been fonder of hard intellectual work, and less prone than he
was to the indulgence of emotion. (H. Ro.; J. S. Bl.)
Gibbon’s literary art, the sustained excellence of his style, his piquant epigrams and his brilliant irony, would perhaps not secure for his work the immortality which it seems likely to enjoy, if it were not also marked by ecumenical grasp, extraordinary accuracy and striking acuteness of judgment. It is needless to say that in many points his statements and conclusions must now be corrected. He was never content with secondhand accounts when the primary sources were accessible; “I have always endeavoured,” he says, “to draw from the fountainhead; my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals; and if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend.” Since he wrote, new authorities have been discovered or rendered accessible; works in Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Armenian, Syriac, Arabic and other languages, which he was unable to consult, have been published. Again, many of the authorities which he used have been edited in superior texts. The relative weights of the sources have been more nicely determined by critical investigation. Archaeology has become a science. In the immense region which Gibbon surveyed there is hardly a section which has not been submitted to the microscopic examination of specialists.
But apart from the inevitable advances made in the course of a century during which historical research entered upon a new phase, the reader of Gibbon must be warned against one capital defect. In judging the Decline and Fall it should carefully be observed that it falls into two parts which are heterogeneous in the method of treatment. The first part, a little more than five-eighths of the work, supplies a very full history of 460 years (A.D. 180–641); the second and smaller part is a summary history of about 800 years (A.D. 641–1453) in which certain episodes are selected for fuller treatment and so made prominent. To the first part unstinted praise must be accorded; it may be said that, with the materials at the author’s disposition, it hardly admitted of improvement, except in trifling details. But the second, notwithstanding the brilliancy of the narrative and the masterly art in the grouping of events, suffers from a radical defect which renders it a misleading guide. The author designates the story of the later empire at Constantinople (after Heraclius) as “a uniform tale of weakness and misery,” a judgment which is entirely false; and in accordance with this doctrine, he makes the empire, which is his proper subject, merely a string for connecting great movements which affected it, such as the Saracen conquests, the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, the Turkish conquests. He failed to bring out the momentous fact that up to the 12th century the empire was the bulwark of Europe against the East, nor did he appreciate its importance in preserving the heritage of Greek civilization. He compressed into a single chapter the domestic history and policy of the emperors from the son of Heraclius to Isaac Angelus; and did no justice to the remarkable ability and the indefatigable industry shown in the service of the state by most of the sovereigns from Leo III. to Basil II. He did not penetrate into the deeper causes underlying the revolutions and palace intrigues. His eye rested only on superficial characteristics which have served to associate the name “Byzantine” with treachery, cruelty, bigotry and decadence. It was reserved for Finlay to depict, with greater knowledge and a juster perception, the lights and shades of Byzantine history. Thus the later part of the Decline and Fall, while the narrative of certain episodes will always be read with profit, does not convey a true idea of the history of the empire or of its significance in the history of Europe. It must be added that the pages on the Slavonic peoples and their relations to the empire are conspicuously insufficient; but it must be taken into account that it was not till many years after Gibbon’s death that Slavonic history began to receive due attention, in consequence of the rise of competent scholars among the Slavs themselves.
The most famous chapters of the Decline and Fall are the fifteenth and sixteenth, in which the historian traces the early progress of Christianity and the policy of the Roman government towards it. The flavour of these chapters is due to the irony which Gibbon has employed with consummate art and felicity. There was a practical motive for using this weapon. An attack on Christianity laid a writer open to prosecution and penalties under the statutes of the realm (9 and 10 William III. c. 22, still unrepealed). Gibbon’s stylistic artifice both averted the peril of prosecution and rendered the attack more telling. In his Autobiography he alleges that he learned from the Provincial Letters of Pascal “to manage the weapon of grave and temperate irony, even on subjects of ecclesiastical solemnity.” It is not easy, however, to perceive much resemblance between the method of Pascal and that of Gibbon, though in particular passages we may discover the influence which Gibbon acknowledges. For instance, the well-known description (in chap. xlvii.) of the preposition “in” occurring in a theological dogma as a “momentous particle which the memory rather than the understanding must retain” is taken directly from the first Provincial Letter. The main points in the general conclusions of these chapters have been borne out by subsequent research. The account of the causes of the expansion of Christianity is chiefly to be criticized for its omissions. There were a number of important contributory conditions (enumerated in Harnack’s Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums) which Gibbon did not take into account. He rightly insisted on the facilities of communication created by the Roman empire, but did not emphasize the diffusion of Judaism. And he did not realize the importance of the kinship between Christian doctrine and Hellenistic syncretism, which helped to promote the reception of Christianity. He was ignorant of another fact of great importance (which has only in recent years been fully appreciated through the researches of F. Cumont), the wide diffusion of the Mithraic religion and the close analogies between its doctrines and those of Christianity. In regard to the attitude of the Roman government towards the Christian religion, there are questions still sub judice; but Gibbon had the merit of reducing the number of martyrs within probable limits.
Gibbon’s verdict on the history of the middle ages is contained in the famous sentence, “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.” It is important to understand clearly the criterion which he applied; it is frequently misapprehended. He was a son of the 18th century; he had studied with sympathy Locke and Montesquieu; no one appreciated more keenly than he did political liberty and the freedom of an Englishman. This is illustrated by his love of Switzerland, his intense interest in the fortunes of that country, his design of writing “The History of the Liberty of the Swiss”—a theme, he says “from which the dullest stranger would catch fire.” Such views and sentiments are incompatible with the idealization of a benevolent despotism. Yet in this matter Gibbon has been grossly misapprehended and misrepresented. For instance, Mirabeau wrote thus to Sir Samuel Romilly: “I have never been able to read the work of Mr Gibbon without being astounded that it should ever have been written in English; or without being tempted to turn to the author and say, ‘You an Englishman? No, indeed.’ That admiration for an empire of more than two hundred millions of men, where not one had the right to call himself free; that effeminate philosophy which has more praise for luxury and pleasures than for all the virtues; that style always elegant and never energetic, reveal at the most the elector of Hanover’s slave.” This criticism is based on a perverse misreading of the historian’s observations on the age of Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines. He enlarges, as it was his business to do, on the tranquillity and prosperity of the empire in that period, but he does not fail to place his finger on the want of political liberty as a fatal defect. He points out that under this benevolent despotism, though men might be happy, their happiness was unstable, because it depended on the character of a single man; and the highest praise he can give to those virtuous princes is that they “deserved the honour of restoring the republic, had the Romans of their days been capable of a rational freedom.” The criterion by which
