He
Is The Most "Modern" As Well As The Most Voluminous Of All The
Mediaeval Writers.
Of all English writers, Miss Kate Norgate {9}
has perhaps most justly estimated the real place of Gerald in
English letters.
"Gerald's wide range of subjects," she says, "is
only less remarkable than the ease and freedom with which he treats
them. Whatever he touches - history, archaeology, geography,
natural science, politics, the social life and thought of the day,
the physical peculiarities of Ireland and the manners and customs of
its people, the picturesque scenery and traditions of his own native
land, the scandals of the court and the cloister, the petty struggle
for the primacy of Wales, and the great tragedy of the fall of the
Angevin Empire - is all alike dealt with in the bold, dashing,
offhand style of a modern newspaper or magazine article. His first
important work, the 'Topography of Ireland,' is, with due allowance
for the difference between the tastes of the twelfth century and
those of the nineteenth, just such a series of sketches as a special
correspondent in our own day might send from some newly-colonised
island in the Pacific to satisfy or whet the curiosity of his
readers at home." The description aptly applies to all that Gerald
wrote. If not a historian, he was at least a great journalist. His
descriptions of Ireland have been subjected to much hostile
criticism from the day they were written to our own times. They
were assailed at the time, as Gerald himself tells us, for their
unconventionality, for their departure from established custom, for
the freedom and colloquialism of their style, for the audacity of
their stories, and for the writer's daring in venturing to treat the
manners and customs of a barbarous country as worthy the attention
of the learned and the labours of the historian. Irish scholars,
from the days of Dr. John Lynch, who published his "Cambrensis
Eversus" in 1622, have unanimously denounced the work of the
sensational journalist, born out of due time. His Irish books are
confessedly partisan; the "Conquest of Ireland" was expressly
designed as an eulogy of "the men of St. David's," the writer's own
kinsmen. But in spite of partisanship and prejudice, they must be
regarded as a serious and valuable addition to our knowledge of the
state of Ireland at the latter end of the twelfth century. Indeed,
Professor Brewer does not hesitate to say that "to his industry we
are exclusively indebted for all that is known of the state of
Ireland during the whole of the Middle Ages," and as to the
"Topography," Gerald "must take rank with the first who descried the
value and in some respects the limits of descriptive geography."
When he came to deal with the affairs of state on a larger stage,
his methods were still that of the modern journalist. He was always
an impressionist, a writer of personal sketches. His character
sketches of the Plantagenet princes - of King Henry with his large
round head and fat round belly, his fierce eyes, his tigerish
temper, his learning, his licentiousness, his duplicity, and of
Eleanor of Aquitaine, his vixenish and revengeful wife, the
murderess of "Fair Rosamond" (who must have been known to Gerald,
being the daughter of Walter of Clifford-on-the-Wye), and of the
fierce brood that they reared - are of extraordinary interest. His
impressions of the men and events of his time, his fund of anecdotes
and bon mots, his references to trivial matters, which more
dignified writers would never deign to mention, his sprightly and
sometimes malicious gossip, invest his period with a reality which
the greatest of fiction-writers has failed to rival. Gerald lived
in the days of chivalry, days which have been crowned with a halo of
deathless romance by the author of "Ivanhoe" and the "Talisman." He
knew and was intimate with all the great actors of the time. He had
lived in the Paris of St. Louis and Philip Augustus, and was never
tired of exalting the House of Capet over the tyrannical and
bloodthirsty House of Anjou. He had no love of England, for her
Plantagenet kings or her Saxon serfs. During the French invasion in
the time of King John his sympathies were openly with the Dauphin as
against the "brood of vipers," who were equally alien to English
soil. For the Saxon, indeed, he felt the twofold hatred of Welshman
and Norman. One of his opponents is denounced to the Pope as an
"untriwe Sax," and the Saxons are described as the slaves of the
Normans, the mere hewers of wood and drawers of water for their
conquerors. He met Innocent III., the greatest of Popes, in
familiar converse, he jested and gossiped with him in slippered
ease, he made him laugh at his endless stories of the glory of
Wales, the iniquities of the Angevins, and the bad Latin of
Archbishop Walter. He knew Richard Coeur-de-Lion, the flower of
chivalry, and saw him as he was and "not through a glass darkly."
He knew John, the cleverest and basest of his house. He knew and
loved Stephen Langton, the precursor of a long line of statesmen who
have made English liberty broad - based upon the people's will. He
was a friend of St. Hugh of Lincoln, the sweetest and purest spirit
in the Anglican Church of the Middle Ages, the one man who could
disarm the wrath of the fierce king with a smile; and he was the
friend and patron of Robert Grosstete, afterwards the great Bishop
of Lincoln. He lived much in company with Ranulph de Glanville, the
first English jurist, and he has "Boswellised" some of his
conversations with him. He was intimate with Archbishop Baldwin,
the saintly prelate who laid down his life in the Third Crusade on
the burning plains of Palestine, heart-broken at the unbridled
wickedness of the soldiers of the Cross. He was the near kinsman
and confidant of the Cambro-Normans, who, landing in Leinster in
1165, effected what may be described as the first conquest of
Ireland.
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