In his essay, “Gibbon’s Historical Imagination,” Glen Bowersock notes that Gibbon “treated the raw materials of ancient and medieval history much as a novelist treated the plot line.” Gibbon was a regular reader of novels. His admiration for Henry Fielding was unbounded. In Memoirs of My Life he refers to “the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners [that] will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria.” Gibbon never thought of writing fiction himself, yet, as Bowersock notes, he “shaped his truth as if it were fiction, preserving thereby the animation of human history and the art of the novelist.” As Simon Leys noted: “The novelist is the historian of the present and the historian the novelist of the past.”
Gibbon does write wonderfully, and his history is highly entertaining, but I have always found his opinions narrow and obtrusive. But I read him so very long ago that I should perhaps give him another look while I still have time.
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