32. Gorgeousness in matter and meanness in manner

The Barleycorn family have been making use of their National Trust membership and taking advantage of the weekend's 2p per litre dip in the price of petrol, visiting two of the nation's cherished tourism honeypots : Stonehenge and Windsor Castle. Barleycorn Sr is disgruntled to note that Places of Interest seem to have universally dispensed with wordy plaques and notice boards and are now all proud to inflict an mp3 player and headphones on the touring classes. In opening the audio guide to Windsor Castle spent a fair bit of time explaining what arrow slits and battlements are and the scenarios in which they might have been employed, after which it explained nothing, having been switched off.

At Stonehenge it seemed reasonable to dispense with whatever facts and fancies may have comprised the tour contents, as I am fairly sure, having read the odd newspaper article here and there concerning whichever latest archaeological speculation about the site, that precious little indeed is known about the stones or exactly who put them there and how. EB9's brief article reasonably reports suggestions that the stones weren't erected by the Romans, but most probably by druids, perhaps between the 1st BC and the 6th century AD. Although I am entirely confident that later archaeologists have rightly put vastly earlier dates to the structures, it is interesting to note the remark in EB9 that "Stonehenge was first mentioned by Nennius, in the 9th century, who asserts that it was erected in commemoration of the 400 nobles who were treacherously slain near the spot by Hengist, in 472."

Looking to see what else Britannica may have on the subject of Stonehenge, the Index directed me to volume II and the article ARCHITECTURE, by T. Hayter Lewis, Professor of Architecture, University College, London and George Edmund Streep, late Royal Academician. I found myself entirely distracted from my purpose by a caustic and unsparing attack, quite startling in its vehemence, on the architectural merits of St Peter's Cathedral in Rome. It would make an entertaining audio tour of the site.

"[...]The front of St Peter's is not more distinguished by its magnitude than by its littleness and deformity. [...]It is divided into three unequal stories, within the height of the columns, whose entablature is surmounted by a windowless attic. In length it is frittered into a multitude of compartments, between which not the slightest harmony is maintained, while tawdriness and poverty are the distinguishing characteristics of its detail. A total absence of everything which produces grandeur and beauty in architecture, marks, indeed, the whole of the exterior of the edifice, except the cupola, than which, if its bad connection with the building out of which it grows is overlooked, architecture seldom produced a more magnificent object. Internally, the structure is open to similar praise and similar dispraise. Gorgeousness in matter and meanness in manner characterise the interior of St Peter's, except the sublime concave which is formed by its redeeming feature without.

[...]The tawdry and inappropriate sculptured decorations of the Renaissance school can nowhere be criticised with more advantage than in St Peter's. It is not too much to say that, throughout the interior, there is scarcely an ornament which is not offensive ; whilst not one of them has the slightest natural connection with, or use in, a sacred building. Perhaps sculpture never reached so profound a bathos as the hideous cherubs which are stuck, like petrified acrobats, against all the piers of St Peter's ; and when we hear of such a building being treated as a model for our guidance in the completion of St Paul's, we are driven devoutly to hope that St Paul's may never in that sense be completed at all. Few people ever seem to trouble themselves to look at any part of St Peter's except the entrance front and the dome. If they would examine the rest of the exterior, they would find it to be a building without one other redeeming feature, or a single grace of outline or detail, and so absolutely unscientific in its constructional arrangements as to be beneath contempt as a complete work of architecture."

St Paul's Cathedral : beneath contempt, ha! Put that in yer pipe and smoke it, ye cherub-obsessed Italianate fops. (More of this article can be read at the ever-indispensable www.1902encyclopedia.com)

My brief and inadequate examination of the article does not reveal which of the two authors is responsible for this particular passage, but it does not seem to be beyond the bounds of possibility that George Streep, late Royal Academician, may indeed have been carried from this mortal coil by a fit of apoplexy after penning this spirited and sustained diatribe.

(Apoplexy, as this same volume usefully informs us, being "commonly understood to apply to a fit of sudden insensibility occurring in connection with some diseased condition of the brain.")

8. (ii) Musing amidst the ruins

Let us return, then, with Mr Rogers and Reverend Black to 18th century England, to find the young Edward Gibbon, himself freshly returned to these shores and living on an allowance in his father's home, beginning a "work of accumulation" building up his father's library.

"I am not conscious," says he, "of having ever bought a book from a motive of ostentation ; every volume , before it was deposited on the shelf, was either read or sufficiently examined" ; he also mentions that he soon adopted the tolerating maxim of the elder Pliny, that no book is ever so bad as to be absolutely good for nothing.

Londoners will no doubt particularly appreciate this maxim, having noted that all those supposed commuters apparently reading a weighty volume called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the Tube last year were actually undercover police officers poised ready to brain any would be backpack bombers with the aforesaid quote novel unquote.

Somewhat alienated by his French education, Gibbon lived in the London of 1760 in books rather than society. He "withdrew without reluctance from the noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure." Which is sorrier, I wonder, fashionable dissipation at a husband's request, or dissipation without pleasure? Certainly, if you are going to dissipate, you should at least enjoy it.

Having read nothing of Gibbon's writing except what is quoted in the Ninth's essay from his autobiography, I have learnt that it was regrettably Frenchified in expression, owing to his formative experience on the continent. Rogers and Black now tell me that over the next 25 years that Gibbon lived in London, he was encouraged to "addict himself to an assiduous study of the more idiomatic English writers".

Of his admiration of Hume's style, of its nameless grace and simple elegance, he has left us a strong expression, when he tells us that it often compelled him to close the historian's volumes with a mixed sensation of delight and despair.

So, in 1761, Gibbon made his first publication, in French. This was done in compliance with his father's wishes, a man who seems to be quite Machiavellian if not Mansonian in his usage of his family, in as much as he "thought that the proof of some literary talent might introduce him favourably to public notice [seems reasonable enough], and secure the recommendation of his friends for some appointment in connexion with the mission of the English plenipotentiaries to the congress at Augsburg which was at that time in contemplation." Interesting fellow, this Pa Gibbon. Unfortunately, being in French, the book was received with "cold indifference" in England, although after Gibbon's later success, the rare first printing first sold for half-a-crown had "risen to the fanciful price of a guinea or thirty shillings" on ye Bay.

Gibbon then spent three years as a Captain in the Hampshire militia, before his father packed him off on that most fashionable - but edifying rather than dissipating - of 18th century pursuits, a Grand Tour of Europe, which at length brought young Edward to Rome. (Whether Gibbon Snr had some colourful ulterior motive concerning supernumeraries at the General Synod or perhaps the predisposition of eunuchs in some sultan's harem, Rogers and Black do not reveal). And now I must quote quotation, for

...the words in which [Gibbon] has alluded to the feelings with which he approached [Rome] are such as cannot be omitted from any sketch of Gibbon, however brief. "My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to affect. But at the distance of twenty five years I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the Eternal City. After a sleepless night, I trod with a lofty step the ruins of the forum ; each memorable spot, where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye ; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation... It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."