Flesh in the Age of Reason (32 page)

For the enlightened philosopher no less than for the Christian saint or sinner, in other words, the body should be essentially subordinate and secondary, a means to an end: out of sight, out of mind. Gibbon neglected the Addisonian advice of following the chase – except briefly to oblige his father (Hampshire’s hunting sorts were bores); and, contrary to Doctors Cheyne and Cadogan’s warnings, he spurned exercise. Furthermore, sex too (‘the grosser appetite’) appears to have left him cold: ‘I was not very strongly pressed by my family or my passions to propagate the name and race of the Gibbons.’ So striking is the lack of evidence of sexual activity that historians disagree whether his bent was straight or gay.

But to say that Gibbon saw himself above matters of the flesh is in no way to imply that he was an ascetic. He never dallied with the image, beloved of the Renaissance, of the lean and shrunk-shanked scholar, possessed of infinite
Sitzfleisch
and inured to pain. In
The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621) Robert Burton had painted the classic cameo of the scholars’ melancholy. ‘They live a sedentary, solitary life,
sibi&musis
, free from bodily exercise, and those ordinary disports which other men use,’ a lifestyle which ‘
dries the brain and extinguisheth natural heat; for whilst the spirits are intent to meditation above in the head, the stomack and liver are left destitute, and thence come black blood and crudities by defect of concoction
.’ Melancholy and spleen, those stigmata of true scholarly dedication, inevitably followed.

That was not for Gibbon. He valued the new enlightened image of the man of letters who was also a man of the world. Thinking was too important to be left to crabbed and crackbrained dons – it must be rescued from those ‘monkish’ Oxbridge cells which (his experience showed only too well) bred morose idleness. What was needed, according – as we have seen – to such enlightened figures as Lord Shaftesbury and Joseph Addison, was politeness not pedantry. ‘The separation of the learned from the conversable world’, lamented the Scottish philosopher David Hume, putting in a plea for this
modernization of the intellectual, had been ‘the great defect of the last age’; learning had ‘been as great a loser by being shut up in colleges’, while philosophy had gone to ruin ‘by this moping recluse method of study’. Things, however, were on the mend. ‘Men of letters in this age have lost in a great measure that shyness and bashfulness of temper which kept them at a distance from mankind.’ As a fellow man of the Enlightenment – one unreserved in his admiration for Hume the historian – Gibbon clearly agreed: how odd to imagine that great works of the mind came from peevish spirits in sickly bodies in musty surroundings? Once installed in the West End of London after his father’s death, he could ‘divide the day between Study and Society’, advantageously to both.

Gibbon cultivated ease, and made much of such ‘solid comforts of life’ as ‘a convenient, well-furnished house, a domestic table, half a dozen [!] chosen servants, my own carriage, and all those decent luxuries whose value is the more sensibly felt the longer they are enjoyed’. Deprived of the ‘indispensable comfort’ of a servant when banished to Switzerland, so much did it irk him that he actually recorded the fact in his
Memoirs
. Ever ‘helpless and awkward’, Gibbon liked his ‘earthly blessings’ and enjoyed flaunting himself as the quintessential Georgian man of sense, taste and refinement. All that notwithstanding, the prime function of bodily comforts, in his complacent vision, was to nurture the mind. His first ‘joy’ on inheriting his father’s wealth was to lay out ‘a bank-note of twenty pounds for the twenty volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions’.

While Gibbon thus represented his body as subordinate and disciplined, a means to an end, a ‘machine’ best neither seen nor heard, it may be psychologically revealing about his authentic relationship with his body – one tenser and less under control than he liked to admit – that he visualized his mind and matters intellectual in rather lurid corporeal idioms. His library was his ‘seraglio’ and the books he authored were his ‘children’. Respecting his first publication, he alluded, with awkward affectation, to ‘the loss of my litterary maidenhead’. Reading was the consumption of literary ‘food’, gratification
of his ‘insatiable appetite’ for study. Greed –
bodily
greed, that is – was clearly not something to boast of – Gibbon, as caricatures make clear, grew inordinately fat. Intellectual voracity, by contrast, might be admitted, if with the usual self-exonerating irony. ‘From the ancient, I leaped to the modern World,’ he thus describes his childhood reading diet, ‘many crude lumps of Speed, Rapin, Mezeray, Davila, Machiavel, Father Paul, Bower &c. [chroniclers and historians] passed through me like so many novels, and I swallowed with the same voracious appetite the descriptions of India and China, of Mexico and Peru.’ Greed was good so long as it was for matters mental.

Gibbon tells readers he is giving them the ‘naked truth’, but his relationship to his body was evidently unresolved, and the naked flesh does not come across in his
Memoirs
. For while he refers to his gout (a good disease), he does not mention the complaint which indirectly killed him, his hydrocele – an enlargement of the scrotum (another swelling): evidently a ‘bad’, humiliating and frightening condition.

Gibbon was obviously ashamed about that particular protuberance. It grew bigger and bigger and, as contemporaries noted, he pretended to be unaware of it – though it drew attention to itself not only on account of its magnitude, but because it interfered with urination: he reeked and his presence became disagreeable. He would ‘undraw the veil before my state of health’, he stated in a letter to Lord Sheffield, ‘though the naked truth may alarm you more than a fit of the Gout. Have you never observed through my inexpressibles a large prominency circa genitalia?’ He had, he added, ‘strangely neglected’ it ‘for many years’ – the ‘strangely’ speaks volumes, and the resort to euphemism and Latin is telling. And how could Sheffield not have noticed it? Presumably its being connected with his genitals (one of those ‘more noble parts’?) made it such a source of mortification, and it evidently forced him, finally, to think once again about the disorders and disintegration of the flesh – and to contemplate dissolution.

Gibbon was no Christian – he may have embraced some Deistic
belief in a presiding Intelligence but there is no sign that he imagined any mode of life after death. Indeed, his sneering and scathing attitude to Christianity made the doctrine of personal immortality a vain and laughable superstition, as shown by his treatment of his pious maiden aunt Hester. That ‘holy Virgin’ was a follower of William Law, the man whose
A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
had ‘overmatched’ Samuel Johnson:

Her only study was the Bible with some legends and books of piety which she read with implicit faith: she prayed five times each day; and, as singing, according to the Serious Call, is an indispensable part of devotion, she rehearsed the psalms and hymns of thanksgiving, which she now, perhaps, may chant in a full chorus of Saints and Angels.

The prospect of extinction obviously exercised Gibbon, as it did Johnson, and the
Memoirs
were, among other things, his attempt to come to terms with mortality. Death – the death of others – was a natural fact to be coolly accepted: he would ‘not pretend to lament’ the five brothers who died in infancy, and he also brushed aside the death of his father (‘The tears of a son are seldom lasting’).

Facing his own future, Gibbon notes that although the ‘evening’ years might be the best time of life, he had doubts about the rosy picture of old age presented by Fontenelle, the French man of science who lived into his hundredth year. ‘I must reluctantly observe, that two causes, the abbreviation of time and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.’

The ‘play of the animal machine’ remained fine, Gibbon assured his readers – somewhat disingenuously to say the least – and ‘probability’ was on his side: ‘this day may
possibly
be my last: but the laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular, still allow me about fifteen years’. Yet, as he admitted, ‘probability’, though strong in the general case, was meaningless in the specific. That abbreviation of time was worrying. ‘The present is a fleeting moment: the past is no more.’ The older one grew, the less each passing year signified:

The proportion of a part to the whole is the only standard by which we can measure the length of our existence. At the age of twenty, one year is a tenth perhaps of the time which has elapsed within our consciousness and memory: at the age of fifty it is no more than a fortieth, and this relative value continues to decrease till the last sands are shaken by the hand of death.

In any case, there was less to look forward to, as ‘time and experience’ had ‘dampened’ anticipations ‘by disappointment or possession’. ‘After the middle season,’ as he put it in one of his hierarchical metaphors, ‘the crowd must be content to remain at the foot of the mountain; while the few who have climbed the summit, aspire to descend or expect to fall’ – another decline and fall. Attempting to put his prospects in order, Gibbon explained his intimations of immortality: ‘In old age, the consolation of hope is reserved for the tenderness of parents who commence as new life in their children; the faith of enthusiasts who sing Hallelujahs above the clouds; and the vanity of authors who presume the immortality of their name and writings.’ The sentiments could have been Johnson’s, but the register would have been quite different: how Gibbonian to compare himself to his aunt!

This chapter has examined a different sort of text: an autobiography. It has explored how a supremely literary individual, late in life, portrayed himself – conceived the relation between his mind and body – largely with a view to constructing an enduring public image. Gibbon was a man publicly happy to ignore his mortal coil. There is no immortal soul – and no tears are lost over that. There remains nevertheless a hope of immortality through ‘litterary… fame’. He would not go to heaven; indeed his last years on earth, spent above the lake at Lausanne, would at best be a state of being ‘alone in paradise’. But his books might last, including the
Memoirs
written ‘that one day his mind will be familiar to the grandchildren of those who are yet unborn’. His mind will thus live on.

After Death, nothing is

ROCHESTER

The Churches, as we have seen, taught that death closed a mundane life that was brief and wretched and opened the portal to life eternal. It was not extinction but metamorphosis. Death was thus not to be feared but welcomed, and ample testimony has come down of Christians eagerly embracing the Churches’ notion of a ‘good death’, as encoded by the
ars moriendi
.

But there was more to it than the art of dying well as an audition for life eternal. Be it one’s own death or that of others, dying involved an intricate and solemn fabric of social beliefs, procedures and expectations aimed at the safe passage of the decedent, some of which will be touched upon below. Elaborate preparedness was a necessary defence, with mortality always threatening and its management so crucial. Funerals were celebrated with far more pomp than marriages or baptisms, while the new secular cultural media accorded mortality new openings, not least magazine obituary columns and tear-jerking novels.

Everyman was forced to walk in the valley of the shadow of death. In the churchyard on Sunday, parishioners saw death all around: tombstones commemorating grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters who had perished in infancy, and not least their own offspring. As amply confirmed by sermons and pious works of religious comfort, and by the testimony of letters, diaries and funerary art, death loomed large in public culture and often governed individual minds. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century and subsequent outbreaks
of plague lasting down to 1665 had, of course, cast a long, dark shadow, and their aftermath was the culture of the Dance of Death, the worm-corrupted cadaver, the skull and crossbones and the charnel house. This was reinforced by a theology which held death to be the wages of sin and, especially for those embracing Calvinist predestinarianism, stressed that for perhaps the great majority it would literally inaugurate the endless torments of hellfire.

Boldly challenging the comforting Roman Catholic doctrines of efficacious deathbed repentance, Protestant voluntarism stressed how the divine arrow could pierce at any moment, out of the blue. Hence, the pious Christian must needs be composed for that event – Bishop Ken warned: ‘Live ev’ry day as if ’twere thy last.’ Indeed, such
ars moriendi
handbooks as Jeremy Taylor’s
Holy Dying
taught that ripeness was all; it ‘must be the business of our whole Lives to prepare for Death’, proclaimed William Sherlock’s influential
A Practical Discourse Concerning Death
(1690).

The deathbed confrontation was bound (and was meant) to be awesome and overwhelming: ‘death is a fearful thing’, blabbed Claudio in
Measure for Measure
(‘to die, and go we know not where’), calling to mind similar chilling passages from
Hamlet
. It had to be faced head-on and vanquished. This public face inured believers to trauma: panic was obviated because religious practices and cultural resources girded the faithful against the Arch-foe. Family prayers, fasting, devotions, Bible-reading and so forth, both before and at the deathbed, were designed to fortify believers as they came to die the good death.