FOUR ARTHURIAN ROMANCES

INTRODUCTION

Chretien 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 Chretien 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 Chretien'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 Chretien'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.

Chretien 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 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
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 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".