I may here quote a remark of the distinguished folk-lore authority to whom I have previously referred. Mr. E. S. Hartland says: 'The rain-making incident has always seemed to me a very good evidence of the traditional origin of the (Yvain) story. At all events it is an incident very closely connected with savage magic.'
I do not suppose it would very much astonish any competent student of these questions if some missionary in Africa, or traveller in the South Sea Islands, was to publish a savage variant of our romance: the substitution of the slayer for the slain, and the practice of rain-making by the pouring out of water, are customs alive in certain parts of the world to this day. But what would Professor Foerster say? Would he still maintain that his 'Meister' invented the story, and credit the savage folk, whoever they might be, with the remains of a vanished civilisation and literary culture?
I think it also highly probable that in the Balaan and Balaain story, and in Meraugis de Portlesguez, we have variants of the same theme. In each of these cases the hero must take the place of the champion he defeats, and hold the post till in his turn he be defeated and slain; while at the same time he succeeds to his predecessor's relations with the lady of the castle, whose ami he becomes.76 It will be observed that Herr Ahlström's suggestion that the lady may originally have been a fairy—a suggestion contemptuously scouted by Professor Foerster77—might be accepted without any detriment to the original signification of the story, whereas Professor Foerster's theory excludes any possible archaic origin, and is demonstrably out of harmony with the very primitive rain-making incident.
It is obvious that such a tale as I have indicated above, belonging as it does to the family of folk-lore and traditional tales, is precisely the kind of story that might be related in a lai; and this was, I believe, its original form. It is significant that Chrétien records the fact that there was a lai more or less closely connected with the lady who became Yvain's wife; and, according to the reading of one MS., that connection was very close indeed, being nothing less than the relation of how Yvain won her to wife.
I print here the reading to which I refer, together with that of Professor Foerster's edition:—
MS. 12560, Bib. Nat. (Anç. fr. 210), fol. 14, recto 2nd col.
Veanz touz les barons se done
La dame a mon seignor 'Y.'
Par la main de son chapelain
Einsint la dame de lenduc
La dame qui fu fille au duc
Landonez dont len note ·|· lai.78
Professor Foerster's critical edition.
Veant toz ses barons se done
La dame a mon seignor Yvain.
Par la main d'un suen chapelain
Prise a Laudine de Landuc
La dame qui fu fille au duc
Laudunet don an note un lai.
—Yvain, ed. 1891, ll. 2148-53.
(Translation.)
All the barons beholding, gives herself
The lady to my lord Yvain.
By the hand of her chaplain
Thus the lady of lenduc,
The lady who was daughter to the duke,
They have given to him of which (whom) one notes a lay.
All her barons beholding, gives herself
The lady to my lord Yvain.
By the hand of one her chaplain
He has taken Laudine de Landuc,
The lady who was daughter to the duke,
Laudunet of whom (which) one notes a lay.
It will be observed that, grammatically, the phrase 'don an note un lai' may refer to the wedding quite as well as to the supposed Laudunet, while in no other passage in the entire poem is the lady's name or that of her father mentioned.
The MS. which offers the interesting variant quoted above is, Professor Foerster tells us, in the dialect of Champagne (Chrétien was a Champenois) of the thirteenth century, and stands in close relation to the source of Hartmann von Aue's translation.79
For many reasons it appears to me that this reading deserves more attention than it has yet received. It is, to say the least, curious that Chrétien should go out of his way to remark upon a lai dealing with an absolutely unknown personage and one to whom he never refers again. Chrétien's poems stand, not at the commencement of the Arthurian tradition, but at a very advanced stage of its evolution: had there been current at that date, the end of the twelfth century, a lai important enough to be chronicled in this unusual manner (I can recall no other instance in Chrétien's poems), some trace of the hero of the lai, if not the poem itself, would surely have been preserved to us. On the other hand, the version given in the Welsh tale has a break precisely at this point, showing where the primary redaction ended, and the character of the tale is, as we have seen, such as might well be preserved in a lai. I believe that Chrétien is here indicating the original source of this section of his poem.
The passage, moreover, has a curious affinity with one to which I shall have occasion to refer later on, where the carelessness of a copyist in running together two or three words has created what the editor of the text read as a proper name, a reading adopted by his critics. But here the text had not been worked over, and the result was a confused reading which has baffled more than one commentator. The mere chance that the right reading (here undoubted) has been preserved in a text hitherto unaccountably neglected has enabled me to detect the error; but had the copyists of the Queste been as careful to preserve the grammatical sense as those of the Yvain, we should have been much puzzled to decide whether D'Estrois de Gariles was or was not originally des trois de Gaule!80
It is a question for experts in palæography which is the more likely error to be made, the running of two or three words into one, eventually read as a proper name, or the separation of the letters composing a proper name into two or three words.
It appears to me that the arguments advanced for the above view are, as compared with Professor Foerster's arguments, objective versus subjective. Professor Foerster sees in the story of Yvain and his lady a resemblance to the tale of the Widow of Ephesus, therefore he concludes that Chrétien based his romance on that story; but in support of his theory he offers no proof whatever: there is no evidence that Chrétien knew the tale, no reference to a book in which it might be contained, no correspondence of name or phrase, and the most characteristic incidents, the dwelling by the grave, and the insult to the corpse, have no parallel in the romance.81 The evidence is purely subjective; satisfactory to the framer of the theory, but not satisfactory to others.
The evidence for the theory advanced above is, on the contrary, purely objective. The story must be of such a character that it might be told as a lai—it is of such a character, i.e. folk-lore and traditional; proof—the rain-making incident, and correspondence with the motif of 'slayer and slain.' We must have proof that Chrétien knew the lais current in his day—he refers to one of the most famous, Guingamor, and couples the hero with that of another, Graalent. We should like a reference to a lai connected with the story—we have the reference, at the very point where, according to our theory, we might expect to find it. Further, the reading of one MS., and that neither a late nor a poor one, gives a remarkable indication of the contents of the lai. If on these grounds we decline to accept the Widow of Ephesus theory we are surely neither prejudiced nor oblivious of facts.82
Nor is Professor Foerster more fortunate in his theory of the origin of Perceval. He states it at great length in the introduction to the Charrette,83 but the main points may be summarised thus. The book given to Chrétien by Count Philip of Flanders was a Grail as distinct from a Perceval romance. The two were independent stories and their combination was the work of Chrétien de Troyes. 'Dieser original Gralroman enthielt natürlich keinen Perceval und auch nicht dessen Sagen-motiv, sondern wird den uns sonst bekannten Gral-texten ähnlich gewesen sein.'84 'Sollte das livre aber, aller Unwahrscheinlichkeit zu trotz, dennoch ein Perceval (d. h. Dümmlings-) Roman gewesen sein, so erklärt sich ebenfalls warum das livre nicht gefunden worden ist: der Name Perceval stand natürlich nicht in demselben sondern ist durch Kristian von einem schon in Erec genannten Ritter auf den Helden übertragen worden.'85
Into such pitfalls can the obstinate adherence to a preconceived idea lead the most distinguished scholar! What are the facts? In Erec, Chrétien mentions Perceval by his full title, Perceval li Galois, as at Arthur's court, but does not include him in the list of knights of the Round Table;86 but in Cligés, written some years later than Erec, and according to Professor Foerster himself between twenty and thirty years before the Perceval, the whole position is changed: Perceval is not merely one of Arthur's knights, but second in rank, inferior only to Gawain, thus displacing Erec, whose praises Chrétien had sung at length, and superior to Lancelot, whom the poet also celebrated before he wrote of Perceval.
This is the position. Cligés has come to a tournament at Ossenefort, and has on the first two days overthrown successively Segramore and Lancelot; on the third day:
Del ranc devers Ossenefort
Part uns vassaus de grant renon,
Percevaus li Galois ot non.
Lués que Cligés le vit movoir
Et de son non oï le voir,
Que Perceval l'oï nomer,
Mout desirre a lui asanbler.'—Cligés, 4826-32.
This is the Perceval who was only a name to Chrétien! But Chrétien's hero knows him! Can we avoid the conclusion that, at the time Cligés was written, Perceval was already the hero of a well-known and highly popular tale; so popular that the author felt justified in displacing in his favour the hero (Erec) whose deeds he had already sung with such marked success? If the story of Perceval li Galois be due to Chrétien, then we must believe that, having conceived the tale in his mind, and paved the way for its reception by the above reference, he yet abstained from presenting it to the public for nearly thirty years! Or could Perceval have been the hero of some other tale, the popularity of which has waned before that of Chrétien's poem? Of any story connected with him save the Enfances-Grail adventure there is no trace, and of these we have variants of the former minus the Grail tradition (Peredur and the English Sir Percyvelle); but all the Grail stories know the Enfances.
It is also significant that Chrétien in the Erec mentions both Gurnemanz (Gornemant) and L'Orguelleus de la Lande, both of them noted characters of the Perceval story; in fact, but for that story the former would be nothing more than a name to us.
I have remarked in a note to chap. ii. that Chrétien apparently also knew the enchanter of the Lanzelet. I had not noted this till I had completed my study of the poem, and, as a footnote is apt to be overlooked, I draw attention to it here. In the list of the knights of the Round Table given in Erec, Chrétien ranks as eighth Mauduiz li Sages; in Hartmann's translation the name is given as Malduiz li Sages; Diu Krône has Malduz der Weise; the Lanzelet spells the enchanter's name Malduz or Malduc, and qualifies him as der Wîse.87
I do not think there can be the least doubt that it is one and the same individual who is referred to in these quotations, and the only adventure known of him, and one which would fully account for his sobriquet li Sages, is one which is preserved in a poem bristling with Perceval allusions,88 the Lanzelet of Ulrich von Zatzikhoven.
I have said above that a critical edition of the Lanzelet is urgently needed, and I should not be surprised if the result of a close examination of that poem were to show good reasons for fixing the date of the Perceval story (as a Perceval and not a mere Dümmling story) at a much earlier period than we have hitherto been inclined to admit.89
Is it not the fact that story-tellers in mediæval times depended for their popularity less upon the manner in which they told their stories than on the stories themselves? i.e., if they wished to write a really popular poem they took a subject already popular, and which they knew would be secure of a favourable hearing. Are we really so unreasonable when we contend that it was the traditional, folk-lore, popular character of the stories told in Erec, Yvain, and Perceval, which made them so much more popular than Cligés? The Charrette is so manifestly inferior to Chrétien's other works that we will not call it as evidence; it was, and deserved to be, little known. But Cligés stands on a different footing. The story is interesting, it is well written, and the love-tale of Alexander and Soredamors contains some of the poet's most characteristic writing; yet, compared with the other poems, it took little hold on the popular fancy. Was it not because the story was unknown to the general public with whom the tale itself counted for more than the skill with which it was told?
I cannot but think that to treat such stories as the three named above, solely as Arthurian stories, is to base our criticism of them on an entirely false foundation: they are only Arthurian in a secondary sense, and criticism of them, to be accurate and scientific, must be founded as much on folk-lore as on literary data. Nor, I submit, are arguments, which may be sound enough as applied to the rise of the Arthurian romantic legend, of necessity equally sound when applied to stories of independent origin incorporated in that legend. I do not say for a moment that Arthur as a romantic hero is a continental creation, personally I very much doubt it; but of this I am quite certain, were that continental origin proved up to the hilt, it would still leave unsolved the problem of the origin of these stories.
Before closing this chapter I would touch for a moment on the geographical questions involved; for it seems to me that not sufficient account has been taken of the marked difference between the geography of these three and that of Chrétien's remaining two poems. The first three have a common character. Yvain's adventures pass in and on the borders of Wales. He starts from Carduel en Galles (Kardyf in the English version), and after one night's rest reaches the fountain. It is at Chester, not otherwise an Arthurian town, but one well within the bounds of the story, that his wife's messenger finds him. Erec is 'd'Estregalles'; the towns are Caradigan, Carduel, Cærnant, Nantes. So with Perceval, who is li Galois, we have Carduel, Dinasdron, the Forest of Broceliande—exactly the geography we might expect in stories of Welsh origin redacted on Armorican ground. Many of the names here, as in certain of the lais, may be either insular or continental, inasmuch as they are common to the Celtic race on both sides of the Channel.
But in Cligés, and in a minor degree in the Charrette, we are on different ground: the geography is that neither of Wales nor of Brittany. Here we have Dover, Wallingford, Winchester, Windsor, Southampton, Oxford, Shoreham, Bath, London; while we note a marked omission of the distinctively Arthurian localities. The Charrette opens at Carlion, which it, however, apparently confuses with Camelot.
Now this is surely significant. If Chrétien had a free hand in the arrangement of his stories, if they were really compounded of elements drawn from all sources and thus combined for the first time, why did he shift his mise-en-scène backwards and forwards in this curious manner? Why turn from the geography of Erec to that of Cligés and the Charrette, only to revert to his first love in Yvain and Perceval? Is it not most probable that in those three stories, at least, he was dealing with traditional matter, the localising of which had already been effected?
In the case of Cligés and the Charrette it seems not improbable that closer investigation may find grounds to support the theory of a possible Anglo-Norman transmission, which would account for the southern England geography.90
A point on which we may well lay stress is, that the independence of Chrétien as a story-teller does not stand or fall with the existence or non-existence of Anglo-Norman Arthurian poems. Their importance, in relation to Chrétien, may easily be exaggerated by those unfamiliar with the character of oral tales. If we once accept as a principle the well-ascertained fact that such stories have a tendency to fall into a set form, a fixed sequence of incident and detail, would always be related in practically the same words, and, moreover, could well contain more than one sagen motif, we shall realise that the necessity of postulating a written source as explanation for the agreement in sequence, incident, and phrase, becomes infinitely less pressing.91
To my mind, the correspondences between the Welsh Arthurian tales and Chrétien's three poems in question offer no proof that the former repose directly on these poems as basis; but I consider it extremely probable that many of the perplexing features of the question—e.g. the occurrence in the Welsh stories, and in translations of Chrétien's poems, of details not to be found in the best mss. of those poems—may be accounted for by copyists and translators familiar with an oral version of the tale, filling in details which Chrétien had either never heard, or had purposely omitted. If we postulate, as from the character of the stories we are justified in doing, a very widespread knowledge of those tales, apart from any written source, we shall not be surprised at the existence of a large number of minor variants; the impossibility of explaining which on purely literary grounds drives Professor Foerster and those who share his views to the unsatisfactory expedient of multiplying MS. 'families.'92
To sum up the considerations advanced in the preceding pages, I think we are justified in saying that the real crux of Arthurian romance is the period before and not after Chrétien de Troyes. Not that the latter period does not offer us puzzles: it does, many and great, but when we arrive at some definite and proven conclusion as to the materials with which the earliest compilers of metrical romance were dealing, we shall have made a great step towards unravelling the problem of their successors. So far, I do not think we have arrived at such a conclusion; many theories are in the field, but none seem entirely to meet the conditions of the question. My own conviction is that, whether oral or written, Arthurian romantic tradition is of much older date than we have hitherto been inclined to believe.
To arrive at any solid result in our investigations there are certain principles which we must always keep in view, e.g., if the Arthurian tradition consists (as it admittedly does) largely of folk-lore and mythic elements, it must, so far as these elements are concerned, be examined and criticised on methods recognised and adopted by experts in those branches of knowledge—and not treated on literary lines and literary evidence alone. Thus it is essential to determine the original character of a story before proceeding to criticise its literary form. To treat stories of folk-lore origin from an exclusively literary point of view is to render a false conclusion not merely probable but certain.
In every case where an oral source appears probable, or even possible, we must ascertain, from the evidence of experts in story-transmission, what are the characteristics of tales so told, and what is the nature of the correspondence existing between tales of common origin but of independent development.
The evidence of proper names is valuable only in a secondary degree, as testifying to the place or places of redaction. But the older the story the less valuable they are as indications of original source, the oldest tales having a strong tendency to anonymity. So we find that in the lais the older versions only speak of 'a king,' the later identify that king with Arthur.93
If we take these elementary tests, and apply them to those of the poems of Chrétien de Troyes for which a traditional origin may safely be postulated, we shall I think arrive at the conclusion that there is little ground for ascribing inventive genius to the poet, whose superiority over his contemporaries was quantitative rather than qualitative. He differed from them in degree, not in kind; he had a keener sense of artistic composition, a more excellent literary style. Given the same material as his contemporaries he produced a superior result; when the material was deficient, as in the Charrette, the result was proportionately inferior.
There is no necessity to belittle him as 'ein sklavischer Übersetzer'; there is no ground that I can see for crediting him with an inventive genius foreign to his age. The truth lies, as it so often does, midway between the two extremes.
In this connection I may well quote Dr. Schofield's sober and carefully reasoned conclusion to his Study of the Lays of Graalent and Lanval: 'The process of combining separate episodes to make an extended poem, we may well believe, had begun before the time of Marie's contemporary, Chrétien de Troyes. He simply carried it one step farther, and devoted his great literary talent to presenting in more attractive form, with more modern courtly flourishes, the stories already existing. Doubtless he himself made new combinations, and in so doing was guided by a poet's sense of appropriateness, choosing such general and subordinate episodes as would contribute best to the development of his hero's character.94 To him we must certainly ascribe the interesting psychological discussions so numerous in his works. But still his power of invention is not great. His art is shown above all in the way in which he combines and arranges separate stories, or embellishes those already told at considerable length.'95
These words, I believe, state in generous terms the position which scientific criticism will ultimately assign to Chrétien de Troyes: they represent the very utmost that can reasonably be claimed for him.
Herr Brugger's article, referred to on p. 66, did not come into my hands until these studies were in proof. Inasmuch as the theory regarding the Arthurisation of the lais stated in this chapter and in chapter ii. might lead some readers to the conclusion that my views are identical with those set forth in the article in question, I think it well to state (a) that I only postulate of certain early metrical romances an origin which Herr Brugger apparently attributes to all Arthurian romances, prose or verse; (b) that when Herr Brugger speaks of origin he uses the word loosely, and in a secondary sense, whereas I use it in a primary; e.g. to say that a story which reached French writers through a Breton source may therefore be accurately described as of Breton origin is, in my opinion, both inaccurate and misleading, especially in the face of Professor Foerster's strongly reiterated denials of an insular Arthurian romantic tradition. The immediate source of the French writers does not solve for us the problem of the origins of Arthurian tradition; it is a mistake to employ an argument, or use terminology, confounding two distinct questions.