Books: Ugliest Historian

EDWARD GIBBON—D. M. Low—Random House ($3.50).

For most readers, interest in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is now eclipsed by the much-predicted decline & fall of the civilization now current. Because he wrote colorfully and lacked the wide propagandist streak of many modern historians, Edward Gibbon seems to most present-day readers less the greatest English historian than the most industrious and fervid of historical novelists. About the only part of Gibbon’s reputation so far not attacked is his claim to being the ugliest historian in English literature, and of having produced, for his size, the most impressive work.

In this new biography, the best so far, the biographer sets himself to prove that modern critics who belittle Gibbon’s history commit an error equal to Boswell’s when he snarled that “Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow,” or to Dr. Johnson’s when that captious fellow club-member implied that it was Gibbon who had ruined Rome. Ingenious as well as admiring, Biographer Low makes no attempt to turn ugly-duckling Gibbon into a swan: the greatness of The Decline and Fall is dramatized more effectively by contrast with the fussy mite of a man who wrote it.

Under five feet, pumpkin-cheeked, with a button nose and a buttonhole mouth “nearly in the centre of his visage,” a double chin that hung like an udder, deep red hair, high-domed forehead, big ears and plenty of fat. set off by the loudest clothes to be found in a loud century, Gibbon’s personal appearance was the most noticeable of the handicaps reputed to have combined to produce the perfect historian.

As a child (the only survivor of seven) “he tended towards consumption and dropsy, was subject to violent fluctuations of temperature, suffered a contraction of the nerves, and had a fistula in one eye.” Able at 12 to recite Pope’s Homer and the Arabian Nights, he was soon so deep in Roman history that he resented mealtime, could not go to sleep for thinking about discrepant history dates. Sent to Oxford as a gentleman scholar at 15. he had “no duties and many privileges.” Discovering that nobody minded if he cut classes, he spent most of the school year traveling, studied in the summer. Kicked out of Oxford for joining the Catholic Church, he was turned over to a freethinker in Switzerland, where he went in for society, became an addict of the French theatre after seeing Voltaire in one of his own plays, prided himself on becoming a man of the world instead of being “steeped in port and prejudice among the monks at Oxford.”

At the beginning of his pursuit of vivacious, learned, blonde Suzanne Curchod. 20-year-old Gibbon stalked about the neighboring fields “compelling the peasants to agree at the sword’s point that Mile Curchod was the most beautiful person on earth.” But when, after Suzanne had accepted him, his father refused to consider a penniless foreigner for a daughter-in-law, Gibbon took only two hours to admit his father was right, a crisis later summed up in his famed line: “I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.”

Suzanne began a furious correspondence mingling hysteria with threats, telling him he would be sorry some day. Realizing now what a “dangerous and artificial girl” she was, he congratulated himself on his narrow escape, vowed he would thereafter confine himself to friends and history. Even the great Rousseau was mixed up in Suzanne’s plot to marry him. Rousseau said he would speak to Gibbon, but was glad an accident prevented the appointment, since Gibbon would only make her “unhappy and rich in England.” After her marriage to Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s famed Minister for Finance, Suzanne invited Gibbon to the house frequently, kept tabs on him the rest of his life, although the scared historian took care not to get in her clutches again. Wary of all women after that, he took revenge on them by emphasizing women’s treachery in The Decline and Fall. But at least one woman paid him back with interest when she told a story of Gibbon, middleaged, burdened with gout and fat, getting down on his knees to a pretty female novelist and having to call a footman to put him on his feet again. Her other story was of the time, in a Paris salon, when a blind woman ran her hand over Gibbon’s inexplicable face, backed up declaring indignantly that a mean trick was being played on her.

Having escaped the net of a conventional English education, Anglican religious drill, sports, the life of a country gentleman, marriage, and having enough money to avoid hack work but not enough to become a dilettante. Gibbon’s last blessing in disguise (for history’s sake, of course, says the biographer) was his failure as a politician. Elected to Parliament two years before the first volume of his history appeared. Gibbon fell in line with Tory policy regarding the American colonies; privately, and especially after reports of the first American victories, his confidence in the Government dropped to zero. In his last term he decided “the country could be ruled by boys for all he cared.” He was now free to settle down abroad to complete his history, wait for relatives to die to solve his financial problems, bask in the attention paid him by Europe’s greatest authors, but more particularly by pretty women, and acquire at last the warming conviction that he was the Roman Empire.