Four Arthurian Romances | Page 4

and 1172 he lived, perhaps as herald-at-arms (according to Gaston Paris, based on
"Lancelot" 5591-94) at Troyes, where was the court of his patroness, the Countess Marie
de Champagne. She was the daughter of Louis VII, and of that famous Eleanor of
Aquitaine, as she is called in English histories, who, coming from the South of France in
1137, first to Paris and later to England, may have had some share in the introduction of

those ideals of courtesy and woman service which were soon to become the cult of
European society. The Countess Marie, possessing her royal mother's tastes and gifts,
made of her court a social experiment station, where these Provencal ideals of a perfect
society were planted afresh in congenial soil. It appears from contemporary testimony
that the authority of this celebrated feudal dame was weighty, and widely felt. The old
city of Troyes, where she held her court, must be set down large in any map of literary
history. For it was there that Chretien was led to write four romances which together form
the most complete expression we possess from a single author of the ideals of French
chivalry. These romances, written in eight-syllable rhyming couplets, treat respectively of
Erec and Enide, Cliges, Yvain, and Lancelot. Another poem, "Perceval le Gallois", was
composed about 1175 for Philip, Count of Flanders, to whom Chretien was attached
during his last years. This last poem is not included in the present translation because of
its extraordinary length of 32,000 verses, because Chretien wrote only the first 9000
verses, and because Miss Jessie L. Weston has given us an English version of Wolfram's
wellknown "Parzival", which tells substantially the same story, though in a different spirit.
To have included this poem, of which he wrote less than one-third, in the works of
Chretien would have been unjust to him. It is true the romance of "Lancelot" was not
completed by Chretien, we are told, but the poem is his in such large part that one would
be over-scrupulous not to call it his. The other three poems mentioned are his entire. In
addition, there are quite generally assigned to the poet two insignificant lyrics, the pious
romance of "Guillaume d'Angleterre", and the elaboration of an episode from Ovid's
"Metamorphoses" (vi., 426- 674) called "Philomena" by its recent editor (C. de Boer,
Paris, 1909). All these are extant and accessible. But since "Guillaume d'Angleterre" and
"Philomena" are not universally attributed to Chretien, and since they have nothing to do
with the Arthurian material, it seems reasonable to limit the present enterprise to "Erec
and Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot".
Professor Foerster, basing his remark upon the best knowledge we possess of an obscure
matter, has called "Erec and Enide" the oldest Arthurian romance extant. It is not possible
to dispute this significant claim, but let us make it a little more intelligible. Scholarship
has shown that from the early Middle Ages popular tradition was rife in Britain and
Brittany. The existence of these traditions common to the Brythonic peoples was called to
the attention of the literary world by William of Malmesbury ("Gesta regum Anglorum")
and Geoffrey of Monmouth ("Historia regum Britanniae") in their Latin histories about
1125 and 1137 respectively, and by the Anglo-Norman poet Wace immediately afterward.
Scholars have waged war over the theories of transmission of the so-called Arthurian
material during the centuries which elapsed between the time of the fabled chieftain's
activity in 500 A.D. and his appearance as a great literary personage in the twelfth
century. Documents are lacking for the dark ages of popular tradition before the Norman
Conquest, and the theorists may work their will. But Arthur and his knights, as we see
them in the earliest French romances, have little in common with their Celtic prototypes,
as we dimly catch sight of them in Irish, Welsh, and Breton legend. Chretien belonged to
a generation of French poets who rook over a great mass of Celtic folk-lore they
imperfectly understood, and made of what, of course, it had never been before: the
vehicle to carry a rich freight of chivalric customs and ideals. As an ideal of social
conduct, the code of chivalry never touched the middle and lower classes, but it was the
religion of the aristocracy and of the twelfth-century "honnete homme". Never was

literature in any age closer to the ideals of a social class. So true is this that it is difficult
to determine whether social practices called forth the literature, or whether, as in the case
of the seventeenth-century pastoral romance in France, it is truer to say that literature
suggested to society its ideals. Be that as it may, it is proper to observe that the French
romances of adventure portray late mediaeval aristocracy as it fain would be.