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The religious episode was liquidated: after eighteen months of earnest but polite dialectic with his Swiss tutor Gibbon decided to suspend his enquiries and receive the sacrament. History had sent him to Rome, and logic, with a growing indifference to the subject-matter, sent him far across the opposite frontier. The only permanent consequence of his lapse and recovery was a delight in the refinements of theological debate, and a profound conviction of the worthlessness of religious emotion. As an ecclesiastical historian and an ironist, Gibbon owed much to those encounters with M. Pavilliard. Later, it pleased him to reflect that Bayle had followed the same course, from Protestantism to Rome and from Rome to a universal Protestantism of his own making. ‘Je suis protestant, car je proteste contre toutes les religions.’ This profession of faith Gibbon could at all times have signed with perfect sincerity. Once when pressed by a friend, he declared himself, emphatically, a theist, with no interest in a future life, and his final opinion is recorded in the chapter where he traces the history of Reform from the Paulicians to his own times. The Protestants had overthrown a vast fabric of superstition: but they had kept the inspiration of Scripture and added, in the Justification theology, fresh absurdities of their own: their chief service to humanity was accidental and unintended. By appealing to private judgment they made the ultimate triumph of reason inevitable, a triumph to be qualified, however, by the doubt whether rational religion can ever be sufficient to satisfy the emotions, or regulate the conduct, of the vulgar.

Released from controversy, he gave himself wholly up to study. His eighteenth year was a second spring. His tutor appreciated both his gifts and his defects, and set his course accordingly. For the first time in his life he was made to read systematically. One omission indeed Pavilliard, an excellent schoolmaster but no great scholar, was not equipped to supply. Gibbon had missed the steady drill in conjugations and declensions which a school provides, and to the end he was capable of mistakes which a very ordinary schoolboy learns to avoid. He was never, in the Westminster and Oxford sense, a scholar, and when he disclaimed the scrupulous ear of a well-flogged critic, he knew that he did not possess it. His genders and his quantities were both shaky: he will write ἁγίος πέλαγος, and begin a hexameter with Optimus est Niger. A friend who looked over his posthumous papers declared that his early manuscript was faulty beyond belief. Even Voltaire, who had passed through the excellent discipline of a Jesuit school, had the advantage of him here. In particular, Gibbon was never really at home in Greek, and sometimes he seems to be skating over awful depths of ignorance. ‘The name of Werdan has very little of a Greek aspect or sound. In transposing the Greek character from left to right, might not the Arabs produce from the familiar appellation of Andrew, something like the anagram Werdan?’ Certainly they might, if the Greeks had called Andreas Andrew. But they did not, and to find Gibbon in the full tide of his History proffering this nonsense in cold print is a warning, and a consolation, to us all.

But unwearied, unimpatient, he made his way under Pavilliard’s guidance through the main body of Roman literature. Logic, mathematics and international law were taken as recreations. He began to write, always in French or Latin, letters to classical editors, essays on points of interpretation, such things as would now find their way into the Classical Review. One of his emendations (a fairly easy shot) has proved acceptable to editors.^[1] Over another it is best to draw a veil. Latin versification may be an idle pursuit, but it does prevent a man from pronouncing Aetōlus Aetŏlus.

Daily translating French into Latin and Latin into French, he lost his ear for English idiom. In fact, by the time he was eighteen he could hardly write English at all.

These people are very free in all the extent of the natural rights and it seems as if the liberty banished from almost all the rest of the earth has chose her retreat here. Nothing diverts them so much as to hear talk of obeying the King. That makes them laugh. They cannot adjust the idea of submission with that of a real man. Every Iroquois thinks himself sovereign and pretends to be subordinate of none.

The birth makes a gentleman, the virtue alone a knight. How great lord soever one was it was not allowed to wear the cloak before one was knighted.

And this is how he announces his re-conversion in a letter to his aunt:

I have at length good news to tell you; I am now good protestant and extremely glad of it. Brought up with all the ideas of the Church of England, I could scarce resolve to communion with Presbyterians as all the people of this country are. I at last got over it in considering that whatever difference there may be between this church and ours in the government and discipline they still regard us as brethren and profess the same faith as us. I do assure you I feel a joy pure and the more so as I know it to be not only innocent but laudable.

After this mollifying introduction, he proceeds to business. He had been prevailed upon by an English visitor to play Pharaon and had lost forty guineas. He demanded his revenge, and lost seventy more. ‘Never have I felt a despair equal to that I had then. I was a great while hesitating upon the most violent parties.’ The party he resolved on was to borrow a horse, travel to London, and raise the money. But Pavilliard was on his tracks.

Was successful as far as Geneva, but there the difficulty I found to dispose of my horse having stopped me some days, Pavilliard who had perceived my evasion, ran after me and half entreaties half force brought me back to Lausanne with him.

The escapade seems to have caused more amusement than annoyance at home. Kitty passed the letter on to his father; it survives with his stepmother’s endorsement--’Old cat to refuse his request.’ Pavilliard pleaded for the erring child, and Mr. Gibbon paid up.

Gibbon had from nature a happy temperament. His first few months in Lausanne were uncomfortable, but he soon reconciled himself to the contrast between the luxury of Magdalen and the chilly, not over-cleanly, quarters provided by Madame Pavilliard, and the mutton roasted twice with a gash in it. Mr. Gibbon’s instructions were that he should be kept at home on short pocket-money, but Pavilliard got the régime relaxed, and he was gradually allowed to make a place for himself in local society: ‘though I am the Englishman here who spends least money, I am he who is most generally liked.’ He learnt to walk through a minuet and to draw: he became a Free Mason: he formed the friendship with Deyverdun which gave so much contentment to his later years. Pavilliard took him round Switzerland to observe, not the landscape, but the institutions of the country, and to gaze with Protestant abhorrence on the splendour and superstition of Einsiedeln. The addition of a stepmother to the family circle, announced not by his father but by a Hampshire neighbour, and the possible effect, if she had children, on his own fortunes, alarmed him. He sent affectionate and respectful messages to the lady, but he was annoyed, and at a distance disposed to hate her. His father, possibly as a set-off, offered him a tour in France or Italy: he declined. ‘I never liked young travellers: they go too raw to make any great remarks, and they lose a time which is (in my opinion) the most precious part of a man’s life.’ He was reading ten or twelve hours a day, and he wanted to finish his studies at Cambridge or a Dutch university. The world has reason to be grateful to M. Pavilliard, who taught Gibbon how to read; but his economy of time and purpose, like the even clerkly hand in which he kept his journals, all neatly paged and headed, with hardly an erasure in a hundred lines, suggests a throwback to his commercial grandfather.

At Lausanne Gibbon ceased to be an Englishman, but he did not become a Frenchman. He was a young provincial, and a certain provincial foppishness hung about him to the end of his life. His studies were not of the modern fashionable kind. His solitary education kept him out of the main stream of contemporary thought, and it may be doubted whether the latest literature was to be found in the Pastor’s library. One influence indeed could not be excluded. The great event of the years while Gibbon was at Lausanne was the arrival of M. de Voltaire at Les Délices in the territory of Geneva. He was close on sixty, incomparably the most famous and the most influential man in Europe. The Venerable Consistory of Geneva were not so easily impressed. They disapproved of the theatre, and Voltaire, to gratify his passion for the stage, had to form a private troupe, outside their jurisdiction, at Monrepos, near Lausanne. Gibbon got to know them, supped with them, listened to the old-fashioned declamation of Voltaire on the stage. He was introduced to the great man, who received him with an indifference which helped him afterwards to realize that Voltaire was perhaps not so great a man as he had thought.

Of Voltaire’s influence on Gibbon as a historian I must say something later. Meanwhile, of far more importance than this casual encounter was his reading of Montesquieu and Pascal. Gibbon used to read the Provinciales once a year, and his mingling of truth and malice in an innocent antithesis is often of the purest Pascalian quality, as for example when he writes of the Popes’ attitude to the Filioque clause: ‘They condemned the innovation but they acquiesced in the sentiment.’ Or more broadly (and there is plenty of fun in Pascal):

In the last and fatal siege of Syracuse, her citizens displayed some remnant of the spirit which had formerly resisted the powers of Athens and Carthage. They stood about twenty days against the battering-rams and catapultae, the mines and tortoises of the besiegers,

--really it seems as if Gibbon, who thought Lord Heathfield of Gibraltar ‘a glorious old fellow,’ had for once taken fire--’and the place might have been relieved if the mariners of the Imperial fleet had not been detained at Constantinople in building a church to the Virgin Mary.’ Pascal would have condemned the irreverence, but no one would have enjoyed the expression of it more keenly.

The influence of Montesquieu was still more extensive. There are few famous books about which it is so difficult to make up one’s mind as the Esprit des Lois: Macaulay’s impertinent image of the Learned Pig will intrude itself into the picture. But one thing may be affirmed with confidence. Montesquieu’s apprehension of Impersonal Causes was a positive and memorable advance in historic method, of which Gibbon was the first historian to avail himself. His magnificent deduction, for example, of the history of the nomads from the nomad way of life is much finer than anything in Montesquieu, because Gibbon had a much finer intellect. But without Montesquieu’s guidance it could not have been written. Very often, no doubt, Montesquieu attaches the wrong cause to the wrong effect. But that there must be a cause, and that the cause is to be looked for not in the individual will, in the wisdom of the good, or the cleverness of the wicked, but in circumstances, in climate, in the culture appropriate to a particular time and place, all this, though it seems elementary doctrine now, had to be discovered once, and, so far as any idea can ever be self-born, it was the issue of Montesquieu’s unaided meditation. Prolem sine matre creatam he wrote on his title-page, a device which few philosophers could take with equal right. And his style, the pungent blend of epigram and solemnity, not unlike what admiring disciples have related of Lord Acton’s conversation, might very well seem to a young reader to be compact of rich oracular wisdom. For a time Gibbon copied his idol with the fervour of a youthful passion, and traces of his early allegiance mark his writing to the end. French critics have praised the skill with which Montesquieu enlarged the language by casting back to Latin idiom.

La Suède était comme répandue dans les déserts de Pologne.

Gibbon was equally diligent, but less successful. In Siam a just army is divided into four brigades: the Praetorian prefect moderated the trades which he regulated: a general pervaded a province by marching through it, and Aurelian dejected the invaders of Italy not by pointing out the difficulties of their enterprise, but by slaughtering them in large numbers. That military engines were occasionally issued to the army is not meant as a reflexion on the Roman War Office. Apart from these floral tributes, Gibbon’s mature judgment reserved for his master one signal honour. The only modern writer whom he transcribes at length in the Decline and Fall is the President de Montesquieu.