The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (62 page)

The publisher had originally planned to print only five hundred copies of this first volume but doubled the number when he read the manuscript. Though attacked by some for its impious account of Christianity, the book was widely acclaimed by literary England. Gibbon enjoyed the approval by the “public” to whom he had committed his seven years’ work. “I had likewise flattered myself, that an age of light and liberty would receive, without scandal, an inquiry into the human causes of the progress and establishment of Christianity.” The first printing was exhausted in a few days, and soon Gibbon was flattered by being pirated in Dublin. He luxuriated in the praise and printed at length in his
Memoirs
the letter from David Hume in Edinburgh saying that had he not known Gibbon personally “such a performance by an Englishman in our age would have given
me some surprise.” Joining “all the men of letters” in admiration he urged Gibbon to continue the work.

Two years passed before Gibbon began his second volume. The second and third appeared together in 1781. These bring the story through the age of Constantine, Julian the Apostate’s effort to revive the pagan faith and virtues of the old Rome, the barbarian invasions, the fall of Rome in 410, and the intermixing of Roman and barbarian cultures. The third volume concludes with “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West.”

Gibbon felt the transience of power in 1782, when Lord North’s government fell and he lost his remunerative commission on the Board of Trade. He speculated briefly on seeking another government post, but decided instead to return to his beloved Lausanne, where no political concerns would trouble him. Though for eight years he had not exchanged letters with his Lausanne friend, Georges Deyverdun, he now wrote suggesting they set up a household together. “My reason becomes clear, my courage grows strong,” he wrote Deyverdun from London in June 1783, “and I am already walking on the terrace, laughing with you about all these cobweb threads that seemed to be iron chains.” Despite his friend’s warnings that he would be bored, he found Lausanne an intellectual Mecca, especially in summer. An English visitor soon described him as “the
grand monarque
of literature at Lausanne.” He could not have chosen a better place for his work. Deyverdun was an agreeable and stimulating companion, and he did not lack intellectual visitors.

Had Gibbon been a less passionate historian he might have considered his work complete with three volumes and the end of the Western Empire. But he carried on, and made the next three volumes a work all its own, starting with Byzantium’s counterpart to the Age of the Antonines, then following through the vicissitudes of emperors and empresses, the rise of Roman law, the menace of the barbarians of the desert, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. He had begun Volume Four before leaving England, and the next five years of leisure among friends brought him through Volumes Five and Six, which he completed in June 1787. He took the
manuscript of all three volumes to England, where they were published on his fifty-first birthday, May 8, 1788. Again he basked in the favors of literary Britain and a prosperous sale of his books.

In these later volumes Gibbon resists the temptation to dogma. Just as he treats the decline of the Western Empire, volume by volume, as a series of human dramas, in the final three volumes he casts the height and decline of the Eastern Empire as later acts of the same drama. When, in the final chapter of the final volume, he looks back on fifteen centuries, he does not take his stance in the scholar’s library. He reminds us that “It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life,” and now again from the Capitoline Hill he surveys the ruins of Rome, relics of his story. With the learned Poggius in 1430, he views “from that commanding spot the wide and various prospect of desolation.” “The place and the object gave ample scope for moralising on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empire and cities in a common grave; and it was agreed that in proportion to her former greatness the fall of Rome was the more awful and deplorable.” And when finally “after a diligent inquiry,” he discerns “four principal causes of the ruin of Rome, which continued to operate in a period of more than a thousand years,” what he gives us are not what the modern social scientist could call “causes.” Instead he simply reminds us of the chapters and episodes of his human comedy: “I. The injuries of time and nature. II. The hostile attacks of the barbarians and Christians. III. The use and abuse of the materials. And, IV. The domestic quarrels of the Romans.”

In Gibbon’s lifetime the world of science was newly liberated from the medieval demand for meaning. By abjuring any “philosophy of history” or the rational simplicities of his age, he too was freed to recover impartially all the elusive human atoms of history. In the Royal Society in London and other “invisible colleges,” scientists, virtuosi, and amateurs were expanding their world with tiny increments of knowledge. There were a few theoretic dazzlers like Sir Isaac Newton. But the most important shift in attitude toward knowledge was from an interest in the cosmos, in universal order and salvation, to an interest in facts. Now it seemed possible for every man to become his own scientist, and perhaps also his own historian. The telescope, the “flea glass” (or microscope), the thermometer, and scores of other measuring devices were transforming experience into experiment. The incremental approach to the physical world, spawning a wonderful new-grown wilderness of facts and contraptions, was also Gibbon’s approach to the world of human nature. The new scientific quest for meaning was only beginning to transform the social world into a modern cosmos of new
dogmatic simplicities. Gibbon still gives us incremental history on a grand scale.

While human nature for Gibbon is anything but unintelligible, it tempts him precisely because it is only partly explicable. His explanations of rise and fall, of prosperity and decline, are lists and alternatives. What he recounts is “the triumph of barbarism
and
religion.” His balanced style was well designed for ambiguity and equivocation. An appealing example is his description of the younger Emperor Gordian (192–238):

His footnote adds, “By each of his concubines the younger Gordian left three or four children. His literary productions, though less numerous, were by no means contemptible.” The quirks and quibbles of theologians, the rivalries, crimes, and monstrosities of Eastern monarchs, their wives and mistresses and sons and daughters, are both “amusing and instructive.” Can anything be trivia that can illuminate this, “the greatest, perhaps, and the most awful scene in the history of mankind”?

The landscape becomes the setting for parables of human nature. When earthquakes shook the eastern Mediterranean on July 21, 365, “their affrighted imagination enlarged the real extent of a momentary evil … and their fearful vanity was disposed to confront the symptoms of a declining empire and a sinking world.” Which they explained as the retribution of a just Deity. “Without presuming to discuss the truth or propriety of these lofty speculations, the historian may content himself with the observation, which seems to be justified by experience, that man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.”

Human habits, utterances, exclamations, and emotions are not mere raw materials for distilling “forces” and “movements” but the very essence of history. The more vividly we see, the better we know our subject. Inevitably, then, we must doubt our capacity to grasp the whole story. Advancing into his final three volumes, Gibbon ceases to speak only for himself, and enlists us as “we.” Classic sagas had been grand and impersonal, but Gibbon makes his intimate, precisely because he does not speak the obsolescing parables of science or social science. Nor is he confined by the etiquette of chronology. Although his story extends from the Age of the Antonines (
A.D
. c.98) to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, he gives more space to the
first few centuries than to the whole last millennium. “My Roman decay,” he calls it. Somehow he is entranced by the melodramatic and melancholy scenes of decay. These had first inspired his work, attracted him to the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire and to its equal, the declining Empire of the East. It is not surprising that he is not attracted by the thriving Western civilization that would rise out of the ruins of Rome. His pleasures of melancholy are the very sentiments that produced Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and that nourished the Romantic movement. These still make his history of a great empire intimate, as we join him in sighing for the departed grandeur. Just as Piranesi (1720–1778) was transforming the classic into the romantic by what he made of the Roman ruins, so Gibbon was working a comparable magic with his saga of a disintegrated empire.

G
IBBON
created his sagas of ancient empire from familiar material. He had the writings of the Antonines themselves, of Procopius, Tacitus, and the Church Fathers. But Prescott and Parkman, historians of empires falling and rising in the New World, were traveling there in unfamiliar territory. They had to create their dramas from the rawest of raw material. They had to discover the landscape, conceive new heroes, and mark their own paths through time. The story of how they made their histories was itself a kind of epic.

The easy life of Edward Gibbon, troubled only by obedience to his father and the eclipse of Lord North, was not the lot of these historians of rising empires in America. William Hickling Prescott (1796–1859) and Francis Parkman (1823–1893) each showed a single-minded courage with few precedents in the annals of literature. While it was the familiar spectacle of decay and decline that inspired Gibbon’s view of Empire, Parkman and Prescott were captured by the unchronicled drama of a New World.

William Hickling Prescott was the son of a wealthy Boston judge from a historic New England family. On the walls of his library at 55 Beacon Street he displayed the crossed swords of his grandfather William Prescott, who was in command at Bunker Hill, and his wife’s grandfather, who
captained the British sloop that cannonaded Boston during the battle. He was sent of course to Harvard, where he had an undistinguished record. One day in his junior year when students in the Commons were bombarding one another with scraps of food, he turned as his name was called out and a crust of bread hit him in his open left eye. He never saw with the eye again, and within two years an inflammation impaired the vision of his right eye. For long periods he could not read at all, at other times he could read for only a few minutes, and never more than an hour or two a day.

Prescott was intended to take up his “natural inheritance” and follow the law. But five months as a law clerk in his father’s office squinting his one good eye at antique reports and documents in Gothic type were enough to convince him that he must find some other vocation. Meanwhile the strain of these months and his recurrent attacks of rheumatism persuaded his family to send him to recuperate in his grandfather’s house in the Azores. From there he traveled around Europe, not for historical inspiration but to find a cure for his several ailments. Returning to Boston, he was persuaded that he would have to live with his infirmities and find a career to go with them. Friends believed that his affable outgoing personality would qualify him for business, in which his family had been successful. Or he could have afforded to remain a gentleman of leisure, but somehow he was determined, whatever the difficulties, to pursue a career in letters.

He had already begun finding ways to deal with his impaired vision. His family income helped him do his reading, as he “resolved to make the ear, if possible, do the work of the eye.” At first his wife, whom he married in 1820, read to him. Then Prescott relied on a hired secretary, whose crude pronunciation of Spanish, French, or Italian he still managed to understand. “As the reader proceeded,” he explained, “I dictated copious notes; and when these had swelled to a considerable amount they were read to me repeatedly, till I had mastered their contents sufficiently for the purpose of composition. The same notes furnished an easy means of reference to sustain the text.” He liked to have at least a glimpse of the books himself. The difficulties of reading Gothic type may have led him away from a German subject.

Finding the labor of writing a severe trial to his eye, in London he had bought his first noctograph. This device for the blind was a framework of parallel wires that folded down on a sheet of carbon paper. Using the wires to guide his fingers, he wrote with an ivory stylus, which left an impression below. So he did not need to know when the ink in his pen was exhausted, and he avoided running the lines into one another. “The characters thus formed made a near approach to hieroglyphics; but my secretary became expert in the art of deciphering, and a fair copy—with a liberal allowance for unavoidable blunders—was transcribed for the use of the printer.” Still,
he warned his readers not to give him “undeserved credit” for having surmounted the incalculable obstacles that lie in the path of the blind man.