons and savage monsters.

(2: 401)

The sentence begins in an atmosphere of bustle and animation, with rapid, jerky movement and a multitude of harsh consonants; the flight of the bishop is described with a swift yet smooth progression of sound. In the third section of the sentence we reach the Thebaid, and the effect becomes somber, gloomy, and slow, with a succession of explosives and long open vowel sounds: formidable, gloomy, credulous, superstition, peopled, demons, savage, monsters.

The long sentence has another advantage for Gibbon; it enables him to present as a unit an action which is single, and yet has so many ramifications and complexities, all of which ought to be considered at once, that it would ordinarily require several short sentences and thus fail to give a unified impression. This is especially the case when Gibbon is indulging in an Olympian reflection on the baseness of human motives or the petty causes of great events. Thus he goes into a maze of qualifications, presented in a pompous manner which is a foil for the meanness of what is being described:

Their integrity was gradually undermined by the arguments of the Arians, the dexterity of the eunuchs, and the pressing solicitations of a prince who gratified his revenge at the expense of his dignity, and exposed his own passions whilst he influenced those of the clergy. Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty, was successfully practised; honours, gifts, and immunities were offered and accepted as the price of an episcopal vote; and the condemnation of the Alexandrian primate was artfully represented as the only measure which could restore the peace and union of the catholic church.

(2: 394)

These are perhaps the most notable uses which Gibbon makes of the devices of sentence structure and the larger rhetorical schemata for the purpose of conveying his attitude toward his material and his reader. Equally important, or perhaps more so, are his selection and artful placement of words, and the general atmosphere conveyed by his vocabulary. Without a computer analysis it would be unwise to attempt to estimate the percentage of polysyllables and Latin derivatives in Gibbon's prose; but it is safe to say that they predominate to an extent rivaled by few other English authors, perhaps even including Samuel Johnson. The long word, like the long sentence, cannot fail to convey an atmosphere of dignity and weight—gravitas. Moreover, no matter how well-read the reader, he must be less accustomed to polysyllables and Latinisms than to short words of Teutonic derivation. These long and unusual words therefore create, when they predominate, an effect of strangeness, majesty, and elevation; they approximate the ritualistic “special language” of the epic, which C. S. Lewis stressed, for example, in his Preface to Paradise Lost. Gibbon is of course thinking of the distinction of genres and styles, and has chosen the language which he feels most suitable to present his grand spectacle. In addition, the peculiar quality of sonority which Latinisms transfer to English from their parent tongue must not be forgotten; this ponderous sonority echoes and reinforces the weightiness of the subject matter. Compare the effect of the presence an absence of Latinisms in the following sentence from Gibbon and in its manufactured duplicate:

Yet they soon experienced that the deserts of Libya, and the most barbarous tracts of Cappadocia, were less inhospitable than the residence of those cities in which an Arian bishop could satiate, without restraint, the exquisite rancour of theological hatred.

(2: 396-97)

Yet they soon felt that the deserts of Libya, and the most rugged parts of Cappadocia, were less unfriendly than the dwellings of those cities in which an Arian bishop could glut without curb the finedrawn bitterness of priestly hatred.³

Without Gibbon's specific words the sentence becomes commonplace; in addition it becomes considerably vaguer. Gibbon means precisely what he says: and “inhospitable,” “residence,” “satiate,” “exquisite,” “rancour,” and “theological” become essential in this context to express the exact definitions, actions, and nuances of feeling which he wishes to convey.

At times the Latinisms of Gibbon have an archaic quality, again reminiscent of Milton's usage; it is evident that Gibbon is thinking, and wants the reader to think, of the word's etymology and its Latin force:

He prudently declined the tribunal of his enemies. … The Arians, who had secretly determined the guilt and condemnation … if they had not aggravated the guilt of the primate by the dexterous supposition of an unpardonable offense. … The caution, the delay, the difficulty … discovered to the world that the privileges of the church had already revived. …

(2: 386, 387, 388, 393; italics supplied)

For example, the word “supposition” above is not intended to signify supposing, but rather a putting-under, the adroit insinuation of an untruth where it would have most effect. Here the Latin derivatives give a force and precision to the expression which would be lost on a reader unfamiliar with their etymology, while simultaneously adding to the heightened, uncommon, “epic” tone.

Gibbon gives his prose a quality of high clarity and exactness by continually modifying as he goes. The reader is amazed, on close observation, by the number of adjectives, adverbs, participles, gerunds, and prepositional phrases which constantly define what is being said:

The despotic power of his implacable enemy filled the whole extent of the Roman world; and the exasperated monarch had endeavoured, by a very pressing epistle to the Christian princes of Ethiopia, to exclude Athanasius from the most remote and sequestered regions of the earth. … The numerous disciples of Antony and Pachomius received the fugitive primate as their father, admired the patience and humility with which he conformed to their strictest institutions, collected every word which dropped from his lips as the genuine effusions of inspired wisdom.

(2: 400-01; italics supplied)

Thus Gibbon confines the reader within close limits; one is never allowed to doubt what mood a man was in or what was the quality of an edict. This precision and detail contribute to the meditative and reasoned tone of the narrative; nothing is permitted to be vague. They are also a constant reminder of the brooding and attentive presence of the choregus who regulates minutiae; less obtrusively than Fielding, but just as surely, Gibbon makes himself felt as the creating and presiding deity of his artistic universe.

And yet, paradoxically enough, Gibbon's prose is often singularly vague in another respect, and remote from what it is describing. It might be called colorless, in that the words chosen are very free from connotations of a warmly emotional nature. This pallidness is partly ascribable to Gibbon's constant use of Latinisms; partly to his exquisite choice of adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It is, of course, perfectly compatible with the historian's detachment and Gibbon's own pose of Olympian remoteness; but it often reduces to a state of bloodless chill scenes in which Macaulay or Carlyle would have reveled and rioted:

The doors of the sacred edifice yielded to the impetuosity of the attack, which was accompanied with every horrid circumstance of tumult and bloodshed … before the final sentence could be pronounced at Tyre, the intrepid primate threw himself into a bark which was ready to hoist sail for the Imperial city … the soldiers, with drawn swords, rushed forwards into the sanctuary; and the dreadful gleam of their armour was reflected by the holy luminaries wich burnt round the altar. … Athanasius rejected the pious importunity of the monks and presbyters who were attached to his person, and nobly refused to desert his episcopal station.

(2: 398, 387, 400)

An intrepid primate, however accurately the description may fit him, cannot be as dear to our hearts as a brave bishop; pious importunity, holy luminaries, and the impetuosity of attacks cannot rouse our emotional reactions as would cries and tuggings, flaring lamps, and battering at the door. We have formed no complex of familiar connotations around the Latinisms; they convey little to us besides their denotative meaning and whatever incidental force they may acquire from the context. It is probable that Gibbon was proceeding on the theory that each situation to be described might be most properly expressed by a certain particular epithet, and that in his respect we may compare his prose to the poetry of the early Pope and his epigones, with its “chill penury,” “dire vengeance,” and so on, where strong or unexpected emotional coloring was one of the lesser desiderata. Consequently, the most vivid and violent matters are consistently described by Gibbon in a decorous undertone, whose strength and weight are not, however, impaired by its quietness.

This understatement, moreover, lends itself admirably to Gibbon's purpose when he wishes to use innuendo, sarcasm, or the sneer, without allowing his dignity to be marred by a smile. The history of Athanasius abounds with examples:

… his progress was marked by the abject homage of the Oriental bishops, who excited his contempt without deceiving his penetration. … After every satisfaction and security had been given which justice or even delicacy could require … [he] sustained, with modest firmness, the embraces and protestations of his master … the fervour of his prayers for the success of the righteous cause might perhaps be somewhat abated … his decent flattery swayed and directed the haughty Julius.

(2: 392, 391, 392, 390, 393)

It is interesting to note that Gibbon's technique of the sneer often makes uses of an adjective or expression with an ordinarily favorable meaning (“modest firmness”; “piously condemned”; “the bishops immediately resumed a mild and devout aspect”; “decent flattery”) and the hasty reader is in danger of being beguiled by the general tone to neglect to observe what strange company these adjectives and adverbs are keeping. Gibbon may, however, get his effect by a mere relation of the story in the most innocent and demure manner possible, with only the faintest hint of incredulity, as in the hilarious incident of Athanasius' concealment in the home of

a virgin, only twenty years of age, and who was celebrated in the whole city for her exquisite beauty. At the hour of midnight … she was surprised by the appearance of the archbishop in a loose undress,⁴ who … conjured her to afford him the protection which he had been directed by a celestial vision to seek. … The pious maid … conducted Athanasius into her most sacred chamber … and dexterously concealed from the eye of suspicion this familiar and solitary intercourse between a saint whose character required the most unblemished chastity, and a female whose charms might excite the most dangerous emotions.

(2: 402)

Here it is only the meticulous selection of the words which permits the reader to guess, apart from the nature of the events being described, that Gibbon is possibly snickering. The tone is uniformly stately; Gibbon has merely heightened his discourse to a point a little beyond what the subject requires, and permitted the incongruity of the situation to encroach upon the reader by slow degrees.

Gibbon's expert use of the adjective is also worthy of note. We have already considered his care to delineate exactly the nature of an action as performed; this function is usually undertaken by a carefully chosen adjective (or adverb) and a count would doubtless show that Gibbon's use of the adjective is considerably greater than that of most English authors. This extreme employment of adjectives tends to deprive prose of vigor and muscularity; but these are not so important with Gibbon as gravitas, grandeur, and majesty of movement:

While the public devotion was interrupted by shouts of rage and cries of terror, he animated his trembling congregation to express their religious confidence by chanting one of the psalms of David which celebrates the triumph of the God of Israel over the haughty and impious tyrant of Egypt.

(2: 400; italics supplied)

Moreover, the careful and precise use of the Gibbonian adjective contributes a firmness absent in the prose of inepter writers who overuse adjectives, but use them carelessly and loosely. This extreme propriety in the use of adjectives and other modifiers is particularly apparent in connection with the frequent parallel pairs of nouns and verbs that govern them:

… how far he might boldly command, and where he must dexterously insinuate … the Greek and Latin churches, which were separated by the accidental difference of faith and the permanent distinction of language … the cruel order would have been executed without hesitation, by the ministers of open violence or of specious justice.

(2: 384, 390, 393; italics supplied)⁵

The workaday prose of Gibbon's time was no longer dominated by the canons of classical rhetoric, which were also beginning to lose their sway over poetry (Howell 259-98, 441-47). His subject, in his opinion the most majestic spectacle which history presented, demanded a heightened style and an almost epic tone of grandeur. Yet it presented to his rational mind an almost uninterrupted spectacle of human pettiness, folly, and unreason which he must censure without sacrificing his unity of tone. The solution of the problem was the Gibbonian style, which could reflect grandeur and meanness alike. Gibbon made the structure of his sentences, his prose rhythm, his rhetorical devices, his range of vocabulary, his choice and placement of words, reinforce what he had to say and perpetually direct the reactions of the attentive reader. He adopted and amplified Pope's maxim,

The sound must seem an Echo to the sense.

Notes

1. Notable among these are the discussions in Tillyard, Bond, Braudy, Clive, and Gossman.

2. For example: “I come to Counsel learned in the Law” (To Fortescue) and, for an example randomly chosen from Johnson: “Let him that peruses this paper … enquire how he was placed in his present position” (Rambler 184).

3. The clumsy inaccuracy of the pseudo-synonyms in this sentence, and the difficulty the reader will experience in finding better ones, should give ample proof of the labor behind Gibbon's style and the propriety of his diction.

4. One is probably entitled to see a squinting phrase here: was it the archbishop's arrival or his costume, or both, that surprised the virgin?

5. In these examples we may again see the Anglo-Saxon four-beat rhythm referred to above.

Bibliography

Bond, Harold L. The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon. Oxford: Clarendon, 1960.

Braudy, Leo. Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, Gibbon. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970.

Burrow, J. W. Gibbon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.

Clive, John. “Gibbon's Humor.” Edward Gibbon and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ed. G. W. Bowersock, John Clive, Stephen R. Graubard. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977. 183-92.

Gibbon, Edward. An Autobiography. London: Dent, 1932.

———. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1776-88. Ed. J. B. Bury. 7 vols. London: Methuen, 1909.

Gossman, Lionel. The Empire Unpossess'd: An Essay on Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Cambridge and London: Cambridge UP, 1981.

Howell, Wilbur S. Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

Hume, David. Letters Ed. J. Y. T. Greig. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932.

Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. London: Oxford UP, 1942.

Tillyard, E. M. W. The English Epic and Its Background. New York: Oxford UP, 1954. 510-17.

Womersley, David. Rev. of J. W. Burrow, Gibbon. Times Literary Supplement 27 Sept. 1985: 1058.