Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/588

566 composers of these "Breton" lays was a woman, Marie de France as she is called, who lived in England in the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189). Her younger contemporary was the facile trouvère Chrétien de Troies, of whose life little is actually known. But we know that the subject of his famous Lancelot romance, called the Conte de la charrette, was suggested to him (about 1170) by the Countess Marie de Champagne, daughter of Louis VII. Surely then he wrote to please the taste of that royal dame, whose queenly mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was also a patroness of this courtly poetry.

These are instances proving the feminine influence upon the composition of these romances. And the growth of this great Arthurian Cycle represents, par excellence, the entry of womanhood into the literature of chivalry. Men love, as well as women; but the topic engrosses them less, and they talk less about it Likewise men appreciate courtesy; but in fact it is woman's influence that softens manners. And while the masculine fancy may be drawn by what is fanciful and romantic, women abandon themselves to its charm. Of course the origin or provenance of these romances was different from that of the chansons de geste. It was Breton—it was Welsh, it was walhisch (the Old-German word for the same) which means that it was foreign. In fact, the beginnings of these stories floated beautifully in from a weiss-nicht-wo which in the twelfth century was already hidden in the clouds. When the names of known localities are mentioned, they have misty import. Arthurian geography is more elusive than Homeric.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries these stories took form in the verse and prose compositions in which they still exist. Sometimes the poet's name is known, Chrétien de Troies, for instance; but the source from which he drew is doubtful. It probably was Breton, and Artus once in Great Britain fought the Saxons like as not. But the growth, the development, the further composition, of the matière de Bretagne is predominantly French. In France it grows; from France it passes on across the Rhine, across the Alps, then back to what may have been its old