Four Arthurian Romances | Page 6

the proper motivation of many episodes,
no apology can be made. He is not always guilty; some episodes betoken poetic mastery.
But a poet acquainted, as he was, with some first-class Latin poetry, and who had made a
business of his art, ought to have handled his material more intelligently, even in the
twelfth century. The emphasis is not always laid with discrimination, nor is his yarn
always kept free of tangles in the spinning.
Reference has been made to Chretien's use of his sources. The tendency of some critics
has been to minimise the French poet's originality by pointing out striking analogies in
classic and Celtic fable. Attention has been especially directed to the defence of the
fountain and the service of a fairy mistress in "Yvain", to the captivity of Arthur's
subjects in the kingdom of Gorre, as narrated in "Lancelot", reminding one so insistently
of the treatment of the kingdom of Death from which some god or hero finally delivers
those in durance, and to the reigned death of Fenice in "Cliges", with its many variants.
These episodes are but examples of parallels which will occur to the observant reader.
The difficult point to determine, in speaking of conceptions so widespread in classic and
mediaeval literature, is the immediate source whence these conceptions reached Chretien.
The list of works of reference appended to this volume will enable the student to go
deeper into this much debated question, and will permit us to dispense with an
examination of the arguments in this place. However, such convincing parallels for many
of Chretien's fairy and romantic episodes have been adduced by students of Irish and
Welsh legend that one cannot fail to be impressed by the fact that Chretien was in touch,
either by oral or literary tradition, with the populations of Britain and of Brittany, and that
we have here his most immediate inspiration. Professor Foerster, stoutly opposing the
so-called Anglo-Norman theory which supposes the existence of lost Anglo-Norman
romances in French as the sources of Chretien de Troyes, is, nevertheless, well within the
truth when he insists upon what is, so far as we are concerned, the essential originality of
the French poet. The general reader will to-day care as little as did the reader of the
twelfth century how the poet came upon the motives and episodes of his stories, whether
he borrowed them or invented them himself. Any poet should be judged not as a "finder"
but as a "user" of the common stock of ideas. The study of sources of mediaeval poetry,
which is being so doggedly carried on by scholars, may well throw light upon the main
currents of literary tradition, but it casts no reflection, favourable or otherwise, upon the

personal art of the poet in handling his stuff. On that count he may plead his own cause
before the jury.
Chretien's originality, then, consists in his portrayal of the social ideal of the French
aristocracy in the twelfth century. So far as we know he was the first to create in the
vulgar tongues a vast court, where men and women lived in conformity with the rules of
courtesy, where the truth was told, where generosity was open-handed, where the weak
and the innocent were protected by men who dedicated themselves to the cult of honour
and to the quest of a spotless reputation. Honour and love combined to engage the
attention of this society; these were its religion in a far more real sense than was that of
the Church. Perfection was attainable under this code of ethics: Gawain, for example, was
a perfect knight. Though the ideals of this court and those of Christianity are in accord at
many points, vet courtly love and Christian morality are irreconcilable. This Arthurian
material, as used by Chretien, is fundamentally immoral as judged by Christian standards.
Beyond question, the poets and the public alike knew this to be the case, and therein lay
its charm for a society in which the actual relations or the sexes were rigidly prescribed
by the Church and by feudal practice, rather than by the sentiments of the individuals
concerned. The passionate love of Tristan for Iseut, of Lancelot for Guinevere, of Cliges
for Fenice, fascinate the conventional Christian society of the twelfth century and of the
twentieth century alike, but there-is only one name among men for such relations as
theirs, and neither righteousness nor reason lie that way. Even Tennyson, in spite of all he
has done to spiritualise this material, was compelled to portray the inevitable dissolution
and ruin of Arthur's court. Chretien well knew the difference between right and wrong,
between reason and passion, as the reader of "Cliges" may learn for himself. Fenice was
not Iseut, and she would not have her Cliges to