Gibbon

“ The gray gibbons of Borneo, who quite successfully made their escape from us, but promptly returned close up to my party in response to the S. O. S. cries of a captured baby gibbon, displayed the sublime courage of parental affection, and of desperation. ”

“ Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up—the gigantic body, the huge, massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing ”

“ It is shortest in the chimpanzee, somewhat longer in the gorilla, still longer in the orang, and remarkably long in the gibbon. In all these instances the fact that the arms exceed the legs in length indicates that they must have played a large and important part in the work of locomotion, and especially so in the case of the gibbon. It is well known, in fact, that the gibbons progress very largely by the aid of their arms, swinging from limb to limb and from tree to tree with extraordinary strength and facility. ”

“ A female of the Hainan gibbon (H. hainanus) in confinement changed from uniform sooty-black (without the white frontal band of the black phase of the hulock) to puce-grey; but it is probable that this was only an individual, or at most a sexual, peculiarity. The range of the genus extends from the southern bank of the Bramaputra in Assam to southern China, the Malay Peninsula, Java, Sumatra and Borneo. ”

“ Did Gibbon lose as much as he thought in missing the scholastic drill of the regular public school and university man? Something he undoubtedly lost: he was never a finished scholar, up to the standard even of his own day. If he had been, is it certain that the accomplishment would have been all gain? It may be doubted. At a later period Gibbon read the classics with the free and eager curiosity of a thoughtful mind. It was a labour of love, of passionate ardour, similar to the manly zeal of the great scholars of the Renaissance. ”

“ He was not one of those men that Gibbon appreciated; but his fame is steadily growing, after a lapse of a thousand years. His whole appearance was manly, cheerful, and dignified. His countenance reflected a child-like serenity. He was one of the few men, like David, who was not spoiled by war and flatteries. ”

“ I by no means completely admired Gibbon, perhaps not more than I do now; but his winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing and killing dead, were often admirably potent and illuminative to me.” In one of the most intimate conversations I ever had with Carlyle he spoke even more distinctly of this his first complete reading of Gibbon in Kirkcaldy. The conversation was in his back-garden in Chelsea, and the occasion was his having been reading Gibbon, or portions of him, again. ”

“ The gibbons are an Indo-Malayan group of monkeylike anthropoids with small, long-nosed faces, and arms so long that when the gibbon stands erect the fingers touch the ground. By means of these long arms they swing themselves through the tree tops with astonishing speed, and are adept at climbing and leaping about the mountain slopes that are their favorite resorts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The faults of Gibbon's style are obvious enough, and its compensatory merits are not far to seek. No one can overlook its frequent tumidity and constant want of terseness. It lacks suppleness, ease, variety. It is not often distinguished by happy [166] selection of epithet, and seems to ignore all delicacy of nuance. A prevailing grandiloquence, which easily slides into pomposity, is its greatest blemish. ”

“ In model and texture the skeleton of the gibbon is the most delicate and graceful of all the apes, and in this respect is superior to that of man. He is the only one of the four apes that can walk in an erect position. In doing this the gibbon is awkward and often uses his arms to balance himself. Sometimes he touches his hands to the ground. ”

“ Should the fowls at midnight become terrified and make an unusual sound like “i-ak, i-ak” someone will die. Should gibbons be heard hooting during the night, they have seen the corpse of someone who will fall from a tree or be drowned. As the gibbon retires to rest even before the sun sets, it must be very seldom that their shouts are heard at night. It is “thianglo” to shoot a gibbon, because at the Thimzing a man and a wife were changed into those animals. ”

“ Gibbon now began to fear that he had an old age of poverty before him. He had pursued knowledge with single-hearted loyalty and now became aware that from a worldly point of view knowledge is not often a profitable investment. A more dejecting discovery cannot be made by the sincere scholar. He is conscious of labour and protracted effort, which the prosperous professional man and tradesman who pass him on their road to wealth with a smile of scornful pity have never known. ”

“ In one Kenyah house a fantastic figure of the gibbon is carved on the ends of all the main crossbeams of the house, and the chief said that this has been their custom for many generations. He told us that it is the custom, when these beams are being put up, to kill a pig and divide its flesh among the men who are working, and no woman is allowed to come into the house until this has been done. None of his people will kill a gibbon, though other Kenyahs will kill and probably eat it. ”

“ The gibbon, better adapted to biped progression, and having a less heavy jaw, has no skull-crests. Further, with it, the ventricles of Morgagni, that is to say, the little pouches situated behind the vocal cord in the larynx, never develop (except in one species, Hylobates syndactylus) into enormous air-sacs as in the orang-utan. In this respect, the gibbon approaches much nearer to man than the other anthropoids, but it is also more distinguished from him than the others by the excessive length of the arms, or, to be more exact, of the pectoral limbs. ”

“ Gibbon reached Paris on the 28th January, 1763; thirty-six days, as he tells us, after the disbanding of the militia. He remained a little over three months in the French capital, which on the whole pleased him so well that he thinks that if he had been independent and rich, he might have been tempted to make it his permanent residence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Gibbon might have thought of the case of Madame de Maintenon, and how her reputation fared in the hands of the vindictive courtiers of Versailles; how a woman, cold as ice and pure as snow, was freely charged with the most abhorrent vices without an atom of foundation. ”

“ Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds were Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Fox, Gibbon, and Sheridan. Of these Gibbon is not the least distinguished. He is an illustrious example of what an ordinary personality can accomplish by reason of an extraordinary devotion to one purpose. Some few men achieve fame by their brilliant versatility; some, as in the case of Samuel Johnson, by their commanding personal force; Gibbon has won a permanent place in literary history by spending his life in doing one thing. ”

“ We see Gibbon very fairly in this remark. He had tenderness, steady and warm attachments, but no passion.
Nearly two years elapsed after his father's death, before he was able to secure from the wreck of his estate a sufficient competence to establish himself in London. His house was No. 7, Bentinck Street, near Manchester Square, then a remote suburb close to the country fields. His housekeeping was that of a solitary bachelor, who could afford an occasional dinner-party. ”

“ Gibbon that for going farther and not marrying him she had not fared worse. The rather acid allusion to "opulence" is found in both letters; but much more pronounced in hers than in his. Each hints that the other thought too much of wealth. But he does so with delicacy, and only by implication; she charges him coarsely with vulgar admiration for it. We may reasonably suspect that riches had been the subject of not altogether smooth conversation between them, in the later part of the evening, perhaps, after M. Necker had retired in triumph to bed. ”

“ They have black fur with white breasts, and go about usually in pairs, swinging from branch to branch with incredible agility, and making the forest resound with their strange cachinatory cry...."—T. Lewin, A Fly on the Wheel, 374.
1884.—"He then ... describes a gibbon he had (not an historian nor a book, but a specimen of Hylobates hooluck) who must have been wholly delightful. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But its sustained vigour [167] and loftiness will always be uncommon; above all its rapidity and masculine length of stride are quite admirable. When he takes up his pen to describe a campaign, or any great historic scene, we feel that we shall have something worthy of the occasion, that we shall be carried swiftly and grandly through it all, without the suspicion of a breakdown of any kind being possible. An indefinable stamp of weightiness is impressed on Gibbon's writing; he has a baritone manliness which banishes everything small, trivial, or weak. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In two memorable chapters Gibbon has allowed his prejudices to mar his work as an historian. But two chapters out of seventy-one constitute a small proportion. In the remainder of his work he is as free from bias and unfairness as human frailty can well allow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus, in consequence of his own strange self-neglect and imprudence, was extinguished one of the most richly-stored minds that ever lived. Occurring when it did, so near the last summons, Gibbon's prospective hope of continued life "for ten, twelve, or twenty years" is harshly pathetic, and full of that irony which mocks the vain cares of men. ”

“ Gibbon might well say that the militia was unfit for and unworthy of him.
Yet it is quite astonishing to see, as recorded in his journal, how keen an interest he still managed to retain in literature in the midst of all this dissipation, and how fertile he was of schemes and projects of future historical works to be prosecuted under more favourable auspices. Subject after subject occurred to him as eligible and attractive; he caresses the idea for a time, then lays it aside for good reasons. First, he pitched upon the expedition of Charles VIII. of France into Italy. ”

“ If the gibbon, which [115] belongs to the type of our supposed ancestors, has a brain relatively smaller than ours, it is otherwise with the three members of the genus cebus given in the table. The latter are superior to the anthropoid; the two first show exactly the same relation as the infant and youth; the third surpasses the adult man. ”

“ Not Voltaire himself is more perspicuous than Gibbon. Everything is in its place, and disposed in such apparently natural sequence that the uninitiated are apt to think the matter could not have been managed otherwise. It is a case, if there ever was one, of consummate art concealing every trace, not only of art, but even of effort. Of course the grasp and penetrating insight which are implied here, were part of Gibbon's great endowment, which only Nature could give. But it was fortunate that his genius was educated in the best school for bringing out its innate quality. ”