14 - Structure

Summary

Matter grows under our hands. – Let no man say, – ‘Come – I'II write a duodecimo.’

Sterne

History is a Structure; she demands Order and Connexion as all other Buildings; and her Materials without that, would make but a tumultuous Heap of Sand without Lime.

Le Moyne

In ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ Hume points out a literary pitfall which lies in wait for the historian committed to investigating causality:

But when the event is supposed to proceed from certain and stable causes, he may then display his ingenuity, in assigning these causes; and as a man of any subtilty can never be at a loss in this particular, he has thereby an opportunity of swelling his volumes, and discovering his profound knowledge in observing what escapes the vulgar and ignorant.

Gibbon's experience is the reverse of this. It is the frustration of his attempts to grasp the causation of history which swells The Decline and Fall, just as the perfected structure of Volume I was the fruit of the certainty Gibbon felt in 1776 about the cause of Roman decline. John Burrow has recorded Gibbon's proud insistence ‘on the coherence of the entire work’. But one must be careful not to press the historian's phrase ‘the unity of design and composition’ too far: as Gibbon uses it, it denotes little more than his resolve not to be seduced irrecoverably from his subject of the Roman empire.