'By Saying Too Much, Says Nothing'

“One way or another, the modern age is always there in the best moments of the old historians: we can tell by the way construction of the prose suddenly ceases to sound anachronistic, or even constructed.”

I’ve always tried to resist the Crocean notion that all history is contemporary history. It’s lazily self-centered and blind to obvious differences. In its currently fashionable self-righteous form it amounts to presentism, a stupid vanity nicely mocked by Turner Cassity in “Fin de Siècle” (Between the Chains, 1991): “The way of presentism is to whore the past / For passions of the moment. That is pestilence / Also.” They are not us – but still. The sentence quoted above is from the chapter on Edward Gibbon in Cultural Amnesia (2007), and Clive James is referring specifically to Tacitus and Montesquieu:

“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.”

James proceeds to be needlessly critical of Gibbon’s elaborate prose. He quotes with approval an uncharacteristically terse sentence from this passage in Chap. 3 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (the sentence in question is underlined):

“The slave of Imperial despotism, whether he was condemned to drag his gilded chain in Rome and the senate, or to wear out a life of exile on the barren rock of Seriphus, or the frozen banks of the Danube, expected his fate in silent despair. To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly. On every side he was encompassed with a vast extent of sea and land, which he could never hope to traverse without being discovered, seized, and restored to his irritated master.”

Terse, yes, as a sort of human distillation that functions as a hinge between two longer (though not too long), scene-setting sentences. Even a modern reader can’t imagine a history of the Roman Empire composed entirely of ten-word sentences. Gibbon’s style has never seemed unnecessarily overwrought or self-servingly Rococo to this reader. James observes of his chosen prose sample: “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.” True, we translate Gibbon’s pithy remark into the world created by Stalin, Hitler and Mao. That seems appropriate to me. But the gem is placed in an elaborate prose setting that accentuates its truth and beauty.

My point is not to absolve Gibbon of testing the reader’s concentration, memory and patience. No one expects to read Augustan prose with the flitting attentiveness we devote to Twitter. Gibbon’s compositional ideal is gravitas tempered by a well-exercised sense of irony. He had no taste for pomposity or affectation in prose. He didn’t write filigree. When revising the first volume of his History, Gibbon noted: “Mr. [David] Hume told me that in correcting his history, he always laboured to reduce superlatives and soften positives.” And in a footnote, Gibbon dismisses “miserable amplification, which, by saying too much, says nothing.”

Gibbon was born on this date, May 8, in 1737.