Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/589

CHAP XXIII home across the British Channel. With equal ease on the wings of universal human interest it surmounts the Pyrenees. It would have crossed the ocean, had the New World been discovered.

Far be it from our purpose to enter the bottomless swamp of critical discussion of the source and history of the Arthurian romances. Two or three statements—general and probably rather incorrect—may be made. Marie de France, soon after the middle of the twelfth century, wrote a number of shortish narrative poems of chivalric manners and romantic love, which, as it were, touch the hem of Arthur's cloak. Chrétien de Troies between 1160 and 1175 composed his Tristan (a story originally having nothing to do with Arthur), and then his Erec (Geraint), then Cligés; then his (unfinished) Lancelot or the Conte de la charrette; then Ivain or the Chevalier au lion, and at last Perceval or the Conte du Graal. How much of the matter of these poems came from Brittany—or indirectly from Great Britain? This is a large unsolved question! Another is the relation of Chrétien's poems to the subsequent Arthurian romances in verse and prose. And perhaps most disputed of all is the authorship (Beroul? Robert de Boron? Walter Mapes?) of this mass of Arthurian Old French literature which was not the work of Chrétien. Without lengthy prolegomena it would be fruitless to attempt to order and name these compositions. The Arthurian matters were taken up by German poets of excellence—Heinrich von Veldeke, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach,—and sometimes the best existing versions are the work of the latter; for instance, Wolfram's Parzival and Gottfried's Tristan. And again the relation of these German versions to their French originals becomes still another problem.

For the chivalry of these romances, one may look to the poems of Chrétien and to passages in the Old French prose (presumably of the early thirteenth century), to which the name of Robert de Boron or Walter Mapes is attached. Chrétien enumerates knightly excellences in his Cligés, and, speaking from the natural point of view of the jongleur, he puts largesce (generosity) at their head. This, says he,