Cultural Amnesia (42 page)

To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly.

—EDWARD GIBBON,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, P. 73

O
NCE READ,
IMPOSSIBLE
to forget; and I have used this line ever since, but always in the sad knowledge that Gibbon provided very few like it. I expected him to. I came to him late, and spoiled:
spoiled by Thucydides and Tacitus, by Machiavelli and Montesquieu, by Pieter Geyl and Lewis Namier, by Mommsen and Gregorovius, by Napier’s
History of the
War in the Peninsula
and Prescott’s
Conquest of Peru
, by Stephen Runciman’s set of books about the Crusades and finally by—one of
the great long historical reads in the world—Shelby Foote on the American Civil War. I expected Gibbon to provide me with a heap of those readily detachable judgements that all the serious
historians seem able to generate at will as a qualification for their trade.

No such luck, alas; and after twenty years I am still getting to the end of Gibbon’s long
book—longer than its admirers admit, I think, because not as good as they claim. No doubt the quoted sentence translates itself from the eighteenth-century page to the twentieth-century
mind with such ease because the modern condition is in it. Gibbon was talking about an empire that filled the known world, so that when a tyrant was in charge there was nowhere for the victim to
run: and that was the kind of empire that Stalin, Hitler and Mao all brought into existence. Mao’s version, indeed, though admittedly in attenuated
form, is still here
to distort the lives of more than a thousand million human beings. But the modern condition is in any pregnant sentence from any time: current possibilities are what a classic sentence is
pregnant with. In Tacitus and Montesquieu there are few paragraphs without a sentence that seems written with us in mind, and few chapters without a paragraph. Sometimes there is a whole chapter:
even in Tacitus, let alone Montesquieu, there are times when time collapses and the past seems very near. You would swear, when some vengeful emperor’s proscription is raging in the
Annals
of Tacitus, that you were reading the secret diary of the daughter of a Prussian landed family after the botched attempt against Hitler’s life
on July 20, 1944—the atmosphere of prying doom is so similar. One way or another, the modern age is always there in the best moments of the old historians: we can tell by the way the
construction of the prose suddenly ceases to sound anachronistic, or even constructed.

Gibbon, unfortunately, seldom ceases to sound any other way. From him, this quoted sentence is rare first
of all for its relatively natural cadence. Yes, it is consciously balanced around its caesura and makes us feel that it is: but no, it is not typical of him, because his usual classicism was
neo-classical by way of the Baroque, and what he wrote rarely lets you forget that it has been written. Had he been an architect, his buildings would never have ceased to remind you that they had
been built. He is one of the four master dwarves of the Rococo, but unlike the other three—Pope, Lichtenberg and Cuvilliés, the court architect of the Wittelsbachs—he
can’t make you forget his injuries, which dulled, instead of sharpening, his sense of proportion. Would his capital work have ever acquired its huge reputation if it had not been a
harbinger of imperialist dominance, a proof that Britain could own, not just all the new worlds, but the ancient world as well? Now that the wave of history has retreated, the book is left
looking like a beached whale. A more compact version could have been the written equivalent of Sir John Soane’s Museum. Instead, Gibbon produced a hulking forecast of St. Pancras Station.
But a shorter book, to seem so, would have needed less elaborate sentences: at their original length, even a single page of them is a long haul.

There are parts of Gibbon’s autobiography to prove that a simple declarative sentence was not beyond him. In
The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire
, for some reason, it was. Having chosen a tall theme,
the small man got up on stilts, and stayed elevated for twenty years. Not the least of his heroism was that he could make a single page seem like an eternity. His secret was—we had better
say is—to make you read so many of his sentences twice even while you think you are reading them only once. His aim might have been compression and economy, but the compression was a
contortion and the economy was false. In a single sentence, two separated adjectival constructions often served the one noun, or two separated verbs the one object, or two separated adverbs the
one verb, and so on through the whole range of parts of speech: it was a kind of compulsive chess move in which a knight was always positioned to govern two pieces, except that the two pieces
governed it. Whether this conspicuous stroke of ingenuity ever really saved time is debatable, but when properly done it added the value of density, or at any rate seemed to. Take this
observation about the two sons of Severus and Julia, the “vain youths” Caracalla and Geta: “Their aversion, confirmed by years, and fomented by the arts of their interested
favourites, broke out in childish, and gradually in more serious, competitions . . .” (volume 1 of the Modern Library edition, p. 111). There is more to the sentence, but all we need note
here is that “childish” and “more serious” both qualify “competitions”; and that there is no great hardship in following the train of thought, because we
don’t imagine that a noun to fit the adjective “childish” will fail to arrive eventually. Gibbon worked this forking manoeuvre over and over, but it was a dangerous habit,
especially if the first adjectival construction could be mistaken for a noun. After Caracalla’s oppressive tax had made a mess of Rome’s finances, the “prudent liberality”
with which Alexander restored them attracted Gibbon’s admiration. But Alexander was still left with the problem of how to meet the expectations of the troops, and Gibbon with the problem of
how to mirror Alexander’s perplexity. Gibbon would no doubt have packed my previous sentence into a smaller space, but he might well have made it as awkward in its compactness as this one
of his: “In the execution of his design the emperor affected to display his love, and to conceal his fear, of the army” (vol. 1, p. 133).

By now the danger needs no explaining, because you have just tripped over it. Until you read further, there is nothing to
say that the
first comma might not as well be a full stop; and the same applies to the second comma; so you must get all the way to the end before you read back again and make
the proper sense of what you previously mistook. When you have been long enough with Gibbon you learn not to mistake it, and always wait for a re-reading before settling on what must be meant;
but it is a tiresome necessity, and makes for the kind of stylistic difficulty which leads its admirers to admire themselves, for submitting to the punishment. There was never much to the
assumption that a sentence is only ever read diachronically from left to right with never a backward glance: the eye doesn’t work like that and neither does prose. But there is still
something to the assumption that a sentence, however the reader gets to the end of it, should be intelligible by the time he does, and that if he is forced to begin again he has been hoodwinked
into helping the writer do the writing. Readers of Gibbon don’t just help: they join a chain gang, and the chain gang is in a salt mine, and the salt mine is reached after a long trip by
galley, during which they are never excused the feel of the oar or the snap of the lash.

Gibbon was quite capable of working his favourite bipartite effect of pretended compression twice in a
paragraph and sometimes three times. In one of his best early chapters of summary, chapter XVI (
A.D
. 180–318), he has a paragraph that begins very
promisingly. “History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the
cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution” (vol. 1, p. 453). This is almost good enough to remind you that Montesquieu was alive at the same time, although by now the reader
has recognized Gibbon’s favourite stylistic device to be a nervous tic, and the tic has transferred itself from the writer’s quill to the reader’s face, so that he flinches
while wondering if the word “future” should not have a comma after it too, in case “past,” like “future,” is not a noun but an adjective sharing the task of
qualifying the noun “ages.” I suppose that if Gibbon had meant that, he would not have put a “the” in front of “past,” but it gets hard to give him the benefit
of the doubt after you have realized that he was in the grip of mania. The proof is only a little way away in the same paragraph, where three sentences in a row are all lamed by the same
hobble.

But the princes and magistrates of ancient Rome were strangers to
those principles which inspired and authorised the inflexible obstinacy of the Christians in the cause of truth, nor could they themselves discover in their own breasts any motives which
would have prompted them to refuse a legal, and as it were a natural, submission to the sacred institutions of their country. The same reason which contributes to alleviate the guilt, must
have tended to abate the rigour, of their persecutions. As they were actuated, not by the furious zeal of the bigots, but by the temperate policy of legislators, contempt must often have
relaxed, and humanity must frequently have suspended, the execution of those laws which they enacted against the humble and obscure followers of Christ.

When I first read this the name of our redeemer had already sprung to my lips before
I saw it in print. In a way I am still reading it: years have gone by but the anguish in the brain has not abated. Gibbon has that deadly combination of talent and determination which can put
jagged awkwardness into your head as if it were a melody, and keep it there as if it were a splinter of shrapnel.

Talented he was; a genuinely superior individual; but he wanted his readers to be optimates like him. He
was continually testing them. Especially he tested their powers of memory. Quite often he expected them to remember the layout in detail of one sentence while they were reading the second. Take
this for a first sentence. “Like the modesty affected by Augustus, the state maintained by Diocletian was a theatrical representation: but it must be confessed that, of the two comedies,
the former was of a much more liberal and manly character than the latter” (vol. 1, p. 332). Got that? You will need to have done, because the next sentence depends on it. “It was the
aim of the one to disguise, and the object of the other to display, the unbounded power which the emperors possessed over the Roman world.” Just to make it feel like Groundhog Day, the
second sentence has the familiar two-part forking routine as well; but in the long run the reader—who will either develop a more muscular attention span or, more likely, postpone into old
age his commitment to what the counsellors call closure—is obliged to accept the memory test as an equally inescapable, if not equally frequent, event.

How did you do? You had to look back? But of course you did. Everyone has to, all the time,
and it makes reading Gibbon a long business, which some of us never seem to quite finish. An expert will judge from my citations that I have got not much beyond a third of the way through.
Actually, over the years, I have several times gone further: but I could do it only by ceasing to make notes, and for one of the few times in my reading life I have skipped and tasted, in the
manner that the egregious twentieth-century British politician R. H. S. Crossman unwarrantably dignified with the name of “gutting.” As well as the Modern Library edition, which is
ugly but strong and therefore good for travel, I also own Bury’s handsome but fragile seven-volume edition of 1902, and at home, in fits of fire-lit studiousness during a cold winter, I
have sometimes dipped into the later volumes, hoping to find some uncluttered going, but always in vain. The one passage everyone quotes is indeed a standout, and that’s just the trouble.
“Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions he left behind him, it appears that the
former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.” Roguish Gibbonians assure us that the younger of the two Gordians has thus been impaled unforgettably on the
skewer of satire. By Gibbon’s usual standard it certainly counts as a moment of light relief, and indeed it isn’t a bad gag even with its donnish dressing: you could just about say
that the elevated diction multiplied the mirth. But even here, you need Quiz Kid retentiveness if you aren’t to be driven back to the beginning of the sentence to sort out which was the
former and which the latter.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
is a Grand National with a fence every ten yards, each to be jumped backwards as well
as forwards; and you have to carry your horse. At one stage I skipped all the way to the end, and found the pages about Cola di Rienzo blessedly free of most of Gibbon’s most irritating
tricks. But not even Wagner can be fully boring about Rienzo, and in Gibbon the road to the final excitement is very long.