Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

In that fine scene, with so many classic when he has outgrown all its harm, the associations, the walks to which Addi- consciousness of injury still hangs about son's name gives a gentle charm of pen- him. "It is whimsical enough, that as sive thoughts; the slowly flowing, silent soon as I left Magdalen College my taste stream stealing by to Isis; the stately for books began to revive," he says. In deer park behind; the gray tower, so the long vacation he even began to write; finely poised and full of grace, crowning but on returning to college gave up "The the sacred chapel and studious chambers; Age of Sesostris," which was the ambiand nothing but learned seclusion and tious subject he had chosen. The state tranquillity about, could there be a more of things which he describes has long perfect home of wisdom and science? ceased to be; no privileged gentlemenBut when one recalls the little, fastidious, commoners, with velvet cap or gold tuft, self-willed, sickly boy, too young to feel are now to be seen among the glades of the charm, left alone in his three elegant Maudlin; the dons are of a very different rooms, with his pile of English books and class from those whose "dull and deep detested manuals of the classic languages, potations " astonished the boy. But still perplexed and lonely, and out of his ele- there are some, no doubt, who find their ment, it is impossible to think of him "taste for books begin to revive" when otherwise than with pity. He spent four they get clear of the venerable spires, and teen months in the midst of these acces- leave the atmosphere of learning for that sories, which were far too much for the of common life. Why this should be is instruction they accompanied, or were not a question to be here discussed; but supposed to accompany. Even at so long it is astonishing and strange to note how a distance of years it is difficult for him to many of the great names in literature are abstain from a murmur of irritation. "To unadorned by any academical degree. the University of Oxford I acknowledge Gibbon's was precisely the kind of mind, no obligation," he cries, calling upon the one would have thought, to take kindly to reader to decide between the school and university life. Perhaps he would have the scholar: "I cannot affect to believe done so had he entered the university that nature had disqualified me for all lit at a more suitable age. As it is, he adds erary pursuits." Whenever he approaches another to the long list of eminent names this subject there is a tone of resentment which have derived neither advantage in his voice. His description of the col nor credit from their temporary connec lege life of his time is penetrated by this tion with the acknowledged fountaindisdainful irritation: heads of learning.

The Fellows or monks of my time were Gibbon's departure from Oxford was decent easy men, who supinely enjoyed the precipitated by what is one of the most gifts of the founder; their days were filled by remarkable episodes in his life. He a series of uniform employments- the chapel the future sceptic and philosopher, the and the hall, the coffee-house and the common- great critic of Christianity and reviler of room, till they retired, weary and well satisfied, its teachings in after-days an imperto a long slumber. From the toil of reading, sonation of the angry and contemptuous writing, or thinking, they had absolved their unbelief of his century was for once in consciences; and the first shoots of learning his life the subject of an attack of reliand ingenuity withered on the ground, without yielding any fruits to the owners or the public.gious enthusiasm, such as might have beAs a gentleman-commoner, I was admitted to fallen a youth of Newman's days, drawn the society of the Fellows, and fondly expected into the sweeping current of influence that some questions of literature would be the which marked that great man's track. amusing and instructive topics of their dis- There never was a more unlikely disciple; course. Their conversation stagnated in a and the manner in which the youth was round of college business, Tory politics, per-led to this development of faith was as sonal anecdotes, and private scandal; their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth.

This description is touched with an underlying sense of grievance which it is curious to note. The irritating sense that the university, which so many of her disciples praise, was to him nothing at all the waste of those means, which should have been of so much advantage to him weighs upon his mind; even

improbable as the fact. No proselytizing influence of the common sort comes into view at all in the process. He knew nobody, save "a young gentleman of our college," who had any Roman Catholic tendency; and was so far from being persuaded by any priest, that he had to ask a bookseller in London to introduce him to the unknown ecclesiastic who, somewhat reluctantly, admitted him to the Church of Rome - for this was the direc

[ocr errors]

66 some

tion in which the current of his youthful im- ton's attack upon miracles, saints, and all pulse set. Dr. Middleton's "Vindication the wonders of inspiration, drove young of Free Inquiry "had "sounded an alarm Gibbon into the Church which made the in the theological world; " and Oxford, greatest demand upon the faith of its disfrightened and heated, but feeble and in- ciples. It is a most curious episode in conclusive, had risen in defence of the his life, and it drove him finally from his faith, awakening at least a general stir on college; for Oxford, which could support the subject. Young Gibbon, glad of any with equanimity idleness, folly, and insubpretext to escape from Greek and Latin, ordination even comfortable deism, or and "fond" from his childhood "of reli- more ardent and conspicuous still, the gious disputations," was greatly moved creed of an atheist-could not put up by the quarrel. "The blind activity of with a Roman Catholic convert; its tenidleness urged me to advance without dencies that way were all to come. armor into the dangerons mazes of con- Gibbon's father took the event with troversy," he says. He read the sceptic's natural indignation and fury. He was book; and it would have been very natu- wildly angry at the boy who was standing ral to suppose that it was this which de- in his own light so dismally, and with termined the views of his after-life. But whom, no doubt, he would have the worst nothing could be further from the real of the argument, did he try to bring him case. Catherine Porten's pupil, who had round in that way. What he did was to talked with that tender guardian on every convey his son to "the house of his subject in earth and heaven, and no doubt friend Mr. Mallet," who had brought out with the sympathetic feeling of a child, the works of Bolingbroke, and was an had shared many a pensive aspira- advocate of free inquiry like Middleton, tion towards those skies in which sorrow professing deistical opinions, or and partings are no more, had all the thing more," says the commentators warmth of youthful certainty in spiritual meaning, we presume, something less. wonders, and held by miracles and divine No doubt the angry father supposed this agency as the foundation of faith. Dr. violent alterative to be of a beneficial Middleton's assault upon these supernatu- character, not suspecting that it was scep ral proofs of the truth of Christianity, ticism which had brought his son to be a instead of persuading, revolted the young Roman Catholic. reader, and sent him in the recoil to the other extremity. He was offended and horrified by animadversions upon the saints, and only so far convinced, in a sense totally different from that intended by the writer, as to perceive that these saints and sages were more closely identified with the Romish creed than he had been led to believe. The inferences he drew were not that they were wrong, but that the Church of Rome was right; and when he turned to the works of Bossuet, which he procured from that "young gentleman of our college," his conviction was complete. "I surely fell by a noble hand," he says finely, looking back upon himself with an indulgent smile. And, once convinced, it was natural, at once to his mind and his age, to make his convictions public. One can imagine the fine sense of opposition, of individuality, of noble independence, which moved the youth as he took this step so prejudicial to his future. No one had anything to do with it in the way of persuasion or personal influence. Just as we have all felt, after an unnecessary and laborious defence of some point of doctrine from the pulpit, a momentary inclination to adopt the contrary belief ourselves, so Middle

[graphic]
[graphic]

The boy of sixteen, elevated thus into a martyr for the faith, was "rather scandalized than reclaimed " by the very contrary philosophy into which he was plunged; and it would seem that the experiment, if ever intended to be carried on, was so unsuccessful as to be very soon abandoned. But Romanism was in these days a thing to be got rid of at all costs, and the new destination of the boy was scarcely less remarkable. The son of a wealthy or apparently wealthy Englishman of the old Church and King pat tern, standing by the Church as he did by all other old institutions, young Gibbon was now despatched into a nest of Puri. tanism and republican principles, the narrow circle of a little Swiss town, and the spare and unlovely living of a poor Swiss minister's house. In the calm of his narrative, the sensations with which he made this change are set forth without any but the faintest reflection of the emotions which must have accompanied it; with that half-humorous, half-regretful pleasure in the recollection of feeling so vivid, which is natural in a mature mind when surveying the sentiments of its youth.

The first marks of my father's displeasure rather astonished than afflicted me. When he

[merged small][ocr errors]

threatened to banish and disown and disin- | as destitute of hope as it was devoid of pleas.
herit a rebellious son, I cherished a secret ure. I was separated for an indefinite, which
hope that he would not be able or willing to appeared an infinite, time from my native
effect his menaces; and the pride of conscience country; and I had lost all connection with my
encouraged me to sustain the honorable and Catholic friends.
important part I was now acting. My spirits
were raised and kept alive by the rapid motion
of my journey, the new and various scenes of
the Continent, and the civility of Mr. Frey
[who accompanied. him], a man of sense, who
was not ignorant of books and of the world.
But after he had resigned me into Pavilliard's
hands, and I was fixed in my new habitation, I
had leisure to contemplate the strange and
melancholy prospect before me.

Thus the boy's despair and anguish is softened down in the tranquil contemplation of the man of fifty, who is aware that but for this painful change in his fortunes there never might have been a history of the Roman decline and fall. But it is

easy to imagine what the real state of his
feelings was when, after the excitements
of the journey, and the "honorable and
important part" he had been acting in
face of the opposition, so to speak, of the
entire world, he found himself settled
down a mere rebellious schoolboy, to
whom nobody paid any special respect
in a strange country, in an altogether dif-
ferent mode of living, turned back half a
dozen years at least in his youthful career,
admired by nobody, restrained and im-
poverished, a man no longer, but only a
petulant and unsatisfactory child. The
fact that he did not know the language
added the last touch of sharpness to the
poignancy of this downfall.

This trenchant and radical process, carried out with such inexorable firmness, fully answered its purpose. In all its republican bareness and rigid unlovely life, the little old Swiss town became home to the young Englishman. When he was free to choose his dwelling long after, it was there he settled himself. His dearest friends and warmest likings were life took its permanent shape, where his there; and Lausanne, the place where his first aspirations were changed and his mind turned into a different channel, and which he eventually selected as "the most grateful retreat for the decline of my life," is forever associated with Gibbon's name. The nobleness of the surrounding scenery, the great lake, the greater mountains, and, in the midst, the quaint little unsympathetic town, keeping itself well up upon its banks with its garments gathered round it, in sublime human egotism and superiority to the landscape, bears an amusing likeness to the man and his subcannot be said to be shaped by the localjects. The character of his genius, if it ity, at least fell in with it in wonderful whimsical type of the great historian purharmony; and it is difficult not to see a suing his vast and splendid subject in or derly composure without excitement or enthusiasm, in the dull little town with its little coteries, its local intellectualisms

and clevernesses, turning its back with something of the contempt of familiarity upon Lake Leman and Mont Blanc. The hard-headed Swiss soon cured young Gib

When I was thus suddenly cast on a foreign land, I found myself deprived of the use of speech and hearing, and during some weeks incapable, not only of enjoying the pleasures of conversation, but even of asking or answer-bon of that one little romantic-polemical ing a question in the common intercourse of life. To a homebred Englishman every object, every custom was offensive; but the native of any country might have been disgusted with the general aspect of his lodging and entertainment. I had now exchanged my elegant apartment in Magdalen College for a narrow, gloomy street, the most unfrequented of an unhandsome town, for an old inconvenient house, and for a small chamber ill contrived and ill furnished, which, on the approach of winter, instead of a companionable fire, must be warmed by the dull, invisible heat of a stove. From a man I was again degraded to the dependence of a schoolboy. M. Pavil liard managed my expenses, which had been reduced to a diminutive state. I received a small monthly allowance for my pocket-money; been soundly inspired in his choice of the and, helpless and awkward as I have ever been, I no longer enjoyed the indispensable comfort of a servant. My condition seemed

episode of his life, his youthful adherence to the Roman Catholic Church; and no doubt the same revulsion of the mind from a subject too much pressed upon it, the turn and twist of a fastidious temper which made the perusal of a sceptical book his starting-point for Rome, turned the religiosity and rigid doctrine of the little Swiss circle into a school of hostility and aversion to Christian teaching altogether, in a mind so keen and unsympathetic. But this was not an influence that told immediately. Almost as soon as the shock of the change was over, it

became evident that Gibbon's father had

place and the man to give to his self-willed son the training which neither Westminster nor Oxford had been able to give,

His new tutor understood the youth; ap- tendency of unsuccessful men to hold up preciated his appetite for reading, and the old schools, which have not succeeded used it as his best instrument, leading in training them, to reprobation; but few him easily through his own favorite sub- men who have gained such laurels as jects to other necessary if harder and less Gibbon, take the trouble to put such congenial themes, and finally awakening grudges on record. This is how Lausanne in him a true sense of his own deficiencies, exalted itself over Oxford. Private eduand of the indispensable foundations of cation will always have its triumphs over all knowledge. He gives an interesting public; but it is very seldom that there is account of his progress, from history, al-not a little despite, a certain anger, a ways his favorite subject, to the French sense of unjust inferiority and wrong in and Latin classics, and so gradually to the the triumph. confines of Greek, which he himself at More things than education brightened last perceived to be not only needful but his Swiss life to the youth who had been highly desirable. "It was now," he says, a sickly boy, with a gloomy father, and a "that I regretted the early years which shut-up house, at home-knowing no had been wasted in sickness and idleness, genial companionship but that of his aunt, or mere idle reading; that I condemned who was absorbed in the labors of a the perverse method of our schoolmasters, who, by first teaching the mother language, might descend with so much ease and perspicuity to the origin and etymology of a derivative idiom." He was happily only nineteen when he reached this point, so that on the whole not very much harm was done; but he never seems to have forgotten his grudge against the modes of instruction in use at home which had retarded his education. His elaborate acknowledgment that it is possible the University of Oxford may have amended its ways since his time remains a very keen piece of satire. It will perhaps be asserted," he says, "that in the lapse of forty years many improvements have taken place. I am not unwilling to believe that some tutors might have been found more active than Dr. Waldegrave and less contemptible than Dr. ." And he goes on to compliment gravely Sir William Scott, "whose lectures on history would compose, if they were given to the public, a most valuable treatise" the only one apparently which in all that long period Oxford had produced and to record the better regulations which, "I am told," have been introduced at Christ Church. "A course of classical and philosophical studies is proposed and even pursued in that numerous seminary; learning has been made a duty, a pleasure, and even a fashion; and several young gentlemen do honor to the college in which they have been educated."

[graphic]

66

It would be difficult to stigmatize with keener severity the failure of an institution than by this serious and polite commendation of the "several young gentlemen" who had done honor to the college in the course of forty years, and the one valuable treatise which, if given to the public, it might have produced. It is the

dame's house at Westminster, and had
been, during all this Oxford episode,
separated from him. When he had got
over the first unfavorable impression of
the "unhandsome town," the gloomy
street and inconvenient house in which
he found himself planted at Lausanne, he
found society open upon him. At the
first glance there is nothing more bare,
more devoid of all grace and lightness,
than the life of such a house; and there
are many queer pictures in literature of
the dingy rooms and uninviting table, the
theological talk and narrow dogmas, of
households of this description; but the
pastor was a man of learning and intelli-
gence, quick to understand, and cunning
to take the young, self-confident spirit in
its own snare. And when an able and
curious mind has been delivered out of
idleness, and has a wholesome centre of
work put into it, amusement comes infi-
nitely easier. Gibbon tried for a short
time, he tells us, to indemnify himself for
his banishment by seeking the company
of other idle young Englishmen on this
vacant way about the Continent; but he
soon tired of those vapid companions,
and, after the departure of his first ac-
quaintance of the kind, was "cold and
civil" to their successors.
"My unfit-
ness to bodily exercise reconciled me to
a sedentary life; and the horse, the favor-
ite of my countrymen," he adds, with his
usual keen but quiet satire, never con-
tributed to the pleasure of my youth."
But, on the other hand, he acquired the
habit of social life as yet unknown to him.
He "frequented, for the first time, assem-
blies of men and women." He did not
profit as he might have done in his dan
cing, but he learned to talk - perhaps a
more lasting delight. And there he found
a friendship which was the solace of his

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

66

life. His friend never came to any repu- | member that he has no occasion to blush
tation in the world, perhaps was not an when he recalls the object of his choice.
intellectual person at all. He joined in It was such a choice as a young man of
young Gibbon's studies "with equal zeal, his pretensions ought to have made.
though not with equal perseverance.' "The personal attractions of Mademoi-
But he was of as much advantage to the selle Susan Curchod were embellished by
English youth as if he had been a Cicero. the virtues and talents of her mind."
"To him every thought, every composi- Her father, another pastor, had bestowed
tion was instantly communicated; with "a liberal and even learned education on
him I enjoyed the benefits of a free con- his only daughter." In her short visits
versation on the topics of our common to some relations at Lausanne, the wit,
studies." Long afterwards when Gibbon the beauty, and erudition of Mademoiselle
was alone, and the master of his own Curchod were the theme of universal
movements, it was to this friend of youth, applause." She was "learned without
M. Deyverdun, that he turned; and they pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in
lived together in the same house in broth- sentiment, and elegant in manners." Such
erly amity till the Swiss gentleman died, a gentle and faultless being might have
and the self-exiled Englishman was left furnished Rousseau with a model for her
alone in the world. A man capable of countrywoman Julie, or Mrs. Radcliffe
forming such a friendship must have had with a heroine for one of those novels
some warmth of affection in him. Gib- which contain so many types of feminine
bon had to all appearance a nature en- perfection, along with their wonders and
tirely without passion, but he must have mysteries. Perhaps the most satisfactory
been faithful and kind. If love was not proof of Mademoiselle Susan's charms
for him, yet friendship was strong in him. and endowments, and the one which most
It is difficult to choose between the two pleasantly excites the grateful compla-
which has the finer influence upon char- cency of her early suitor, is that she be-
acter. If love is more profound it is often came afterwards the wife of Necker, and
narrower, shutting up the mind within a a very considerable personage. But no
limited circle, and absorbing it in the wel- doubt, when they met in the little assem-
fare of a family. But not to make com- blies at Lausanne, the English lad, whose
parisons, the heart, which, with no self- curiosity was awakened "by the report of
interest involved, is capable of the lifelong such a prodigy," felt his youth stir in him
alliance of a supreme friendship, must underneath his laced coat, when he made
have depths and tenderness in it which it his formal bow to the wise Swiss maiden
is difficult to connect with the formal in her hoop and patches, if such vanities
sedateness and self-occupation of the his- were permitted in the pastor's household.
torian. This was the poetical side of his They added, no doubt, some follies of
their age to the strain of fine sentiment
He did not get through youth, however, and eloquent discussion which flowed
without one small inevitable chapter of around; and by and by the happy young
romance. "I hesitate," he says in his man was permitted to visit her in her
sententious way," from the apprehension father's house, among the wild and pas-
of ridicule, when I approach the delicate toral heights of Burgundy, where he was
subject of my early love; and he ex- accepted as a suitor not unworthy, and
plains with a little serious flourish what the parents "honorably encouraged the
he means by love, not gallantry, which connection." "In a calm retirement,"
is "interwoven with the texture of French says the hero of this chapter of ineffectual
manners," but a passion "which is in-love-making, falling into fictitious inflation
flamed by a single female, which prefers of words in the conscious insincerity of
her to the rest of her sex, and which
seeks her possession as the supreme or
the sole happiness of our being." This
neat eighteenth-century definition of the
sentiment does not lead us to expect any
profound absorption in it; and the air of
gentle complacency with which Gibbon
contemplates the incident across the long
interval of placid years is extremely char-
acteristic. He is pleased with himself
that he was capable of "such a pure and
exalted sentiment," and is happy to re-

nature.

[ocr errors]

the story, "the gay vanity of youth no longer fluttered in her bosom; she lis tened to the voice of truth and passion, and I might presume to hope I had made some impression on the virtuous heart." But alas! when he returned to England he found the vanity of his hopes. His father "would not hear of this strange alliance;" and without his father Gibbon had nothing. He was not the man to beard fortune under any impulse, however strenuous; and he has left no record of

« VorigeDoorgaan »