Poe vs. Gibbon

Poe also mocks the following sentence by Gibbon (emphasis added by Poe himself):

“The Life of Julian, by the Abbé de la Breterie, first introduced me to the man and to the times, and I should be glad to recover my first essay on the truth of the miracle which stopped the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem.”

Poe remarks: “This laughable Gibbonism is still a great favourite with the stelle minores of our literature.”

I do think Gibbon is a great English stylist, though elsewhere in this review Poe hits the nail on the head– the massive scope of Gibbon’s subject means that he has to cram lots of indirect allusion into every sentence. Poe chooses a very good example of a single sentence about Britain from the opening pages of Gibbon’s work:

“The proximity of its situation to that of Gaul, seemed to invite their arms; the pleasing, although doubtful, intelligence of a pearl-fishery, attracted their avarice; and, as Britain was viewed in the light of a distant and insulated world, the conquest scarcely formed any exception to the general system of continental measures; after a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid, maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island submitted to the Roman yoke.”

Poe neglects to mention that Gibbon augments this passage with at least two footnotes. In one of these notes he explains that Julius Caesar was the one who heard of the supposed British pearl-fishery, which turned out to be worthless because the pearls were too dark. In another he gives us a key by saying that the stupid emperor was Claudius, the dissolute one was Nero, and the timid emperor was Domitian. But this assistance via footnote only proves Poe’s point that indirectness often leads to a sort of florid pedantry. Though I wouldn’t want to write like that, I wouldn’t mind writing a bit more like it.

As Poe brilliantly and charitably puts it:

“The immense theme of the decline and fall required precisely the kind of sentence which [Gibbon] habitually employed. A world of essential, or at least of valuable, information or remark, had either to be omitted altogether, or collaterally introduced. In his endeavours thus to crowd in his vast stores of research, much of the artificial will, of course, be apparent; yet I cannot see that any other method would have answered as well.”