A CORRUPT FOLLOWING

During the whole nineteenth century our language underwent a certain derogation, notorious, different in kind from the corruptions of all other ages, and as familiar as brick and slate, gas, and the architecture of stations—and apparently of yesterday, and to-day, and of a morrow seen in rather dull and discouraging prospect. But the truth is that this common speech is due to the enormous influence of a great author who was born in 1737, was for forty-seven years the contemporary of Dr. Johnson, and died well within the eighteenth century.

Whose, for instance, is the use of ‘I expect’ for a conjecture referring to the past? It is Gibbon’s: ‘I should expect that the eunuchs were not expelled from the palace.’ What is the ‘and which’, ‘and who’ of the slovenly? and what the ‘whose’ applied to inanimate things by authors too fine and too modern to write ‘whereof’? Gear of Gibbon’s style, both: ‘Below the citadel stood a palace of gold, decorated with precious stones, and whose value might be esteemed,’ &c.; and ‘A Menapian of the meanest origin, but who had long signalized his skill as a pilot’. There is, it is true, the inanimate ‘whose’ of a more illustrious and older author, but that claims the excuse of metre.

43Whence have we that peculiarly harsh vulgarism, ‘so much per month’, instead of ‘so much a month’, or ‘per mensem’? From Gibbon. ‘And coal will be by the sack or per the scuttle,’ said a seaside landlady, in some one’s observant ear. In her innocence she would not have said it but for Gibbon. And whose is the confusion of speech that cannot give the word ‘same’ its proper completion, but saddles it with a relative pronoun? Gibbon’s: ‘The Western countries were civilized by the same hands which subdued them.’ ‘The hands which subdued them’ would be correct, and certainly more majestic.

Gibbon set the example of this common lax grammar: ‘Instead of receiving with manly resolution the inevitable stroke, his unavailing cries and entreaties disgraced the last moments of his life’; and ‘The election of Carus was decided without expecting the approval of the Senate’; and ‘A peasant and a soldier, his nerves yielded not easily to the impressions of sympathy’. And there is nothing that (Gibbon always says ‘which’) illiterate politeness is so fond of as this unconstructed and decorated phrase. Gibbon’s literature was scholarly, and these errors of his alter little or nothing of the honour due to his eminent elegance of style. But it was these laxities that took the public taste mightily, and it was the ‘corrupt following’ of this apostle that set the fashion of an animated strut of style—a 44strut that was animated in its day and soon grew inanimate, as the original authentic Gibbon never does. His own narrative never fails to reply to a perpetual stimulation.

But to deal with the rest of the grammatical ill-example, left to unlucky generations from the very middle of the century of propriety, and made so much our own. It is very modern to have ‘either’ or ‘neither’ followed by more than two things, and it is pure Gibbon; all the more conspicuous as Gibbon dearly loves the sound of three: ‘The policy of the senate, the active emulation of the consuls, and the martial enthusiasm of the people’; ‘The undertaking became more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious.’ But the three go ill with ‘either’: ‘either food, plunder, or glory;’ ‘either salt, or oil, or wood’. ‘The generals were either respected by their troops, or admired for valour, or beloved for frankness and generosity.’

Finally, for a very little and silly blunder, what is more modern and current and popular than this: ‘Magnus, with four thousand of his supposed accomplices, were put to death’? And even this is Gibbon.

To have done with mere grammar, there is surely no author in the history of our literature who has so imposed a new manner of writing upon an admiring people. He changed a hundred years 45of English prose. The dregs of his style have encumbered the nation. Changes that have been ascribed to Johnson were his doing and not Johnson’s.

He belonged to the eighteenth century; but the nineteenth century belonged to him, because he possessed it. That is why he and his English are thus modern; the times became conformed to him; and he was himself not his own age, but that which succeeded and admired him.

It was to the broad face of astonishment, and with the self-conscious face of novelty, that Gibbon addressed his prose. That shortened sentence (for it was he who shortened the sentence, and Macaulay did but imitate his full stops for the pauses of historical surprise) was to strike and to demonstrate, and this with a gesture constantly renewed. ‘Suspicion was equivalent to proof. Trial to condemnation.’ ‘The strict economy of Vespasian was the source of his magnificence. The works of Trajan bear the stamp of his genius.’ His, too, is the full ceremony of the ushering phrase: ‘It is easier to deplore the fate, than to describe the actual condition, of Corsica.’ His, too, the ‘the latter and the former’, which became a favourite fashion. ‘Oh, do not condemn me to the latter!’ exclaims a lover in one of Mrs. Inchbald’s stories, after a statement of his hopes and fears; and this phrase of emotion was a debt to Gibbon. The reader finds that the lady 46does not condemn him to the latter; she permits some prospect of the former. ‘Peruse’ is Gibbon’s verb, and ‘extensive’ a favourite adjective. To him we owe ‘the mask of hypocrisy’ and ‘the voice of flattery’. It is not his fault that posterity divided this property so lavishly among themselves.

And yet is there no fault in his own frigid prodigality? Take this sentence in all its splendour: ‘The Tyber rolled at the foot of the seven hills of Rome, and the country of the Sabines, the Latins, and the Volsci, from that river to the frontiers of Naples, was the theatre of her infant victories.’ And this: ‘A distant hope, the child of a flattering prophecy.’ This all-inhuman image reminds us, by contrast, of Shelley, who often has this figure of a child, and never, however remote the thought, without a sense of childhood. So cold is Gibbon that when the incessant stimulation of his rhetorical intention spurs him to describe a murder thus: ‘A thousand swords were plunged at once into the bosom of the unfortunate Probus,’ we are moved to tell him trivially that he exaggerates. When Burke said ‘A thousand swords’ he meant a thousand, and had a right to mean them, but Gibbon did not, obviously, mean a thousand.

‘The unfortunate Probus’ is the model of a sentence that sometimes becomes monotonous even with the carefully various Gibbon: ‘The prudent Atticus’ begins a phrase, and ‘the equitable Nerva’ passes it on to ‘the cautious 47Athenian’, and then again to ‘the generous Atticus’. His is a frigidity that deals broadly with massacre and the sack of cities. And from amid these generalities, as it were invisible unless viewed from afar, he suddenly plucks us this man’s ‘smile’, or that man’s ‘blush’. Whatever Gibbon’s race, there never was a writer so exceedingly Latin in spirit.

‘To view’, by the way, is one of his favourite verbs: ‘Viewing with a smile of pity and indulgence the various errors of the vulgar ... and sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition, they concealed the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robes.’ Readers with a sense of humour may remember under what conditions Zenobia ‘reiterated the experiment’; and the fatal manner in which the tradesman’s circular of to-day has ‘diffused’ (as Gibbon would say) the last ruins of his prose by post, is rather curiously illustrated thus: a little while ago some infamous face-wash was described in advertisements as a mixture of drugs brought across the desert by fleet dromedaries. And here is Gibbon’s Zenobia ‘mounting her fleetest dromedary’.

How great, nevertheless, how sombre are the nobler habits of his language: ‘The veteran legions of the Rhine and the Danube.’ What armies! what time! what space! what war! ‘Give back my legions, Varus!’ Give back our legions, 48Gibbon! We may count our regiments, but thou hast named, not counted, multitudes.

And when Gibbon ‘gratifies’ these legionaries, the polite word does but make them more historical: ‘After suppressing a competitor who had assumed the purple at Mentz, he refused to gratify his troops with the plunder of the rebellious city.’ So that we do not forgive the corrupters who so scattered the word that burlesque was necessary for sweeping it out of the way. When Mr. Micawber confesses his ‘gratifying emotions of no common description’, Dickens rallies a distant Gibbon.

Ruskin, student of Hooker in the further, and of Johnson in the nearer, past, was the first writer of pure prose—the first by a long tale of years—to reject the whole encumbrance of the vain spoils of Gibbon; yet even he has one little patch of them: ‘A steep bank of earth that has been at all exposed to the weather contains in it ... features capable of giving high gratification to a careful observer.’ It is solitary in Modern Painters; it is the nether Gibbon, a waste product of Gibbon.

But now I spoke of burlesque; and Dickens’s burlesque of style is admirable; there is also a burlesque of another and more innocent kind: when the author of a recent English work on the Divine Comedy says that Paolo and Francesca were to receive from Dante ‘such alleviation as circumstances would allow’, that also is a distant, a shattered Gibbon, a drift of Gibbon.

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