Although by no means the best, the Chevalier de la Charrette is perhaps the most interesting of Chrétien’s extant works, for the reason that we obtain in it our first literary introduction to the story of Lancelot of the Lake. It treats, indeed, of only an episode in that famous knight’s career, but that episode reveals him to us as the lover of Arthur’s queen, and so marks an important stage in the evolution of Arthurian romance. In Chrétien’s poem, Guinevere is abducted by Meleaguant,[98] the son of the king of a land whence no man returns. Her rescue is accomplished by Lancelot, who, in order to achieve his object, has to ride in a cart used as a tumbril to convey prisoners to execution; hence the name given to him and to the poem, ‘The Knight of the Cart.’ Welsh tradition knows nothing whatever of the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere, although, as we have seen, Guinevere did come to have in Welsh folk-lore a doubtful reputation that somewhat debased her name. It is in his Lancelot poem alone that Chrétien suggests that Guinevere was anything but a gracious and loving wife. Whence, then, did he derive the story of her illicit relations with Lancelot? Some see in it the influence of the Tristram legend, in which passionate love breaks every bond. Others attribute the invention of Lancelot as Guinevere’s lover to the personal suggestion of Marie of Champagne, who, according to Chrétien’s own account, furnished him with the material for his poem. Whatever may be the truth about its origin, the story of Lancelot is an obvious, indeed the most signal, example of the way in which the Arthurian legends were adapted to suit the conceptions of chivalry. We have in it a capital instance of what was implied in the cult of “courtly love,” and hence it is not surprising that among mediæval tales women, as Chaucer informs us, held “in ful gret reverence the boke of Lancelot de Lake.”[99] That book was not Chrétien’s poem, but, much more probably, the prose romance of Lancelot, usually assigned to Walter Map. The same prose story, or one of its adaptations, was presumably the book in which Paolo and Francesca read, as related by Dante in the Fifth Canto of his Inferno.
The prose Lancelot is a vast compilation embracing what is really a series of romances, including a version of the Grail story, and is attributed, on good MS. authority, to the courtier Walter Map. If he be indeed its author, he is entitled to as high a pedestal in the Arthurian House of Fame as either Geoffrey or Chrétien. The difficulty of accepting his authorship of the work is not so much that he was a very active public man, as that the one book of which he is the indubitable author, the De Nugis Curialium,—a sort of commonplace book in which contemporary history finds a place side by side with fairy tales, and much other odd lore,—does not afford the slightest trace of interest in Arthurian story. Map’s name was used to give a literary passport to the notorious Goliardic poems gathered from many cryptic sources in the thirteenth century, and it may very well be that the ascription to him of so wholly laudable a work as the Lancelot was dictated by some too modest scribe’s desire for high credentials.
The other great love-story of Arthurian romance, that of Tristram and Iseult, is the most poetical and the most poignant in tragic interest of all the tales that came to be included in “the matter of Britain.” The story of Lancelot, with all its charm and pathos, betrays only too obviously its origin in the artificial conventions of “courtly love.” The story of Tristram, on the other hand, is one of sheer, over-mastering, natural passion,—the first really great story of passionate romantic love in modern literature. It is also, in its scene, its characters, its colouring, a distinctively Celtic tale. Tristram[100] is known to early Welsh tradition under the name of Drystan, the son of Tallwch, as a purely mythical hero; so also is Mark, or March ab Meirchion, who, in the first literary versions of the story, appears as King of Cornwall. The “proud, first Iseult, Cornwall’s queen,”
“She who, as they voyaged, quaff’d
With Tristram that spiced magic draught,”
came from Ireland; while the other Iseult,
“the patient flower,
Who possess’d his darker hour,
Iseult of the Snow-White hand,”[101]
had her home in Brittany. The entire atmosphere of the story is that of the western Celtic seaboard, where lay the mystic land of Lyonesse, then “unswallowed of the tides,” and