Edward Gibbon · Civilisations
Gibbon’s incomparable style - the elegant, ironic, magisterial prose that made history a supreme literary art and embodied the cool skepticism of the Enlightenment.
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is treasured not only as a monument of scholarship but as one of the supreme masterpieces of English prose - a work whose style is as celebrated as its substance. Gibbon wrote in a magnificent, elegant, balanced, magisterial prose, full of irony, wit, and rhetorical art, that made the writing of history a supreme literary achievement. His sentences are masterpieces of balance, rhythm, and elegance; his irony is incomparable; his command of the grand sweep and the telling detail is masterful; his style is at once learned and elegant, magisterial and witty, grave and ironic. The Decline and Fall is, in its style, one of the supreme achievements of English prose - history written as great literature, scholarship raised to the level of literary art.
One of the most delightful features of Gibbon’s style is his footnotes - the thousands of learned notes that document his sources but that are also famous for their wit, irony, and sly asides. In his footnotes, Gibbon not only cites his evidence but comments on it, often with devastating wit and irony - skewering credulous sources, making sly observations, deflating pretensions, and indulging in asides too risqué or irreverent for the main text. The footnotes are a parallel performance of wit and irony running beneath the magisterial main narrative - a place where Gibbon’s skeptical, ironic, mischievous intelligence plays freely, commenting on his sources and subjects with a wit and irreverence that delight readers and that make the footnotes themselves famous. (One scholar quipped that Gibbon’s footnotes are where he kept his sense of humour and his indecency.) The famous Gibbonian footnotes are a delightful and characteristic feature of his style, and a parallel performance of the wit and irony that pervade his great work.
Gibbon’s famous and characteristic view of history is captured in one of his most quoted lines: that ‘history is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ This disenchanted, skeptical, somewhat pessimistic view of history - as largely a record of human crime, folly, and misfortune, of the failings and disasters of humanity - is characteristic of Gibbon’s outlook and of one strand of Enlightenment thought. It reflects a clear-eyed, unsentimental, skeptical view of human history and human nature - a refusal to idealise the past or humanity, an awareness of the pervasiveness of human folly, crime, and suffering in history, a disenchanted recognition of how much of history is a record of human failings and disasters. This view gives Gibbon’s history its characteristic tone - magisterial but disenchanted, learned but skeptical, grand but ironic - and reflects a clear-eyed, unsentimental view of human history and nature that is one of the marks of his outlook and one of the sources of his irony.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Gibbon’s style combined elegant, ironic, magisterial prose with Enlightenment skepticism. Explain what made his writing a supreme literary art and what his irony achieved, in your own words.
Leads to Voltaire.
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