Chrétien De Troyes has had the peculiar fortune of becoming the best
known of the old French poets to students of mediaeval literature, and
of remaining practically unknown to any one else. The acquaintance of
students with the work of Chrétien has been made possible in academic
circles by the admirable critical editions of his romances undertaken
and carried to completion during the past thirty years by Professor
Wendelin Foerster of Bonn. At the same time the want of public
familiarity with Chrétien's work is due to the almost complete lack of
translations of his romances into the modern tongues. The man who, so
far as we know, first recounted the romantic adventures of Arthur's
knights, Gawain. Yvain, Erec, Lancelot, and Perceval, has been
forgotten; whereas posterity has been kinder to his debtors, Wolfram
yon Eschenbach, Malory, Lord Tennyson, and Richard Wagner. The present
volume has grown out of the desire to place these romances of adventure
before the reader of English in a prose version based directly upon the
oldest form in which they exist.
Such extravagant claims for Chrétien's art have been made in some
quarters that one feels disinclined to give them even an echo here.
The modem reader may form his own estimate of the poet's art, and that
estimate will probably not be high. Monotony, lack of proportion,
vain repetitions, insufficient motivation, wearisome subtleties, and
threatened, if not actual, indelicacy are among the most salient defects
which will arrest, and mayhap confound, the reader unfamiliar with
mediaeval literary craft. No greater service can be performed by an
editor in such a case than to prepare the reader to overlook these
common faults, and to set before him the literary significance of this
twelfth-century poet.
Chrétien de Troyes wrote in Champagne during the third quarter of the
twelfth century. Of his life we know neither the beginning nor the
end, but we know that between 1160 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 Chrétien 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,
Cligés, Yvain, and Lancelot. Another poem, "Perceval le Gallois", was
composed about 1175 for Philip, Count of Flanders, to whom Chrétien 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 Chrétien wrote only the first 9000 verses, and because
Miss Jessie L. Weston has given us an English version of Wolfram's
well-known "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 Chrétien would have been unjust to
him. It is true the romance of "Lancelot" was not completed by Chrétien,
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
Chrétien, and since they have nothing to do with the Arthurian material,
it seems reasonable to limit the present enterprise to "Erec and Enide",
"Cligés", "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. Chrétien 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. For the glaring
inconsistencies between the reality and the ideal, one may turn to the
chronicles of the period. Yet, even history tells of many an ugly sin
rebuked and of many a gallant deed performed because of the courteous
ideals of chivalry. The debt of our own social code to this literature
of courtesy and frequent self-sacrifice is perfectly manifest.
What Chrétien's immediate and specific source was for his romances is of
deep interest to the student. Unfortunately, he has left us in doubt. He
speaks in the vaguest way of the materials he used. There is no evidence
that he had any Celtic written source. We are thus thrown back upon
Latin or French literary originals which are lost, or upon current
continental lore going back to a Celtic source. This very difficult
problem is as yet unsolved in the case of Chrétien, as it is in the
case of the Anglo-Norman Beroul, who wrote of Tristan about 1150. The
material evidently was at hand and Chrétien appropriated it, without
much understanding of its primitive spirit, but appreciating it as a
setting for the ideal society dreamed of but not realised in his own
day. Add to this literary perspicacity, a good foundation in classic
fable, a modicum of ecclesiastical doctrine, a remarkable facility in
phrase, figure, and rhyme and we have the foundations for Chrétien's art
as we shall find it upon closer examination.
A French narrative poet of the twelfth century had three categories of
subject-matter from which to choose: legends connected with the history
of France ("matiere de France"), legends connected with Arthur and
other Celtic heroes ("matiere de Bretagne"), and stories culled from
the history or mythology of Greece and Rome, current in Latin and French
translations ("matiere de Rome la grant"). Chrétien tells us in "Cligés"
that his first essays as a poet were the translations into French of
certain parts of Ovid's most popular works: the "Metamorphoses", the
"Ars Amatoria", and perhaps the "Remedia Amoris". But he appears early
to have chosen as his special field the stories of Celtic origin dealing
with Arthur, the Round Table, and other features of Celtic folk-lore.
Not only was he alive to the literary interest of this material when
rationalised to suit the taste of French readers; his is further the
credit of having given to somewhat crude folk-lore that polish and
elegance which is peculiarly French, and which is inseparably associated
with the Arthurian legends in all modern literature. Though Beroul, and
perhaps other poets, had previously based romantic poems upon individual
Celtic heroes like Tristan, nevertheless to Chrétien, so far as we can
see, is due the considerable honour of having constituted Arthur's court
as a literary centre and rallying-point for an innumerable company
of knights and ladies engaged in a never-ending series of amorous
adventures and dangerous quests. Rather than unqualifiedly attribute
to Chrétien this important literary convention, one should bear in mind
that all his poems imply familiarity on the part of his readers with
the heroes of the court of which he speaks. One would suppose that other
stories, told before his versions, were current. Some critics would go
so far as to maintain that Chrétien came toward the close, rather than
at the beginning, of a school of French writers of Arthurian romances.
But, if so, we do not possess these earlier versions, and for lack of
rivals Chrétien may be hailed as an innovator in the current schools of
poetry.
And now let us consider the faults which a modern reader will not be
slow to detect in Chrétien's style. Most of his salient faults are
common to all mediaeval narrative literature. They may be ascribed to
the extraordinary leisure of the class for whom it was composed--a class
which was always ready to read an old story told again, and which would
tolerate any description, however detailed. The pastimes of this
class of readers were jousting, hunting, and making love. Hence the
preponderance of these matters in the literature of its leisure hours.
No detail of the joust or hunt was unfamiliar or unwelcome to these
readers; no subtle arguments concerning the art of love were too
abstruse to delight a generation steeped in amorous casuistry and
allegories. And if some scenes seem to us indelicate, yet after
comparison with other authors of his times, Chrétien must be let off
with a light sentence. It is certain he intended to avoid what was
indecent, as did the writers of narrative poetry in general. To
appreciate fully the chaste treatment of Chrétien one must know some
other forms of mediaeval literature, such as the fabliaux, farces, and
morality plays, in which courtesy imposed no restraint. For our poet's
lack of sense of proportion, and for his carelessness in 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 Chrétien'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 "Cligés", 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 Chrétien. 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 Chrétien'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 Chrétien 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
Chrétien 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.
Chrétien'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 Chrétien, 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 Cligés 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. Chrétien
well knew the difference between right and wrong, between reason and
passion, as the reader of "Cligés" may learn for himself. Fenice was not
Iseut, and she would not have her Cligés to be a Tristan. Infidelity,
if you will, but not "menage a trois". Both "Erec" and "Yvain" present
a conventional morality. But "Lancelot" is flagrantly immoral, and the
poet is careful to state that for this particular romance he is indebted
to his patroness Marie de Champagne. He says it was she who furnished
him with both the "matiere" and the "san", the material of the story and
its method of treatment.
Scholars have sought to fix the chronology of the poet's works, and have
been tempted to speculate upon the evolution of his literary and moral
ideas. Professor Foerster's chronology is generally accepted, and there
is little likelihood of his being in error when he supposes Chrétien's
work to have been done as follows: the lost "Tristan" (the existence of
which is denied by Gaston Paris in "Journal des Savants", 1902, pp. 297
f.), "Erec and Enide", "Cligés", "Lancelot", "Yvain", "Perceval". The
arguments for this chronology, based upon external as well as internal
criticism, may be found in the Introductions to Professor Foerster's
recent editions. When we speculate upon the development of Chrétien's
moral ideas we are not on such sure ground. As we have seen, his
standards vary widely in the different romances. How much of this
variation is due to chance circumstance imposed by the nature of
his subject or by the taste of his public, and how much to changing
conviction it is easy to see, when we consider some contemporary
novelist, how dangerous it is to judge of moral convictions as reflected
in literary work. "Lancelot" must be the keystone of any theory
constructed concerning the moral evolution of Chrétien. The following
supposition is tenable, if the chronology of Foerster is correct. After
the works of his youth, consisting of lyric poems and translations
embodying the ideals of Ovid and of the school of contemporary
troubadour poets, Chrétien took up the Arthurinn material and started
upon a new course. "Erec" is the oldest Arthurinn romance to have
survived in any language, but it is almost certainly not the first to
have been written. It is a perfectly clean story: of love, estrangement,
and reconciliation in the persons of Erec and his charming sweetheart
Enide. The psychological analysis of Erec's motives in the rude testing
of Enide is worthy of attention, and is more subtle than anything
previous in French literature with which we are acquainted. The poem is
an episodical romance in the biography of an Arthurinn hero, with the
usual amount of space given to his adventures. "Cligés" apparently
connects a Byzantine tale of doubtful origin in an arbitrary fashion
with the court of Arthur. It is thought that the story embodies the same
motive as the widespread tale of the deception practised upon Solomon by
his wife, and that Chrétien's source, as he himself claims, was literary
(cf. Gaston Paris in "Journal des Savants", 1902, pp. 641-655). The
scene where Fenice feigns death in order to rejoin her lover is a
parallel of many others in literary history, and will, of course,
suggest the situation in Romeo and Juliet. This romance well illustrates
the drawing power of Arthur's court as a literary centre, and its use as
a rallying-point for courteous knights of whatever extraction. The poem
has been termed an "Anti-Tristan", because of its disparaging reference
to the love of Tristan and Iseut, which, it is generally supposed,
had been narrated by Chrétien in his earlier years. Next may come
"Lancelot", with its significant dedication to the Countess of
Champagne. Of all the poet's work, this tale of the rescue of Guinevere
by her lover seems to express most closely the ideals of Marie's court
ideals in which devotion and courtesy but thinly disguise free love.
"Yvain" is a return to the poet's natural bent, in an episodical
romance, while "Perceval" crowns his production with its pure and
exalted note, though without a touch of that religious mysticism
which later marked Wolfram yon Eschenbach's "Parzival". "Guillaime
d'Angleterre" is a pseudo-historical romance of adventure in which the
worldly distresses and the final reward of piety are conventionally
exposed. It is uninspired, its place is difficult to determine, and
its authorship is questioned by some. It is aside from the Arthurian
material, and there is no clue to its place in the evolution of
Chrétien's art, if indeed it be his work.
A few words must be devoted to Chrétien's place in the history of
mediaeval narrative poetry. The heroic epic songs of France, devoted
either to the conflict of Christendom under the leadership of France
against the Saracens, or else to the strife and rivalry of French
vassals among themselves, had been current for perhaps a century before
our poet began to write. These epic poems, of which some three score
have survived, portray a warlike, virile, unsentimental feudal society,
whose chief occupation was fighting, and whose dominant ideals were
faith in God, loyalty to feudal family ties, and bravery in battle.
Woman's place is comparatively obscure, and of love-making there is
little said. It is a poetry of vigorous manhood, of uncompromising
morality, and of hard knocks given and taken for God, for Christendom,
and the King of France. This poetry is written in ten- or twelve-
syllable verses grouped, at first in assonanced, later in rhymed,
"tirades" of unequal length. It was intended for a society which was
still homogeneous, and to it at the outset doubtless all classes of the
population listened with equal interest. As poetry it is monotonous,
without sense of proportion, padded to facilitate memorisation by
professional reciters, and unadorned by figure, fancy, or imagination.
Its pretention to historic accuracy begot prosaicness in its approach
to the style of the chronicles. But its inspiration was noble, its
conception of human duties was lofty. It gives a realistic portrayal of
the age which produced it, the age of the first crusades, and to this
day we would choose as our models of citizenship Roland and Oliver
rather than Tristan and Lancelot. The epic poems, dealing with the
pseudo-historical characters who had fought in civil and foreign wars
under Charlemagne, remained the favourite literary pabulum of the middle
classes until the close of the thirteenth century. Professor Bedier
is at present engaged in explaining the extraordinary hold which these
poems had upon the public, and in proving that they exercised a distinct
function when exploited by the Church throughout the period of
the crusades to celebrate local shrines and to promote muscular
Christianity. But the refinement which began to penetrate the ideals of
the French aristocracy about the middle of the twelfth century craved a
different expression in narrative literature. Greek and Roman mythology
and history were seized upon with some effect to satisfy the new demand.
The "Roman de Thebes", the "Roman d'Alexandre", the "Roman de
Troie", and its logical continuation, the "Roman d'Eneas", are all
twelfth-century attempts to clothe classic legend in the dress of
mediaeval chivalry. But better fitted to satisfy the new demand was the
discovery by the alert Anglo-Normans perhaps in Brittany, perhaps in the
South of England, of a vast body of legendary material which, so far as
we know, had never before this century received any elaborate literary
treatment. The existence of the literary demand and this discovery of
the material for its prompt satisfaction is one of the most remarkable
coincidences in literary history. It would seem that the pride of the
Celtic populations in a Celtic hero, aided and abetted by Geoffrey of
Monmouth, who first showed the romantic possibilities of the material,
made of the obscure British chieftain Arthur a world conqueror. Arthur
thus became already in Geoffrey's "Historia regum Britaniae" a conscious
protagonist of Charlemagne and his rival in popularity. This grandiose
conception of Arthur persisted in England, but this conception of the
British chieftain did not interest the French. For Chrétien Arthur had
no political significance. He is simply the arbiter of his court in all
affairs of justice and courtesy. Charlemagne's very realistic entourage
of virile and busy barons is replaced by a court of elegant chevaliers
and unemployed ladies. Charlemagne's setting is historical and
geographical; Arthur's setting is ideal and in the air. In the oldest
epic poems we find only God-fearing men and a few self-effacing women;
in the Arthurian romances we meet gentlemen and ladies, more elegant and
seductive than any one in the epic poems, but less fortified by
faith and sense of duty against vice because breathing an enervating
atmosphere of leisure and decadent morally. Though the Church made the
attempt in "Parzival", it could never lay its hands so effectively upon
this Celtic material, because it contained too many elements which
were root and branch inconsistent with the essential teachings of
Christianity. A fleeting comparison of the noble end of Charlemagne's
Peers fighting for their God and their King at Ronceval with the futile
and dilettante careers of Arthur's knights in joust and hunt, will show
better than mere words where the difference lies.
The student of the history of social and moral ideals will find much to
interest him in Chrétien's romances. Mediaeval references show that he
was held by his immediate successors, as he is held to-day when fairly
viewed, to have been a master of the art of story-telling. More than any
other single narrative poet, he was taken as a model both in France and
abroad. Professor F. M. Warren has set forth in detail the finer points
in the art of poetry as practised by Chrétien and his contemporary
craftsmen (see "Some Features of Style in Early French Narrative Poetry,
1150-1170 in "Modern Philology", iii., 179-209; iii., 513-539; iv.,
655-675). Poets in his own land refer to him with reverence, and foreign
poets complimented him to a high degree by direct translation and by
embroidering upon the themes which he had made popular. The knights made
famous by Chrétien soon crossed the frontiers and obtained rights of
citizenship in counties so diverse as Germany, England, Scandinavia,
Holland, Italy, and to a lesser extent in Spain and Portugal. The
inevitable tendency of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to reduce
poetry to prose affected the Arthurian material; vast prose compilations
finally embodied in print the matter formerly expressed in verse, and it
was in this form that the stories were known to later generations until
revived interest in the Middle Ages brought to light the manuscripts in
verse.
Aside from certain episodes of Chrétien's romances, the student will be
most interested in the treatment of love as therein portrayed. On this
topic we may hear speaking the man of his time. "Cligés" contains the
body of Chrétien's doctrine of love, while Lancelot is his most perfect
lover. His debt to Ovid has not yet been indicated with sufficient
preciseness. An elaborate code to govern sentiment and its expression
was independently developed by the troubadours of Provence in the early
twelfth century. These Provencal ideals of the courtly life were carried
into Northern France partly as the result of a royal marriage in 1137
and of the crusade of 1147, and there by such poets as Chrétien they
were gathered up and fused with the Ovidian doctrine into a highly
complicated but perfectly definite statement of the ideal relations of
the sexes. Nowhere in the vulgar tongues can a better statement of these
relations be found than in "Cligés."
So we leave Chrétien to speak across the ages for himself and his
generation. He is to be read as a story-teller rather than as a poet,
as a casuist rather than as a philosopher. But when all deductions are
made, his significance as a literary artist and as the founder of a
precious literary tradition distinguishes him from all other poets
of the Latin races between the close of the Empire and the arrival of
Dante.
--W. W. COMFORT.