Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/368

 William can ever have seen either of these works in its present form, though he may possibly have had access to an earlier edition of one or both of them. Except in two passages, however, the resemblance between William's account of crusading matters and that given in the poem and the ‘Itinerarium’ is scarcely close enough to warrant the assumption that he borrowed from either of them; in some details it differs from them both. The two passages where alone William and the ‘Itinerarium’ are in close verbal agreement (, i. pp. xxvii–viii, 249, 329;, pp. lxix, 5, 54) have nothing corresponding to them in the French poem; they both occur in the first book of the ‘Itinerarium,’ which appears, from internal evidence, to have been written some years earlier than the rest of the work in its present form. Into this first book of the ‘Itinerarium,’ however, there is worked up at least one document earlier still; the verbal coincidence above mentioned may therefore be due, not to William having copied from the ‘Itinerarium,’ but to their having each independently copied from a common source [cf. art. ]. Some other details in William's fourth and fifth books may have been derived, orally or otherwise, from the king's chaplain, Anselm, whose information was also used by Ralph of Coggeshall and Roger of Hoveden [q. v.] Yet throughout all his five books William is practically an original authority. His narrative of the first twenty years of the reign of Henry II (book ii.)—a period for which our other materials are particularly meagre and unsatisfactory—is entirely independent of all other extant writers, and so are many important passages both in the earlier and the later books.

The value of William's authority in those parts of his work which cannot be traced to any known source may be gauged by his way of using materials the origin of which is ascertained: a way which is something unique among English writers of his age. He alone gives us, not so much the facts, or what passed for facts, as the philosophy of history. His facts indeed are not always exact, and his dates are rarely so. Like William of Malmesbury [q. v.], William of Newburgh purposed to write, not a chronicle but a history. Unlike Malmesbury, he did not ‘deliberately set himself forward as the successor of the venerable Bede.’ That he came, in some respects, much nearer than Malmesbury to achieving that position may be partly due to the greater modesty which seems to have kept him from claiming it. As his work shows no trace of acquaintance with that of Malmesbury, it was probably not from the latter, but direct from Bæda, that he received his inspiration. His genius, indeed, was of a higher order than Malmesbury's. His denunciation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, in itself a striking proof of independent thought and critical power, is far from constituting his only claim to the title given him by Freeman, of ‘the father of historical criticism.’ He deals with his materials in the true historical spirit. He has the true historian's instinct for sifting wheat from chaff, for perceiving the relative importance of things, for seizing the salient points and bringing out the significance of a story in a few simple sentences, without straining after picturesqueness or dramatic effect. He never stoops to gossip, or to relate a story merely for entertainment. Nor does he ever indulge in lengthy preaching or moralising; but one or two passages show that his ideas of morality on certain points were extremely strict, rising far above a mere passive acceptance of the ecclesiastical rules current in his day. His politics are equally independent. The judgments which he passes, very briefly and soberly, on men and things are often quite contrary to those of the majority even of the most intelligent and best-informed of his contemporaries; but they are always worthy of consideration; for he looks at characters and events from a standpoint wholly unlike that of the ordinary monastic chronicler or court historiographer; and he sometimes throws upon them, either from his special sources of information or simply from the quality of his own mind, a light which tends to modify considerably the estimate which might be formed from chroniclers and court historians alone. He treats of ‘English affairs’ in no narrow temper; whenever his subject comes into contact with the history of another race or nation, he introduces the new element into his narrative with a careful summary of the best information about it that he can obtain. He pays some attention to the social side of history; and his interest in physical phenomena is remarkably intelligent; to him they are not, as they were to most men of his day, simply wonders or portents, but matters to be investigated, reasoned about, and recorded for instruction, not curiosity. He tells, indeed, some marvellous tales of the supernatural; but on some of these he expressly suspends his judgment; and all of them he relates, not as mere marvels, but as matters for which there has been brought before him such an overwhelming weight or volume of testimony that he feels bound, by his undertaking to put on record all that