adventurer, wandering from land to land in search of patrons. Before 1177 he was a student and teacher of law at Bologna; in that year he witnessed the meeting of the emperor Frederic I. and Pope Alexander III. at Venice. He may have hoped to win the favour of Frederic, who in the past had found useful instruments among the civilians of Bologna. But Frederic ignored him; his first employer of royal rank was Henry fitz Henry, the young king of England (d. 1183), for whom Gervase wrote a jest-book which is no longer extant. Subsequently we hear of Gervase as a clerk in the household of William of Champagne, cardinal archbishop of Reims (d. 1202). Here, as he himself confesses, he basely accused of heretical opinions a young girl, who had rejected his advances, with the result that she was burned to death. He cannot have remained many years at Reims; before 1189 he attracted the favour of William II. of Sicily, who had married Joanna, the sister of Henry fitz Henry. William took Gervase into his service and gave him a country-house at Nola. After William’s death the kingdom of Sicily offered no attractions to an Englishman. The fortunes of Gervase suffered an eclipse until, some time after 1198, he found employment under the emperor Otto IV., who by descent and political interest was intimately connected with the Plantagenets. Though a clerk in orders Gervase became marshal of the kingdom of Arles, and married an heiress of good family. For the delectation of the emperor he wrote, about 1211, his Otia Imperialia in three parts. It is a farrago of history, geography, folklore and political theory—one of those books of table-talk in which the literature of the age abounded. Evidently Gervase coveted but ill deserved a reputation for encyclopaedic learning. The most interesting of his dissertations are contained in the second part of the Otia, where he discusses, among other topics, the theory of the Empire and the geography and history of England. We do not know what became of Gervase after the downfall of Otto IV. But he became a canon; and may perhaps be identified with Gervase, provost of Ebbekesdorf, who died in 1235.
See the Otia Imperialia in G. Leibnitz’s Scriptores rerum Brunsvicensium, vols. i. and ii. (Hanover, 1707); extracts in J. Stevenson’s edition of Coggeshall (Rolls series, 1875). Of modern accounts the best are those by W. Stubbs in his edition of Gervase of Canterbury, vol. i. introd. (Rolls series, 1879), and by R. Pauli in Nachrichten der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (1882). In the older biographers the Dialogus de scaccario of Richard Fitz Neal (q.v.) is wrongly attributed to Gervase. (H. W. C. D.)
GERVEX, HENRI (1852– ), French painter, was born in Paris on the 10th of December 1852, and studied painting under Cabanel, Brisset and Fromentin. His early work belonged almost exclusively to the mythological genre which served as an excuse for the painting of the nude—not always in the best of taste; indeed, his “Rolla” of 1878 was rejected by the jury of the Salon pour immoralité. He afterwards devoted himself to representations of modern life and achieved signal success with his “Dr Péan at the Salpétrière,” a modernized paraphrase, as it were, of Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson.” He was entrusted with several important official paintings and the decoration of public buildings. Among the first are “The Distribution of Awards (1889) at the Palais de l’Industrie” (now in the Versailles Museum), “The Coronation of Nicolas II.” (Moscow, May 14, 1896), “The Mayors’ Banquet” (1900), and the portrait group “La République Française”; and among the second, the ceiling for the Salle des Fêtes at the hôtel de ville, Paris, and the decorative panels painted in conjunction with Blanchon for the mairie of the 19th arrondissement, Paris. He also painted, with Alfred Stevens, a panorama, “The History of the Century” (1889). At the Luxembourg is his painting “Satyrs playing with a Bacchante” as well as the large “Members of the Jury of the Salon” (1885). Other pictures of importance, besides numerous portraits in oils and pastel, are “Communion at Trinity Church,” “Return from the Ball,” “Diana and Endymion,” “Job,” “Civil Marriage,” “At the Ambassadeurs,” “Yachting in the Archipelago,” “Nana” and “Maternity.”
GERVINUS, GEORG GOTTFRIED (1805–1871), German literary and political historian, was born on the 20th of May 1805 at Darmstadt. He was educated at the gymnasium of the town, and intended for a commercial career, but in 1825 he became a student of the university of Giessen. In 1826 he went to Heidelberg, where he attended the lectures of the historian Schlosser, who became henceforth his guide and his model. In 1828 he was appointed teacher in a private school at Frankfort-on-Main, and in 1830 Privatdozent at Heidelberg. A volume of his collected Historische Schriften procured him the appointment of professor extraordinarius; while the first volume of his Geschichte der poëtischen Nationallitteratur der Deutschen (1835–1842, 5 vols., subsequently entitled Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung; 5th edition, by K. Bartsch, 1871–1874) brought him the appointment to a regular professorship of history and literature at Göttingen. This work is the first comprehensive history of German literature written both with scholarly erudition and literary skill. In the following year he wrote his Grundzüge der Historik, which is perhaps the most thoughtful of his philosophico-historical productions. The same year brought his expulsion from Göttingen in consequence of his manly protest, in conjunction with six of his colleagues, against the unscrupulous violation of the constitution by Ernest Augustus, king of Hanover and duke of Cumberland. After several years in Heidelberg,
Darmstadt and Rome, he settled permanently in Heidelberg, where, in 1844, he was appointed honorary professor. He zealously took up in the following year the cause of the German Catholics, hoping it would lead to a union of all the Christian confessions, and to the establishment of a national church.
He also came forward in 1846 as a patriotic champion of the
Schleswig-Holsteiners, and when, in 1847, King Frederick
William IV. promulgated the royal decree for summoning the
so-called “United Diet” (Vereinigter Landtag), Gervinus hoped
that this event would form the basis of the constitutional development
of the largest German state. He founded, together with
some other patriotic scholars, the Deutsche Zeitung, which
certainly was one of the best-written political journals ever
published in Germany. His appearance in the political arena
secured his election as deputy for the Prussian province of Saxony
to the National Assembly sitting in 1848 at Frankfort. Disgusted
with the failure of that body, he retired from all active political
life.
Gervinus now devoted himself to literary and historical studies, and between 1849 and 1852 published his work on Shakespeare (4 vols., 4th ed. 2 vols., 1872; Eng. trans. by F. E. Bunnett, 1863, new ed. 1877). He also revised his History of German Literature, for a fourth edition (1853), and began at the same time to plan his Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (8 vols., 1854–1860), which was preceded by an Einleitung in die Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1853). The latter caused some stir in the literary and political world, owing to the circumstance that the government of Baden imprudently instituted a prosecution against the author for high treason. In 1868 appeared Händel und Shakespeare, zur Ästhetik der Tonkunst, in which he drew an ingenious parallel between his favourite poet and his favourite composer, showing that their intellectual affinity was based on the Teutonic origin common to both, on their analogous intellectual development and character. The ill-success of this publication, and the indifference with which the latter volumes of his History of the 19th Century were received by his countrymen, together with the feeling of disappointment that the unity of Germany had been brought about in another fashion and by other means than he wished to see employed, embittered his later years. He died at Heidelberg on the 18th of March 1871.
Gervinus’s autobiography (G. G. Gervinus’ Leben, von ihm selbst) was published by his widow in 1893. It does not, however, go beyond the year 1836. See E. Lehmann, Gervinus, Versuch einer Charakteristik (1871); R. Gosche, Gervinus (1871); J. Dörfel, Gervinus als historischer Denker (1904).
GERYON (Geryones, Geryoneus), in Greek mythology, the son of Chrysaor and Callirrhoë, daughter of Oceanus, and king of the island of Erytheia. He is represented as a monster with three heads or three bodies (triformis, trigeminus), sometimes with wings, and as the owner of herds of red cattle, which were
