Country-Squire Roman

EDWARD GIBBON: MEMOIRS OF MY LIFE. Edited from the manuscripts by Georges A. Bonnard. 346 pages. Funk & Wagnalls. $10.

In the contemporary imagination, Edward Gibbon seems to be eternally posed against a painted backdrop of the Roman Empire, proudly holding the six volumes of Decline and Fall as if he presumed to be part of Roman history himself. Yet no matter how long readers stare--it has been nearly 200 years now--the country-squire Englishman and his awesome subject still make a curious match.

Gibbon was a small man, just over five feet, and so fat that when he knelt to a lady she had to summon a servant to hoist him to his feet. Rather fussily elegant in his dress--flowered velvet suit, lots of ruffles, snuffbox to flutter over--Gibbon exuded a tepid blandness. Joshua Reynolds painted a deadly portrait of him. His profile is distinctly not that of a Roman emperor. He has the eyes of a maiden aunt, a tiny Cupid's mouth, and a second chin far more impressive than the first. Even his hands manage to look pudgily repressed.

An exhaustive version of the unfinished yet classic work popularly known as Gibbon's Autobiography, edited by Swiss Specialist Georges Bonnard, is now out in the U.S. Bonnard includes Gibbon's notes, his own, and two appendices. Nothing in these pages, however, suggests that Reynolds' portrait was misleading. The alliance of Gibbon and Rome remains one of those successful marriages that amaze by sheer illogic.

Momentary Glow. Gibbon got off to an unlikely start to be historian of anything. Until he was in his teens, he was so frail that his father, Edward Gibbon, gave the name Edward to several succeeding sons--just in case. By his own account, young Gibbon "swallowed more Physic than food," had a "strange nervous affection" in his legs, and was bitten by "a dog most vehemently suspected of madness."

At 16, he became a Roman Catholic. His distressed father shipped him to Switzerland, and on Calvin's home ground the conversion was undone. "My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm," Gibbon wrote. Yet once Catholicism, which he had described as "a momentary glow of Enthusiasm," had faded, he rekindled the glow for a girl he met during his Swiss exile, Susanne Curchod, destined to be remembered as the mother of the writer and celebrated salon keeper, Mme. de Stael. The glow was not strong enough to survive separation and the disapproval of relatives.

Gibbon's one ruling passion, contracted at the age of 27, nothing and nobody could cool. In famous words that still move a reader, Gibbon recorded love at first sight of the Eternal City on the evening of Oct. 15, 1764. Yet the gestation period for his great work was strangely drawn out. Three years were frittered away on an abortive history of Switzerland. Finally, in 1772, Gibbon settled down in London with six servants, a parrot and a Pomeranian lapdog to write Decline and Fall. He completed it 14 years later, and his success was immediate though not universal. Gibbon swiftly arrived at a celebrity that allowed him to dine with Benjamin Franklin, converse with the Emperor of Austria--and aggravate his own gout. But he and his times were not really in tune. The French Revolution Gibbon dismissed as "popular madness." The 19th century social scientist Walter Bagehot was probably right in judging him to be the sort of man that revolutionary mobs like to hang.

It has been generations since Gibbon's masterpiece was regarded as definitive. The Greek scholar Richard Person once wittily observed: "Nor does his humanity ever slumber unless when women are ravished or the Christians persecuted." Today's scholars are more likely to complain that Gibbon was weak on the Byzantine and that he was most responsive to Romans like the Augustans, who resembled himself: "Urbane, accomplished, and occasionally a trifle pompous," as Peter Quennell put it in a Gibbon profile. Despite his limits, unpredictably, erratically, marvelously, Gibbon and Rome did go together. "Gibbon is a kind of bridge," Thomas Carlyle once summed him up, "that connects the antique with the modern ages." These memoirs, composed in a number of drafts, were all that Edward Gibbon was to write after Decline and Fall. Fiddled over by generations of editors--the last extensive revision appeared in London in 1900--the memoirs now seem complete. In Decline and Fall, Gibbon erected his monument. In the memoirs, he composed the obituary to go with it. Then, job completed, he promptly died at the age of 57, showing to the end a fine Roman regard for classical climax.

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