46. The octave of Christmas Day

"NEW YEAR'S DAY. The first day (calends) of January, as marking the beginning of the year, was observed as a public holiday in Rome from at least the time of the Julian reformation of the calendar. Ovid (Fas., i. 63 sq.) alludes to the abstinence from litigation and strife, the smoking altars, the white-robed processions to the Capitol ; and later writers describe the exchanges of visits, the giving and receiving of presents (strenae), the masquerading, and the feasting with which the day was in their time celebrated throughout the empire. [...]

"When about the 5th century the 25th of December had gradually become a fixed festival commemorative of the Nativity, the 1st January ultimately also assumed a specially sacred character as the octave of Christmas Day and as the anniversary of the circumcision of our Lord, and as such it still figures in the calendars of the various branches of the Eastern and of the Western Church, though only as a feast of subordinate importance. The practice of giving and receiving "strenae" for luck about the beginning of the year survives in such institutions as the French "jour d'étrennes" and the Scottish "Handsel Monday." The Persians also, it may be mentioned, celebrated the beginning of the year (nev-ruz) by exchanging presents of eggs."

From vol. 17 (Motanabbi - Ormuzd) of the ninth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1884).

Henceforth I will be celebrating the octave of my birthday on the 1st of November, and will be expecting strenae, thank you.

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. (iii) An exquisite tessellation

In 1772 Edward Gibbon finally began writing the work conceived in October 1764 in the ruins of the forum. The death of his father had left him with the "leisure and opportunity" to begin his great work. He "long brooded over the chaos of materials he had amassed", but by February 1776 the first volume was published. The final volume saw press shortly before its author's 51st birthday, in 1788. Before his death in 1794 Gibbon was able to write a very thorough autobiography, giving Rogers and Black the material for their essay in Britannica. In the closing thousand words or so they give their 19th century judgement on the man and his work. Although "not more than 56 inches in height" and possessing a "shrill and piercing voice", he was (in adulthood and until the end, at least) blessed with good health,

an exceptionally vigorous brain, and a stomach "almost too good," united to bestow upon him a vast capacity alike for work and enjoyment. This capacity he never abused so as to burden his conscience or depress his spirits...

[H]e was not a stranger to the delights of quiet contemplation of the beauties and grandeurs of nature. His manners, if formal, were refined ; his conversation, when he felt himself at home, interesting and unaffected ; and that he was capable alike of feeling and inspiring a very constant friendship there are many witnesses to show... That his temperament at the same time was frigid and comparatively passionless cannot be denied... His most ardent admirers, however, are constrained to admit that he was deficient in large-hearted benevolence ; that he was destitute of any "enthusiasm of humanity" ; and that so far as every sort of religious yearning or aspiration is concerned, his poverty was almost unique.

Decline and Fall shows the clear evidence of the many qualities possessed by Gibbon's great genius.

Of the kind and amount of ability displayed in that truly immortal work it would be almost impossible to speak in language of exaggerated praise, - the grandeur and vastness of conception, the artistic grouping, the masterly fulness and accuracy of detail, the richness and vividness of description, the coruscating liveliness, the polished sarcasm, the pungent wit.

[...] It is the amplest historical canvas ever spread, the largest historic paining ever executed by a single hand; and only a comprehensive and orderly intellect of the highest rank could have grappled as Gibbon has done with the task of blending that vast array of nations, in all their varieties of costume, habit, language, and religion, into one picturesque and harmonious whole.

[...] Never has historian evinced greater logical sagacity in making comparitively obscure details yield important inferences, or held with firmer hand the balance in the case of conflicting probabilities ; by no one has sounder judgement or greater self-control been, on the whole, more uniformly exhibited in cases where it is so easy for learned enthusiasm to run into fanciful hypotheses.

Such praise, however, would be hollow without admitting the failings to which Mr Rogers and Reverend Black have already alluded.

Even when the occasional Gallicisms and grammatical absurdities pointed out by the industry of critics have been willingly overlooked, there yet remains something to be said on the defects of its style. [...] [W]ith all its great merits it is too often formal and inflexible, and is apt to pall on the ear by the too frequent recurrence of the same cadence at frequent intervals, and the too unsparing use of antithesis. It is not veined marble, but an exquisite tessellation ; not the fluent naturally-winding stream, but a stately aqueduct, faced with stone, adorned with wooded embankments, or flowing over noble arches, but an aqueduct still.

There are more than defects of style in the Decline and Fall. Mr Gibbon believed that the rise of Christianity played a fundamental part in the fall of Rome, and Gibbon regretted this, with the full expression of his polished sarcasm and pungent wit.

[I]t is not necessary to adduce any minor instances, when it can be shown that he is out of harmony with the truth, or at least with the truth as apprehended by the 19th century, in a matter so fundamental as his conception of that empire which declined and fell, and that Christianity which, as he rightly supposes, contributed to it's overthrow.

[...] Gibbon's enthusiasm for the empire of Trajan and the Antonines - that "solid fabric of human greatness" - is undisguised and perfectly sincere ; to his thinking, if the earth ever enjoyed a golden age, it was then. The world was happy because it was under a government which it could never think of questioning or resisting.

[...] It is manifest, however, that to him, thinking of the Roman empire as he did, it was well-nigh impossible to be just to Christianity. He could never forgive a religion which, in his opinion, had overthrown "the solid fabric of human greatness," and given to the world the sorry sight of bare-footed friars chanting psalms on the spot where once had been the august worship in which everybody took part but nobody believed. [...]

Comparing "superstition" with "superstition," virtue with virtue, vice with vice, Gibbon had formed a deliberate preference for the religion and ethics of ancient Rome.

And need Rogers and Black spell out the particular fault of this preference?

Philosophical students of history [...] may now be said to be almost unanimous [...] in finding that the phenomenon called Christianity did mean for mankind a higher conception of truth and a nobler conception of duty.

And eight out of ten owners say their cats prefer it.
[The original article is one of many available in full at 1902encyclopedia.com]

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."

8. (i) Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition

I believe that it is safe to assume that the vast majority of readers of the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had experienced the blessings of a classical education, and however much their Latin might have been learned by rote and from the vulgus books and cribs of Tom Brown's School Days, that this widespread and at its least passing familiarity with the thoughts, words and actions of the Greeks and Romans so looked to and emulated by our 19th century forebears, is a cultural achievement largely lost today.

The Ninth has extensive entries on the subject of Rome and all the great Romans, but of course no self-improving Victorian's shelves could be expected to be without all six volumes of the first great academic attempt to completely answer a given question: Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A history of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire can indeed be found in Volume 10's essay on GIBBON by Henry Rogers and the Reverend J. S. Black (largely cribbed, in the true spirit of classicism, from Gibbon's autobiography). [The article is one of many available in full at 1902encyclopedia.com]

Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794) "one of the most celebrated historians of any age or country" easily merits the 9 pages - somewhere over 10,000 words by my calculation - devoted to his life and works. Throughout the Ninth we will find portrait after portrait of the great men of history (and the portraits are mostly of the men, I'm afraid), again and again we will be shown the circumstances, opportunities and adversities that forged their characters, and invited to consider their noble qualities and their tragic failings.

Gibbon's path to greatness was not diverted by a childhood plagued by illness and a mother prone to "the occasional plunge into fashionable dissipation in compliance with her husband's wishes". I'm not entirely certain what fashionable dissipation might be but it returns 1,850 hits from Google, and will join the ranks of opprobrious euphemisms for pleasure that I am slowly acquiring. Ma Gibbon is at least excused her shame for having acted under marital obligation. Of the foundation of his own classical education Gibbon is quotably succinct:

By the common methods of discipline, at the expense of many tears and some blood, I purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax.

It is in reading the Arabian Nights, Pope's Homer and Dryden's Virgil for pleasure that Gibbon credits the germination of his intellectual development. The best of England's public (ie, private) schools gave him little in the way of education, and it was only when his repeated illnesses led to his being tutored at home, and to an indulgence of his "indiscriminate appetite for reading", that his passion for learning grew.

I am much taken with Gibbon's self-appraisal in his first attempt at authorship, whilst a young student at Magdalen College:

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

That first book was never written, and whatever greatness Gibbon might then have wrought was lost owing to Blogger being almost two hundred and fifty years from inception.

Gibbon's studies at Oxford (the "fourteen most idle and unproductive" months of his life) were curtailed by a Jesuit inveigling him with the "doctrines of Popery" - his father, outraged by this base betrayal ratted-out the young turncoat to Magdalen, who in full accordance with the law of the land, expelled the apostate. Gibbon Snr then packed his son off to Lausanne to the care of a Calvinist minister for five years to straighten him out. Owing to his master not speaking English, young Gibbon was forced to immerse himself in French language and thought, with profitable results as far as intellectual discipline, although regrettably a degree of gallification "tinged his style to the last". Rogers and Black seem relieved to report that during his years in Switzerland, Gibbon rejected the "articles of the Romish creed" and returned to Protestantism.

Although Gibbon studied and improved his moral character with rigour in Lausanne, he still found time to shower his blessings upon "such society as the place had to offer". He wrote in a 1755 letter to his maiden aunt:

I find a great many agreeable people here, see them sometimes, and can say upon the whole, without vanity, that, though I am the Englishman here who spends the least money, I am he who is most generally liked.

Had I a maiden aunt I would be most happy to pen her a similar missive from some benighted corner of the globe, and I think that this should not be counted the least of Gibbons' accomplishments.

Gibbon had himself introduced to Voltaire, learned to appreciate theatre beyond "idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman", and fell in love with one Mlle Susan Churchod.

That the passion which she inspired in him was tender, pure, and fitted to raise to a higher level a nature which in some respects was in some need of such elevation will be doubted by none but the hopelessly cynical[.]

Alas, on return to Blighty Pa Gibbon made it clear that his son would not be entering a "strange alliance" with the daughter of the pasteur of Crassier and so

After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate ; I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son ; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life.

1758 sees Gibbon's formative years at a close, with a young man who in spite of being "sometimes a little extravagant, and sometimes a little dissipated" is nonetheless

a sober, discreet, calculating Epicurean philosopher, who sought the summum bonum of man in temperate, regulated, and elevated pleasure.

His great works yet to come, we can see here a man in whom the capacity for genius is clearly marked, a unique product of his era, whose autodidacticism was doubtless the cause of admiration from the editors and readers of Britannica a century later, and should be an inspiration and shining example to ye, the enWikified youth of today.