. Both "Erec" and "Yvain" present
a conventional morality. But "Lancelot" is flagrantly immoral, and the
poet is careful to state that for this particular romance he is indebted
to his patroness Marie de Champagne. He says it was she who furnished
him with both the "matiere" and the "san", the material of the story and
its method of treatment.

Scholars have sought to fix the chronology of the poet's works, and have
been tempted to speculate upon the evolution of his literary and moral
ideas. Professor Foerster's chronology is generally accepted, and there
is little likelihood of his being in error when he supposes Chretien's
work to have been done as follows: the lost "Tristan" (the existence of
which is denied by Gaston Paris in "Journal des Savants", 1902, pp. 297
f.), "Erec and Enide", "Cliges", "Lancelot", "Yvain", "Perceval". The
arguments for this chronology, based upon external as well as internal
criticism, may be found in the Introductions to Professor Foerster's
recent editions. When we speculate upon the development of Chretien's
moral ideas we are not on such sure ground. As we have seen, his
standards vary widely in the different romances. How much of this
variation is due to chance circumstance imposed by the nature of
his subject or by the taste of his public, and how much to changing
conviction it is easy to see, when we consider some contemporary
novelist, how dangerous it is to judge of moral convictions as reflected
in literary work. "Lancelot" must be the keystone of any theory
constructed concerning the moral evolution of Chretien. The following
supposition is tenable, if the chronology of Foerster is correct. After
the works of his youth, consisting of lyric poems and translations
embodying the ideals of Ovid and of the school of contemporary
troubadour poets, Chretien took up the Arthurinn material and started
upon a new course. "Erec" is the oldest Arthurinn romance to have
survived in any language, but it is almost certainly not the first to
have been written. It is a perfectly clean story: of love, estrangement,
and reconciliation in the persons of Erec and his charming sweetheart
Enide. The psychological analysis of Erec's motives in the rude testing
of Enide is worthy of attention, and is more subtle than anything
previous in French literature with which we are acquainted. The poem is
an episodical romance in the biography of an Arthurinn hero, with the
usual amount of space given to his adv