, and said,
"There is less doubt than ever." That the prose should have been
prettified and platitudinised, decorated and diluted into the verse is a
possibility which we know to be not only possible but likely, from a
thousand more unfortunate examples. That the contrary process should
have taken place is practically unexampled and, especially at that time,
largely unthinkable. At any rate, whosoever did it had a much greater
genius than Chrestien's.

This is no place to argue out the whole question, but a single
particular may be dealt with. The curiously silly passage about the bars
above given is a characteristic example of unlucky and superfluous
amplification of the perfectly natural question and answer of the prose,
"May I come to you?" "Yes, but how?" an example to be paralleled by
thousands of others at the time and by many more later. Taken the other
way it would be a miracle. Prose abridgers of poetry did not go to work
like that in the twelfth-thirteenth century--nor, even in the case of
Charles Lamb, have they often done so since.

It is, however, very disagreeable to have to speak disrespectfully of a
writer so agreeable in himself and so really important in our story as
Chrestien. His own gifts and performances are, as it seems to me, clear
enough. He took from this or that source--his selection of the _Erec_
and _Percivale_ matters, if not also that of _Yvain_, suggests others
besides the, by that time as I think, concentrated Arthurian story--and
from the Arthuriad itself the substance of the _Chevalier a la
Charette_. He varied and dressed them up with pleasant etceteras, and
in especial, sometimes, though not always, embroidered the already
introduced love-motive with courtly fantasies and with a great deal of
detail. I should not be at all disposed to object if somebody says that
he, before any one else, set the type of the regular verse _Roman
d'aventures_. It seems likely, again, from the pieces referred to above,
that he may have had originals more definitely connected with Celtic
sources, if not actually Celtic themselves, than those which have given
us the mighty architectonic of the "Vulgate" _Arthur_. In his own way
and place he is a great and an attractive figure--not least in the
history of the novel. But I can see nothing in him that makes me think
him likely, and much that makes me think him utterly unlikely, to be the
author of what I conceive to be the greatest, the most epoch-making, a