This new incremental approach to the physical world—spawning a wonderful newgrown wilderness of facts and contraptions—was also Gibbon’s approach to the world of human nature. The time had not yet come when scientific quest for meaning threatened to transform the social world into another cosmos of dogmatic simplicities. Gibbon gives us incremental history on a grand scale.

For Gibbon, while human nature is anything but unintelligible, it remains only partly explicable. For him the menace to understanding was not so much ignorance as the illusion of knowledge. His explanations of rise and fall, of prosperity and decline are always lists. What he recounts is “the triumph of barbarism and religion.” He recounts the quirks and quibbles of theologians, the rivalries of Eastern monarchs, their wives and mistresses and sons and daughters, not simply because they are amusing, but also because they are instructive. Without such trivia we cannot understand what the Eastern Empire was or what it became.

It is more accurate to insist that for Gibbon there are no trivia. Human habits, utterances, exclamations, and emotions are the very essence of his history—not mere raw material for distilling “forces” and “movements.” The more vividly we see them, the better we know our subject. Inevitably, then, he must remain a skeptic about our capacity finally to grasp the whole story.

But despite—perhaps because of—this recognition, he is not a pessimist. The spectacle which he has unfolded of “the greatest, perhaps, and the most awful scene in the history of mankind” rewards us. He sees the whole planet as a stage for more grand spectacles, which will also be a stage for renewal. “If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common defence. Should the victorious Barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world which is already filled with her colonies and institutions.”

In his optimism Gibbon seems a spokesman for the Age of the Enlightenment. He seems, sometimes, to speak for a faith, burgeoning in his lifetime, that man’s uninhibited critical faculties can grasp the world. I once thought of Gibbon in precisely that way. He spoke to me from and for a period of history. But in the years since Gibbon first spoke to me, he has come to say something more. He has become a more personal historian and hence more intimate, both in what he said and in what I hear.

Some eloquent outspoken prophets of the Age of Reason make it easy for historians to confine the epoch in that epithet. Among historians the great systematizers include such authors as Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Vico (1668–1744) and Voltaire (1694–1778). Of course these men—who are copiously treated in encyclopedias of the social sciences—still interest their fellow systematizers. Among the writers of narrative history in his epoch, Voltaire still speaks vividly to some of us. But his most popular contemporary competitors in narrative history—David Hume and William Robertson—have become historiographical antiques. Gibbon still can and does speak to all of us.

What he saw and what he accomplished was possible, he gladly acknowledged, only because of the peculiar opportunities of his place and time. “I shall ever glory in the name and character of an Englishman,” he observed gratefully at the conclusion of his work, “I am proud of my birth in a free and enlightened country; and the approbation of that country is the best and most honourable reward for my labours.” If he had not exploited the new opportunities and shared the new vistas of his age, he could not have given us his history. Yet his greatness, the intimate ingredient in his work, is his peculiar talent at transcending the characteristic enthusiasms of his age. Nowadays John Dryden and Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, and even Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding, seem to have a certain quaintness. It is doubly remarkable that Edward Gibbon, whose style was at least as idiosyncratic as theirs, somehow manages to talk to us in our own idiom.

This is what I mean by the intimacy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Gibbon succeeds in this intimacy precisely because he does not offer us obsolescing parables of science or the social sciences. Nor is he stultified by the etiquette of a particular genre of literature. The chronological lopsidedness of his work—which gives more space to the first few centuries than to the last millennium of his thirteen-century tale—is itself a witness to his determination to shape the story, not by the a priori dimensions of centuries, but by his own concerns.