The History of the Life of Jonathan Wild, the Great Book

I own a five-volume edition of Gibbon from the 19th Century, inherited from some worthy on my paternal grandmother's side. It came from him to her, to my father, and to me, surviving multiple trips across the continent of America and being stuck in basement boxes several times. I must be the first to have read it entire, because some of the pages were uncut. I like to think it was waiting for me; it's appropriate to the scale of the book (a novel where, as Borges says, the protagonists are the nations of the world) that the host of this beautiful parasite should be an entire family tree, rather than a single organism. The fifth volume is the notes, which has necessitated reading with two volumes at hand at a time (because reading Gibbon without notes is like eating food without salt); each year, these past 4 years, I've read one volume plus one-quarter of the fifth, and I am now finished. I'm a slow reader who likes long books, and it's always a strange feeling to finish a long book. This one, which has taken me from Connecticut to California via Indiana and Chicago, through some of the most tumultuous years of my life, feels four times as strange.

In my copy, this fourth volume takes us from the breakup of the Muslim world from the united Umayyad Caliphate to the final conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Along the way are Genghis Khan; the Crusades; the Normans; Timur the Great; and endless schisms, theological controversies, popes and antipopes of the Catholic church, particularly the great divide between the Latin West and Greek East. The stories and topics are variously interesting; Gibbon's writing is always sublime. (You can see how it affects my own.)

Since here in the Goodreads page for some obscure edition of a fourth volume I am unlikely to be noticed or read, I'll take a moment to talk about something that came more and more to my attention throughout the years I read the book: Gibbon's reputation, and the reputation of the Decline and Fall itself, the way it looms in the minds of people who haven't read it, at least not the whole thing. The first problem is that it is a masterpiece: an unassailable, massive, celebrated, loooooong masterpiece. This has several effects, mostly bad. Amateurs and autodidacts like myself have many vices, and one of them is The Quest For the One True Source. They want to Get It and move on to the next thing, not engage in a neverending conversation, with an endless procession of writers arguing, and (if you feel optimistic) each flawed voice contributing towards a more (but never entirely) perfect whole somewhere in the collective consciousness of the scholarly community, or something. That kind of inconclusiveness, that lack of closure, is not appealing to the autodidact. He or she (in my experience, usually he) is basically searching for scripture, and so has inordinate regard for the famous, the long, the definitive, and the old. Gibbon hits all these marks exactly. And so you get a lot of amateur historians feeling, well, if I read Gibbon, I'll know everything about the late Roman Empire; next I shall read Macaulay, and know everything about the history of England... I say "if" advisedly; of course most people don't actually read the whole book, any more than they read all of Scripture. (The people who read the whole Bible are a different bunch altogether; a discussion for another time.) They read abridgments, if anything, and in my own personal opinion, the selections of the adbridgers tend to be oriented towards what people expect from Gibbon--in other words, by now, the reputation of the book creates the text, rather than the text creating the reputation. It's like Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In a Room": the parts that resonate are amplified until the actual content and meaning disappears. As most people who are interested in history are not trained historians, there's a lot of people with a scriptural view of Gibbon; scientists and engineers are notoriously amateurish when it comes to the humanities, and so with these reputation-created abridgments, or even more likely, with the exaggerated paraphrases of Asimov or Sagan, Gibbon lives in the minds of many as a foundational anti-theist text, infalliable, because scripture.

Against this silliness the actual historians, deep within that conversation, are understandably annoyed and dismissive. History students, in particular, whether undergrad or working on their PhDs, like to pop up when Gibbon is knowingly or unknowingly cited, to correct our foolish errors. Gibbon, they point out, did his historianing from the library, and had no access to archeology; he had no interest in the quotidian facts of daily life in the periods he discussed; he asserted as fact what the earliest sources told him, even when records were scanty and he had only poor materials to work with, and his criteria for chosing between sources were often idiosyncratic; he wrote with a strong anti-clerical, and particularly anti-Catholic, bias; and so on. All true enough. But college students also do not have the time or inclination to read 2500 pages of 18th Century history, especially since their professors have warned them against this scriptural danger; and from what I can tell, those professors themselves don't seem to have read him either, perhaps the result of having been warned by their own mentors, and so on. So their "corrections" and criticisms are often preposterous; I have been told that Gibbon uncritically believed in the story of Romulus and Remus, for one memorably bananas example. (I saw one confrontation, in a comment thread somewhere, between a scripture-seeking autodidact, and a professor-parroting history undergrad; "I've heard the prose is incredible," says the autodidact, in surly response to a mixture of solid and fabulous criticism of Gibbon. "The prose? It's pretty good," replies our undergrad, with the perfectly confident ignorance characteristic of 16-to-22-year old morons.) Again, Gibbon's reputation has written their text: they think Gibbon ignored the Byzantines, never wrote a word about economics or logistic facts, thought about religion and science like a euphoric 21st Century edgelord. The title works its mischief, and practically everyone thinks he represents over a thousand years of history as continual decline.

But the fact is that Gibbon was an artist and a genius. He was as full of negative capability as Shakespeare, as self-contradictory as Whitman. Nothing is truly simple in Gibbon, despite his clarity of prose. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, he has a mystifying reputation for monotonous didacticism when in fact he is maddeningly ambiguous and impossible to pin down. I'm not going to go through various examples, but one thing that jumped out at me was his magnificent summing up of the Crusades, some of the very best writing in the entire book. As he had mentioned not long before that the French monarchy was the oldest still existing in Europe, and later would mention the war in America, I was exquisitely aware of the fact that the French Revolution was almost upon him. And we know he agreed with Burke on the question, when it did come. Yet what did he write, at that exact pre-Revolutionary moment?

In one respect I can indeed perceive the accidental operation of the crusades, not so much in producing a benefit as in removing an evil. The larger portion of the inhabitants of Europe was chained to the soil, without freedom, or property, or knowledge; and the two orders of ecclesiastics and nobles, whose numbers were comparatively small, alone deserved the name of citizens and men. This oppressive system was supported by the arts of the clergy and the swords of the barons. The authority of the priests operated in the darker ages as a salutary antidote: they prevented the total extinction of letters, mitigated the fierceness of the times, sheltered the poor and defenceless, and preserved or revived the peace and order of civil society. But the independence, rapine, and discord of the feudal lords were unmixed with any semblance of good; and every hope of industry and improvement was crushed by the iron weight of the martial aristocracy. Among the causes that undermined that Gothic edifice, a conspicuous place must be allowed to the crusades. The estates of the barons were dissipated, and their race was often extinguished, in these costly and perilous expeditions. Their poverty extorted from their pride those charters of freedom which unlocked the fetters of the slave, secured the farm of the peasant and the shop of the artificer, and gradually restored a substance and a soul to the most numerous and useful part of the community. The conflagration which destroyed the tall and barren trees of the forest gave air and scope to the vegetation of the smaller and nutritive plants of the soil.

It seems almost a manifesto; I can see Robespierre brandishing this passage, insisting that the guillotine must play the part of the Crusades, and clear that forest for the Third Estate.

Very rarely, I have admitted to people that I've been reading this book. Somehow it seems like it will come across as a stunt read, fodder for a (rather old-fashioned, now) clickbait series in Salon. Or like I'm one of those scripture-hunting autodidacts, or worst of all that I'm simply incredibly square. When I do mention it, people sometimes ask what I'm learning, and especially (this is common with older hippie-flavored liberals) what parallels I am finding to the current state of the American empire, with a barely-perceptible note of hope that I will tell them that our hegemony is certainly declining and falling. This is really again the fault of the title; over the course of a thousand years plus, there are parallels to anything and everything, and yet very little that is anything like America now. One thing I have "learned", perhaps less agreeable to current liberal sensibilites, is the enormous flux and change of history, where nothing is permanent. I don't know if there really are any "indigenous" people anywhere; nations have wandered, arisen, disappeared. What we call Turkey was solidly Greek for over a millenium, the Turks are comparatively late arrivals. On the Gibbonian scale, America's 200 years are hardly anything; like the Mongol empire, it might flourish incredibly fast and then disappear, or it may last as long as the Roman Empire did. Along with this endless churning, the persistence of that empire is another thing I "learned"; it's hard to believe that when Donatello and Brunelleschi were digging up Roman artifacts in Italy, the same empire whose ancient ruins they explored still existed, as at least some kind of political continuity, in Constantinople. Despite the title, while reading Gibbon we feel that Rome never actually fell, and rather than declining, rather went through a long--a still, in the third millenium, unfinished--metamorphosis. Perhaps that's why his last chapter is devoted to explaining why the ruins were ruins; if you've read Gibbon, really read him, the "hole" of the Dark Ages doesn't exist, and it does come to seem strange that these buildings should crumble.

But really, of course, I didn't read to learn. I always remember and love Virginia Woolf's distinction between scholars and readers; and like her I prefer the "humane passion for pure and disinterested reading." I read Gibbon to read him, because he has written something worth reading. It is neither scripture, nor science; if you want to know The Truth you must look elsewhere. His book has transcended its origin, and is, as the undergrads insist, no longer history. It is art, and meant for better things than Truth.