Flesh in the Age of Reason (31 page)

Hence Gibbon informs us, without further ado, that he is writing ‘the history of my own mind’, a phrase pregnant with Lockean (or Sternean) associations. ‘The public is always curious’, he opens confidently, or seeking to reassure himself, ‘to
know
the men who have left behind them any image of their minds.’ How did that mind become so stocked and skilled that it could produce a masterpiece? This is what he would relate, ‘that one day his mind will be familiar to the grandchildren of those who are yet unborn’.

The making of Gibbon’s mind was not as one might expect: there was no lengthy and meticulous apprenticeship, such as that enjoyed by Milton. Surprisingly, the
Memoirs
tell of a Shandean chapter of accidents: a tale of a curious infancy which grew odder as childhood slipped into adolescence. Neglected by his inattentive parents (Gibbon conveys his sense of grievance that they were inordinately wrapped up in each other) and brought up through a string of haphazard expedients, he became a freakish child, shown off by his father for his precocity in abstruse scholarship (‘my sleep has been disturbed by the difficulty of reconciling the Septuagint with the Hebrew computation’). Packed off at the age of 14 to university by a proud but perplexed father, ‘I arrived at Oxford with a stock of
erudition that might have puzzled a Doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a school boy would have been ashamed’. His comically absurd Oxford adventures – they are worthy of Evelyn Waugh – and above all his sense of even more grievous neglect then ‘bewildered’ him into the ‘errors of the Church of Rome’. That blundering religious conversion brought his expulsion from an Alma Mater which was no more a mother to him than his real mother, followed by the Swiss exile dictated by his apoplectic father. The ministrations of Monsieur Pavilliard, his tutor in Lausanne, finally gave him his long overdue formal education (how odd to get one’s drilling in Locke in Switzerland!). And much more besides which was strange followed in a chequered tale that led up to the historian’s fateful decision: ‘It was at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted fryars 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.’ Accident upon accident, yet something predestined too: ‘my own religious folly, my father’s blind resolution produced the effects of the most deliberate wisdom.’ It was that blend of forces which propelled the Roman Empire, too.

A motif thus emerges which artistically shapes the
Memoirs
: apparent mishaps, mistakes or setbacks all work out for the best: waywardness and inadvertence produce order, every cloud has a silver lining, every mischance is a blessing in disguise. Indeed, by way of a pre-emptive strike, so as not to tempt fate, or critics, Gibbon presented himself as a lucky man. ‘I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life,’ he declared:

The far greater part of the globe is overspread with barbarism or slavery: in the civilized world the most numerous class is condemned to ignorance and poverty; and the double fortune of my birth in a free and enlightened country in an honourable and wealthy family is the lucky chance of an unit against millions.

Lacking official providential guidance, the unbeliever’s life is salvaged by good fortune.

The
Memoirs
laid bare the logic of events: the most unlikely or (at first sight) unpropitious events contributed to create the optimal circumstances, environment and stimulus for ripening his mind and forwarding his initially unrecognized grand project. He even benefited, he tells us, from the most improbable escapade in the life of that diminutive (four feet eight inches) fat man known unkindly as ‘Mr Chubby-Chub’, his spell in the militia: ‘The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legion, and the Captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.’ Gibbon frequently needed to induce a smile, so as to disarm resistance to his none too likable characteristics, notably his barely veiled and rather ruthless egoism.

Having slipped the clutches of Oxford and Catholicism, Gibbon explained his escape from the entanglements of matrimony when his father in effect vetoed his proposed union with Suzanne Curchod (‘I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son’); and some years later a timely parental demise once again rescued him from the prospect of ‘penury’ and gave him sufficient income to buy the time and books needed for composition. Great works of literature, the historian realistically if self-justifyingly insists, require the right support-systems – those he inherits or carves out for himself:

Yet I may believe and even assert that in circumstances more indigent or more wealthy, I should never have accomplished the task, or acquired the fame, of an historian; that my spirit would have been broken by poverty and contempt; and that my industry might have been relaxed in the labour and luxury of a superfluous fortune. Few works of merit and importance have been executed either in a garret or a palace.

In a word, his life-story turned out to be a tale of growing autonomy, flowering into the independent self. If the attention given in the
Memoirs
to childhood shows that Gibbon bought Locke’s notion that early years were crucial in personality formation, he certainly did not subscribe to the fashionable sentimentalization of childhood as an age of innocence – ‘where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise’,
sang Thomas Gray: ‘I am tempted’, countered Gibbon, ‘to enter a protest against the trite and lavish praise of the happiness of our boyish years, which is echoed with so much affectation in the World. That happiness I have never known; that time I have never regretted.’ Gibbon painted his life as a deliverance from childhood dependence into the freedom which came with mental maturity. The death of his father, the consequent acquisition of an independent income (fortune was his fortune), and the establishment of a position in the world together provided the platform for his adult achievements: ‘Freedom is the first wish of our heart; freedom is the first blessing of our nature: and, unless we bind ourselves with the voluntary chains of interest or passion, we advance in freedom as we advance in years.’

Gibbon thus represents himself primarily as a man of intellect, and his autobiographical artistry shows how that mind had achieved autonomy, and how, by accident and design, luck and judgement, it had been destined for authorship. And what of the body in this fashioning of the self? Matters physical are strictly subordinate to the true business of his life: as a child ‘the dynasties of Assyria and Egypt were my top and cricket ball’, and thus it remained: he had no bodily attractiveness, sporting prowess or martial honours to boast.

‘The pains and pleasures of the body how important soever to ourselves are an indelicate topic of conversation,’ he confides and, respecting matters corporeal, he wanted discreetly to draw the curtain. Gibbon evidently felt less than comfortable about his body, and the
Memoirs
resort to distancing, ironizing, self-exculpatory evasion when matters of the flesh crop up. He will not, unlike certain autobiographers, he promises the reader, document in nauseating detail all his youthful ailments, nor will he emulate Montaigne’s preoccupation with his every bowel motion. The obligation to ‘naked, unblushing truth’ did not extend to the whole truth. And yet, the very act of mentioning such unmentionables drew attention to them; and in truth his
Memoirs
proudly dwelt on the plethora of childhood illnesses from which he suffered. His beloved aunt, Miss Catherine Porten – ‘the true mother of my mind’ –

has often told me with tears in her eyes, how I was nearly starved by a nurse that had lost her milk: how long she herself was apprehensive lest my crazy frame, which is now of common shape should remain for ever crooked and deformed. From one dangerous malady, the small-pox, I was indeed rescued by the practice of inoculation…. I was successively afflicted by lethargies and feavers; by opposite tendencies to a consumptive and a dropsical habit; by a contraction of my nerves, a fistula in my eye, and the bite of a dog most vehemently suspected of madness.

In short, the boy ‘swallowed more Physic than food’, and the preservation of our young hero (how like the Shandean homunculus!) from turning into an ‘illiterate cripple’ was almost miraculous. While protesting that he did not ‘wish to expatiate on so disgusting a topic’, he nonetheless insisted that the ‘school of learning’ was less familiar to him than ‘the bed of sickness’.

As ever, however, such calamities proved fortunate. It was this bed of sickness which gave him the leisure to indulge in that ‘free desultory reading’ which ‘I would not exchange for the treasures of India’. The result? Before he proceeded to Westminster School (which he loathed as much as Locke had done)

I was well acquainted with Pope’s Homer, and the Arabian Nights-entertainments, two books which will always please by the moving picture of human manners and specious miracles. The verses of Pope accustomed my ear to the sound of poetic harmony: in the death of Hector and the shipwreck of Ulysses I tasted the new emotions of terror and pity, and seriously disputed with my aunt on the vices and virtues of the Heroes of the Trojan War.

Filling his imagination, the images garnered from that early reading gave him his enduring vision of history as pageantry and performance, his sense of the human drama. Thus, the defects of his body were the making of his mind. And then – lucky Gibbon again – the ‘mysterious energies’ of Nature turned him into a healthy adult.

Even his adult illnesses were seen, if not quite as lucky breaks, at least as conducive to his choice in life. The principal malady he
acquired later in life was gout. Gout, of course, is a story in itself, being the keynote malady of eighteenth-century gentlemen and men of letters, the lord of diseases and the disease of lords, one of those rare afflictions it was a positive ‘honour’ to acquire, it being a mark of good family and fine living. Gibbon cannot have been displeased to have his gentlemanly credentials confirmed by the onset of the gout.

First stricken in 1772, at the age of 35, he described it as a ‘dignified disorder’. In succeeding years the bouts grew more frequent. ‘The
Gout has
attacked my left foot,’ he informed his friend Lord Sheffield in December 1774, as he was completing the first volumes of the
Decline and Fall
. The sceptical historian coped with ‘that imperious Mistress’ in part by shrugging it off with
risquée
humour. ‘I suffer like one of the first Martyrs,’ he told Sheffield in the following year, ‘and possibly have provoked my punishment as much.’ The ex-Captain of the grenadiers also had a line in military metaphors: ‘the Gout has behaved in a very honourable manner,’ he told his friend on another occasion, ‘after a compleat conquest, and after making me feel his power for some days, the generous Enemy has disdained to abuse his victory or to torment any longer an unresisting victim.’

In Gibbon’s metaphoric arsenal, gout might be an honourable enemy, but it could be an inexorable foe. ‘So uncertain are all human affairs,’ he explained to his stepmother a couple of months later, ‘that I found myself arrested by a mighty unrelenting Tyrant called the Gout.’ Occasionally he might call an attack ‘almost agreeable’, presumably having in mind the theory construing gout as a relief agency, a healthy discharge, not unlike a nosebleed. Ever optimistic, he stated of one fit that it had set him on the road to health: ‘the body Gibbon is in a perfect state of health and spirits as it is most truly at the present moment, and since the entire retreat of my Gout.’

If not a blessing, gout could at least be facetiously passed off as one of the many bearable evils of mortal life:

When I was called upon last February for my annual tax to the Gout, I only paid for my left foot which in general is the most heavily assessed: the
officer came round last week to collect the small remainder that was due for the right foot. I have now satisfied his demand, he is retired in good humour, and I feel myself easy both in mind and body.

One of the ostensible reasons for migrating in 1783 to Lausanne was to recruit his health – that famed Swiss mountain air! – and, once there, high above the lake, he presented himself as reaping the rewards. He gave his stepmother a flattering prospect of his improved health, attributing it to his compliance with the regime advocated by the orthodox physician William Cadogan: the air, he proclaimed, ‘is excellently suited to a gouty constitution, and during the whole twelfthmonth I have never once been attacked by my old Enemy. Of Dr Cadogan’s three rules, I can observe two a temperate diet and a easy mind.’ The third of the rules, so striking by its absence, was exercise: in matters physical Gibbon was notoriously lazy.

His health was good, he liked to boast to his stepmother – presumably whistling in the dark – and ‘though verging towards fifty I still feel myself a young Man’. The attacks, however, worsened. As ever, he put on a brave face: affliction was the mother of fortitude – ‘My patience has been universally admired.’

From 1790 – the midst of his autobiographizing era – his health was deteriorating fast. The ambiguity of his mode of life, the discrepancy between reality and self-image, is captured by passages in letters written towards the end. ‘M
Y MADEIRA
is almost exhausted,’ he informed Lord Sheffield, ‘and I must receive before the end of the autumn, a stout cargo of wholesome exquisite wine.’ Meanwhile this man, his gout worsening and so desperate for drink, was reassuring his stepmother: ‘My health is remarkably good.’

Bespeaking the self-image of an eighteenth-century gentleman, Gibbon’s gout suited his lifestyle perfectly, making destiny his choice. And it was a malady he could flaunt: since it spared his ‘more noble parts’ – studied ambiguity again – it was not demeaning; and it called up hidden reserves of character. So long as he could banter about gout, the historian could ignore more serious complaints in the claim, or pretence, that his body was doing its job: ‘The madness of
superfluous health, I have never known; but my tender constitution has been fortified by time: the play of the animal machine still continues to be easy and regular.’