ty 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 Chretien'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 "Cliges", 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 Chretien. 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 Chretien'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 Chretien 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
Chretien 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