'I Read Slowly, Richly, Not to Say Juicily'

A longtime reader writes: “I’ve noticed you mention Edward Gibbon pretty often. I’ve always want to read him but the book is so big and intimidating. Can you talk me into reading it?” No, but I’ll defer to George Lyttleton, who puts it like this in a May 2, 1957, letter to Rupert Hart-Davis (The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, Vol. 2):

“I love re-reading. Each night from 10.30 to 12 I read Gibbon out loud. I read slowly, richly, not to say juicily; and like Prospero’s isle the room is full of noises—little, dry, gentle noises. Some matter-of-fact man of blunt or gross perceptions might say it was the ashes cooling in the grate, but I know better. It is the little creatures of the night, moths and crickets and spiderlings, a mouse or two perhaps and small gnats in a wailful choir, come out to listen to the Gibbonian music—`Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of 62,000 volumes attested the variety of his inclinations’—what sentient being, however humble, could resist that?”

Not I, and I hope my reader agrees. We no longer read Gibbon strictly for the history, any more than we read Shakespeare for the costumes. Not every reader will be convinced he ought to consume all six volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the glory of its prose and the grandness of its vision, but a few will. Lyttleton is describing the charm of bedtime rereading, the cozy autonomy of one book, one lamp, one reader. In reply, Hart-Davis asks Lyttleton who Gibbon was writing about. On May 9, Lyttleton replied:

“That Gibbon sentence describes the emperor Gordian whose ‘manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father.’ Then comes the sentence I quoted, which ends: `and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former [‘concubines’] as well as the latter [‘62,000 volumes’] were designed for use rather than for ostentation.’”

On May 12, Hart-Davis replied: “I daresay that Gibbon’s broad blade carved out his meaning with more force and exactitude than did the bending rapiers of latter-day swordsmen.” This is rare book talk, a pleasure most of us can indulge in only infrequently. Well-read people are an endangered species. Lyttleton was seventy-four in 1957. The Decline and Fall was a book he already knew well. He was no historian. He read exclusively for the sheer pleasure of it, the most respectable of reasons, and I trust my longtime reader will emulate Lyttleton’s example.