Gibeon

“ It increased, leaped, flamed. Room after room was touched by the illumination. It climbed the stairs, roared outward through windows, spreading, crackling, hissing, devouring.... In a dozen minutes the Lakeside Hotel was wrapped in flame—a beacon light in Gibeon’s history. High and higher mounted the flames until the countryside for miles about was lighted by it, notified by it that a thing was happening, that Gibeon was being purified by fire.
“Is there no doctor here?” Carmel cried.
“Doc Stewart’s some’eres.... I’ll git him.”
The doctor was found and came. He examined Evan as best he could. ”

“ If George Bogardus knew so much, other people knew more. In Gibeon were men willing to talk if she could attract them to her. But this was slow. She felt time would not be given her laboriously to follow clues. She must overleap spaces; must arrive at something bigger then a petty bootlegger. Already, as she knew, Gibeon was aware [231] that Deputy Jenney was deputy no longer, but sheriff, full fledged and unassailable.... She must act, and act quickly—or action would be made impossible for her. ”

“ Your remote villages are conscious of their outstanding personalities, and, however much they may dislike them personally and quarrel with them in the family, they flaunt them in the faces of outsiders and boast of their eccentricities and take pride in their mannerisms. So Gibeon fancied it knew Abner Fownes from the meticulous crust in which his tailor incased him inward to his exact geometrical center ”

“ For the first time he viewed the activities of Gibeon’s liquor smugglers as a matter of right and wrong, and not as a problem set in a textbook. If he could help to abolish this malignant sore he would be performing real service.... That aspect of matters interested him. He found that the mere mental exercise of thinking about humanity gave one an emotional interest in humanity.... He was progressing.
One could not attain to results in a laboratory without intimate contact with specimens; one could not attain to results in the world without intimate contacts with human beings. ”

“ There are their lights.... Wait, Abner Fownes. You cannot get away. If you try to go I shall hold you.”
He turned. Up the road approached a multitude of automobile lights. Gibeon was returning from [299] its crusade!... He uttered a shrill, unnatural cry and made as if to rush past her, but Carmel grasped his arm. ”

“ Wa-al, folks don’t get their pictures taken like they buy flour. Uh-uh!... They got to have a reason to have ’em taken—like a weddin’, or an engagement, or gettin’ to be sixty year old, or suthin’ sim’lar. No. Folks in Gibeon don’t just go off and get photographed on the spur of the moment, like you might say. ”

“ Gibbon, "accurately expressed the figure of their limbs," but 'apparel' is only Miltonic-Gibbonian for 'nobody knows what' He is more intelligible of their persons. "The lofty stature of the Franks, and their blue eyes, denoted a Germanic origin; the warlike barbarians were trained from their earliest youth to run, to leap, to swim, to dart the javelin and battle-axe with unerring aim, to advance without hesitation against a superior enemy, and to maintain either in life or death, the invincible reputation of their ancestors" (vi. 95) . ”

“ The fact of any one "going over to Rome" is too common an occurrence nowadays to attract notice. But in the eighteenth century it was a rare and startling phenomenon. Gibbon's father, who was "neither a bigot nor a philosopher," was shocked and astonished by his "son's strange departure from the religion of his [18] country." He divulged the secret of young Gibbon's conversion, and "the gates of Magdalen College were for ever shut" against the latter's return. They really needed no shutting at all. By the fact of his conversion to Romanism he had ceased to be a member of the University. ”

“ A fighter born, Gibson enlisted at the beginning of the War, earning his commission and subsequent promotion by sheer merit. On the eve of battle he begged that his company should be placed on the right, for, said he:--
"The Macdonalds have always been on the right since the '45." And the right this morning was a post of danger. Gibson was heard cheering his troops on in the darkness, and continually pressed on always in the van. When he reached the first parapet of our old trenches he cried: "Come on, boys, home at last!" ”

“ Why, Gibney, I saw Her Majesty on our last trip, less than two months ago, and she was telling me all about you. Great old girl, Pinky, and mighty proud of the fact that once she had a white husband. So you're King Gibney, eh? Well, well! The world is certainly small." The skipper chuckled, nor noticed Mr. Gibney's bulging eyes and hanging jaw. "Going back to take over your kingdom again, Gibney?" he demanded jocosely.
"You say you saw her two months ago?" Mr. Gibney bellowed. "D'ye mean to tell me she's alive?" ”

“ By the side of the history of concrete events, we miss the presentation of those others which are none the less events for being vague, irregular, and wide-reaching, and requiring centuries for their accomplishment. Gibbon's manner of dealing with the first is always good, and sometimes consummate, and equal to anything in historical literature. The thirty-first chapter, with its description of Rome, soon to fall a prey to the Goths and Alaric, is a masterpiece, artistic and spacious in the highest degree ”

“ Let us turn to the lady's account of the same scenes. "I do not know if I told you," she writes to a friend at Lausanne, "that I have seen Gibbon, and it has given me more pleasure than I know how to express. Not indeed that I retain any sentiment for a man who I think does not deserve much" (this little toss of pique or pride need not mislead us) ; "but my feminine vanity could not have had a more complete and honest triumph. He stayed two weeks in Paris, and I had him every day at my house; he has become soft, yielding, humble, decorous to a fault. ”

“ It is not every man that keeps such an easy reckoning as you do of the benefits for which his friends are indebted to him.”
“But what benefit have you had from me?” demanded Gibbon.
“I’ll tell you that,” said the West Highlander. “I’ll tell you that in a moment. You see, I have no less than three strapping lasses of daughters. I have married all the three, and to each one of them I gave a tocher which you provided.”
“Tut!” cried Gibbon laughing, “the man is demented. When did I ever give a tocher to daughter of yours? By St. Mungo, I have a strapping lass of a daughter of my own to portion. ”

“ Wholly devoted to scholarship without pedantry, and to his art without any of the petty vanity of the literary artist, the life of Gibbon was one long sacrifice to the purest literary enthusiasm. He lived to know, and to rebuild his knowledge in a shape as durable and as magnificent as a Greek temple. He was content for years and years to lie unseen, unheard of, while younger men rose past him into rapid reputation. ”

“ This laborious work was evidently Gibbon's own guidebook in his Italian travels, and one sees not only what an admirable preparation it was for the object in view, but what a promise it contained of that scrupulous thoroughness which was to be his mark as an historian. His mind was indeed rapidly maturing, and becoming conscious in what direction its strength lay.
His account of his first impressions of Rome has been often quoted, and deserves to be so again. "My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to affect. ”

“ Count Julian had plunged so deep into guilt and infamy, that his only hope was in the ruin of his country. After the battle of Xeres, he recommended the most effectual measures to the victorious Saracen. "The king of the Goths is slain; their princes have fled before you, the army is routed, the nation is astonished. Secure with sufficient detachments the cities of Bætica; but in person, and without delay, march to the royal city of Toledo, and allow not the distracted Christians either time or tranquillity for the election of a new monarch." Tarik listened to his advice. ”

“ All was still except the voices of those same prophet cocks, crying in the wilderness of the yet sunless world; a moo now and then from the byres; and the occasional stamp of a great hoof in the stable. Gibbie clambered up into the loft, and turning the cheeses about until he came upon the one he had gnawed before, again attacked it, and enlarged considerably the hole he had already made in it. ”

“ If we lay down Gibbon and take up Neander, for instance, we are conscious that with all the greater fulness of detail, engaging candour, and sympathetic insight of the great Berlin Professor, the general impression of the times is less distinct and lasting. There is no specialism in Gibbon; his book is a broad sociological picture in which the whole age is portrayed. ”

“ Gibbon's fifty-sixth chapter begins with a sentence which may be taken as the epitome of the entire history we have to investigate: "The three great nations of the world, the Greeks, the Saracens, and the Franks, encountered each other on the theatre of Italy." I use the more general word, Goths, instead of Franks; and the more accurate word, Arab, for Saracen; but otherwise, the reader will observe that the division is the same as mine. Gibbon does not recognize the Roman people as a nation—but only the Roman power as an empire. ”

“ Again and again I must repeat my hope that she is perfectly satisfied, and that the close of her life may not be embittered by suspicion, fear, or discontent. What new security does she prefer—the funds, a mortgage, or your land? At all events, she must be made easy." So Gibbon left town and lay at Reading on his road to Bath: here he passed about ten days with his step-mother, who was now nearly eighty years of age. "In mind and conversation she is just the same as twenty years ago," he writes to Lord Sheffield; "she has spirits, appetite, legs, and eyes, and talks of living till ninety. ”

“ We may remark in passing that the retreat was often enlivened, or invaded, by friendly tourists from England, whose “frequent incursions” into Switzerland our recluse seems half to lament as an evil. Among his more valued visitors were M. and Mme Necker; Mr Fox also gave him two welcome “days of free and private society” in 1788. Differing as they did in politics, Gibbon’s testimony to the genius and character of the great statesman is highly honourable to both: “Perhaps no human being,” he says, “was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood.” ”

“ In a celebrated and characteristic sentence, he says, "The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legions, and the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire."
If we don't know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote no fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from the other, and all equally bad. A man must have more heart and soul than Gibbon to write a good autobiography. ”

“ CHAPTER VI. LIFE IN LONDON.—PARLIAMENT.—THE BOARD OF TRADE.—THE DECLINE AND FALL.—MIGRATION TO LAUSANNE.
Gibbon's settlement in London as master in his own house did not come too soon. A few more years of anxiety and dependence, such as he had passed of late with his father in the country, would probably have dried up the spring of literary ambition and made him miss his career. He had no tastes to fit him for a country life. The pursuit of farming only pleased him in Virgil's Georgics. He seems neither to have liked nor to have needed exercise, and English rural sports had no charms for him. ”

“ Gibson had dreamed that he was carried by an eagle to Rome, and to Rome he determined to go, ‘if he went there on foot.’ He went thither, taking his unfinished bust of Roscoe with him, but not before he had been introduced to Fuseli, West, Flaxman, Blake, and Chantrey. ”

“ No part can be fairly judged without regard to the remainder. In fact, Gibbon was much more an artist than perhaps be suspected, and less of a philosophic thinker on history than he would have been willing to allow. His shortcomings in this latter respect will be adverted to presently; we are now considering his merits. And among these the very high one of lofty and vigorous narrative stands pre-eminent. The campaigns of Julian, Belisarius, and Heraclius are painted with a dash and clearness which few civil historians have equalled. ”

“ On the spiritual, we have the silent occult growth of the early Church, the conversion of Constantine, the tremendous conflict of hostile sects, the heresy of Arius, the final triumph of Athanasius, the spread of monasticism, the extinction of paganism. Antiquity has ended, the middle ages have begun.
Over all this immense field Gibbon moves with a striking attitude of power, which arose from his consciousness of complete preparation. ”

“ No one, nowadays, one may hope, would think of making Gibbon's conversion a subject of reproach to him. The danger is rather that [16] it should be regarded with too much honour. It unquestionably shows the early and trenchant force of his intellect: he mastered the logical position in a moment; saw the necessity of a criterion of faith; and being told that it was to be found in the practice of antiquity, boldly went there, and abided by the result. But this praise to his head does not extend to his heart. A more tender and deep moral nature would not have moved so rapidly. ”