Decline & Fall

I mentioned in my last column that I’d been reading Gibbon’s famous history of the Roman Empire, Decline and Fall, which I’d never tackled before.  I’ve never read Herodotus, either, on the Peloponnesian War, or Xenophon’s Anabasis, two other celebrated histories.  I know them only by reputation.  There was a time, of course, when both of them were regularly taught, and in the original.  It was the mark of a classically educated scholar to be conversant in Greek and Latin, and construe his Homer and his Cicero.  

I’m reminded that when my dad got older, and retired across the Massachusetts border into New Hampshire, he took up Trollope.  Trollope was enormously popular in his lifetime, a contemporary and rival of Dickens, but Trollope hasn’t worn as well as Dickens.  You suspect this is because Trollope has a narrower focus, the Barchester books (which my dad was particularly fond of), for example, are about the internal politics of the Anglican church, while Dickens had more of a roving eye, so to speak. 

After my dad died, I myself fell into a binge of Sir Walter Scott.  Quite a few of us might have read Ivanhoe in high school, but not much else, and I discovered that Scott – another guy who was a huge celebrity as a writer, while he was alive – wrote some significantly better books, Old Mortality one of my personal favorites.  St. Ronan’s Well is an attempt to cash in with Jane Austen’s public - the novel of manners not Scott’s strength - and Austen has far outdistanced him in readership mileage.  I remember also wondering aloud about this new-found attachment to a neglected 19^th-century writer, and my friend Ellen Hawkes telling me it seemed entirely natural, that in the wake of my father’s death, I was falling into the past, being  pulled by historical gravity, and revisiting his history by proxy.  (She knew the story about my dad and Trollope.)

I don’t mean to suggest that I’ve gravitated toward Gibbon in my dotage, but there’s some comfort in reading a book so unselfconsciously old-fashioned.  Gibbon’s mannerisms aren’t assumed, they’re entirely natural to the man, and the age he wrote for.  Decline and Fall was published, in six succeeding volumes, between 1776 and 1789.  As it happens, the years of the American and French revolutions, respectively.  Gibbon isn’t a synthesizer, he isn’t summarizing other histories, really, because he’s not that confident he can trust earlier sources.  A lot of the Latin was written to curry favor with whoever was newly risen to power.  Gibbon is weighing the evidence, and he’s not afraid to voice his opinion.  Much of the experience of reading Gibbon has to do with his cadences.  Once you get familiar with the grammar, and the peculiar punctuation, it swings right along.  He doesn’t sound dated, to my ear.

Writers used to insert themselves into the story.  And now, dear Reader is a common trope that we’ve abandoned, as a too-obvious cliché.  You can hark back to it with the first-person narrative, had I but known, but it’s labored, or clunky.  When you see it in a Regency writer, like Austen, though, or one of the Victorians, you don’t cringe.  You see it, almost, as period detail. 

There are conventions, unavoidably, in Gibbon, that bring you up quite sharply, sometimes.  It is a time capsule, two hundred and fifty years old.  But what seems right, to a modern reader, and which must have entertained his contemporaries, are his asides, and sly bits of business.  Here, the assassination of the emperor Caracalla, a capricious incompetent, murdered by his Praetorians.  “He was attended by a body of cavalry; but having stopped on the road for some necessary occasion, his guards preserved a respectful distance, and Martialis approaching his person under a pretence of duty, stabbed him with a dagger.  The bold assassin was instantly killed by a Scythian archer of the Imperial guard.”  In other words, he got a knife between his ribs while he was taking a leak.  The second point being that Martialis was quickly silenced before he could rat out any of the other plotters.  Gibbon doesn’t underline that.  He leaves it to you to fill in the blanks. 

There’s a whisper, in Decline and Fall, of the unreliable narrator.  Gibbon will tell you, the sources contradict each other - but here’s my best guess, and here’s why.  The other thing, is that he often speaks in a conversational tone, as if we already know the story, and he’s confiding extra detail that was left out before.  This has the effect of treating us as colleagues, and of making his history a dialogue, not a lecture.  He invites us to share his table, and does us the compliment of filling the glasses.

My main takeaway from Gibbon, stylistically, is that you can feel your way into a relaxed and amiable speech pattern that mimics common language, even if it’s not entirely natural, but rehearsed - something you might call demotic by design.  I don’t mean that it rings false, but it’s calculated.  Decline and Fall is going to run to a million and a half words, before he’s done, and he needs to find the rhythm.  Somewhere between the unmediated first-person and an omniscient third, Gibbon settles on a kind of public reveal, cautiously artless, as if presenting us with a display of many shiny distractions, some of which may prove to be treasure.  In a word, the book is fun to read. 

The lesson, if we need one, is that a little charm goes a long way.  A lot depends on voice.  Part of it is probably the 18^th- or 19^th-century locutions, and what we might say are anachronisms, but I think the appeal is simple.  Gibbon is approachable.  We should be so lucky.