The Legend of Sir Lancelot du Lac. Weston Jessie Laidlay
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Lancelot gaining access to the queen's chamber by means of a heavily barred window, and severely wounding his hands in wrenching asunder the bars. The traces of blood on the bed-clothes cause the queen to be accused of a liaison with Kay, who, severely wounded, is sleeping in the ante-chamber. Lancelot undertakes to prove Guinevere's innocence by a combat with Meleagant, which shall take place at Arthur's court; but, having set out to seek Gawain, is treacherously decoyed into prison by his foe. Meleagant, by means of forged letters, persuades the queen that Lancelot has returned to court, whither Guinevere repairs, escorted by Gawain, who has meanwhile arrived on the scene. Lancelot, who has been released on parole by his jailor's wife, to attend a tourney, is subsequently walled up in a tower by Meleagant, from which prison he is released by his rival's sister, and reaching court at the last moment, overcomes and slays Meleagant.41
The capital importance of this poem lies in the fact that here, for the first time, so far as our present knowledge goes, we meet with those relations between Lancelot and the queen which form so important a part of the completed Arthurian legend. Are these relations, then, an invention of Chrétien, or were they already familiar to the public for whom he wrote? Here I shall only treat this question incidentally, deferring a full study of the point to a subsequent chapter; the questions which mainly concern us relate rather to the nature (a) of the story itself, (b) of Chrétien's share in its development.
In the introductory lines we learn that the poem was written at the instance of the Countess Marie de Champagne, who supplied 'Matiere et san.' I take this to mean that she only supplied a verbal outline of the story, and left it to Chrétien to fill in details. Thus, as regards source, Chrétien stands in a different position in this poem than in his other romances. In every other instance he had either in livre or conte42 (which latter I take to be the recital of a professional story-teller) a fixed source from which he drew his tale.
The internal evidence agrees with these indications: the Charrette is far inferior to Chrétien's other work; the construction is feeble in the extreme, and bristles with contradictions and obscurities. Why, for instance, does Meleagant suggest that Guinevere shall be put in charge of a knight and follow him? Why not challenge a single combat at the court, where there would be a public to see that the rules of such combat were observed? It may be that the original scene of abduction was a wood, and this is an awkward attempt to combine a later version, i.e. Arthur's court, with a primitive feature; but in any case it starts the story on wrong lines. Gawain (who is also mounted) follows directly on Lancelot's track, but before he comes up with him there has been time for a fierce conflict to take place. These conflicts with a valiant knight do not as a rule terminate so quickly, even though the odds be unequal! Gawain, who of course knows Lancelot well, apparently fails to recognise him, even when he unhelms for supper. The maiden of the castle warns them against sleeping in a certain bed; whoever does so will scarce escape with his life. Lancelot braves the adventure, but the next morning when he is found safe and well, the lady expresses no surprise. We are told that the maiden whom Lancelot frees from the knight at the ford knows him and is afraid he will know her, but no explanation of this is vouchsafed, and her identity is not revealed. We are expressly told that the kingdom of Gorres is surrounded by a water which none may pass, but before Lancelot even arrives at the water and bridge he is in the kingdom of Gorres, peopled by captive Bretons. No explanation is given of how Guinevere knew of Lancelot's hesitation to mount the cart; there was no witness but the dwarf, and if he noted so momentary an indecision he must have had a curiously keen appreciation of the rules of Minne; and how did he come to see Guinevere? But perhaps it was a case of telepathy. In the same manner Kay becomes mysteriously aware of what has passed between Lancelot and the queen. And these instances might be indefinitely multiplied. Chrétien's Lancelot is scarcely less incoherent than Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's; and we begin to wonder if there were not some inherent weakness in the legend itself, which rendered it impossible for any one to give an intelligible account of the hero's proceedings.43
I think it is clear that the decided inferiority of the Charrette as compared with Chrétien's other poems is due to the deficiencies of his source. He was left in the lurch, and his genius was not of a nature to extricate him from his difficulties. When he had before him a story the form of which was already practically fixed, and which required polishing rather than rearrangement, Chrétien could put it into charming language, and make a finished and artistic piece of work out of a simple original. I should express the charm of his work as being that he clad the folk-tale in the garments of the court, and taught it to move easily in its foreign trappings. But when his materials were scanty, and he was called upon to supplement them from his own imagination, he was unequal to the task; and he was artist enough to know it, and to leave unfinished a work which did him little credit, while he turned to one the nature of which precisely suited his special talent. It is not, I think, without significance that the best of Chrétien's poems follows immediately on his worst. He had a reputation to retrieve, and he did it gallantly in the Yvain.
Nor is Chrétien really successful in depicting lovers as lovers: they are little more than lay figures; they talk at great length, and indulge in analysis of their feelings, expressed in the most graceful and ingenious language; but one
'Iseut ma drue, Iseut m'amie,
En vous ma mort, en vous ma vie!'
is worth all Chrétien ever wrote on the subject; the breath of the god is not in it. Yet, so far as the Charrette goes, this is scarcely to be laid to his blame. Nowhere, save perhaps in one chapter of Malory, is there the least ring of reality in the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere. They go through all the prescribed gestures of their rôle with admirable precision. Guinevere is by turns gracious, disdainful, frantically jealous, and repentant of her jealousy; Lancelot is courteous, humble, despairing, hopeful: their relation to each other is all that Minne dienst can require between a knight and his lady, but nowhere in the whole wearily drawn-out story does the real, pent-up human feeling break through. We can never imagine these two taking one another by the hand and wandering off into the wilderness, content, and more than content, with each other's presence. The story of Lancelot and Guinevere is artificial, not natural; it demands the setting of the court, not of the woodlands. Only in the passage where Malory describes their parting do they, for a moment, become real; and the effect produced is probably due to the simplicity of the old knight's language, and the virile force of the English tongue.
Nor do I think that these relations are due to Chrétien. He treats them as an already established fact, well known to his readers, and needing no explanation. Certain episodes of the poem, the finding of the comb, the testing of the knight's fidelity to the queen by the lady in whose castle he passes the night, presuppose a state of things generally familiar. Every one knows who Lancelot is; every one will know why he, and no other knight, shall rescue the queen.
That there was a previous story of Guinevere's rescue from imprisonment under analogous circumstances is quite clear: the references found in the Arthurian romance are too numerous, and too archaic in form to be derived from a poem so late in date, so artificial in character, and so restricted in popularity as the Charrette. Of this story we have at least three distinct accounts: (a) that given by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, where the 'other-world' character of the imprisonment is strongly marked, but the rescue is the work of an enchanter, and not of Arthur or any of his knights; (b) that given in the Vita Gildæ, when the abductor is Melwas, king of Æstiva Regis (Somerset), the place of imprisonment Glastonbury, and there is again no special rescuer, Arthur marches at the head of his armies to her relief, but it is the intervention of St. Gildas and the Abbot of Glastonbury which brings about the desired result; (c) the account given in the poem under discussion.44
Of these three variants the version of the Lanzelet stands by itself; it represents the 'other-world' under an entirely different, and probably more primitive, aspect, and makes no effort at localisation.45 The other two variants fall together, Melwas, the king of Æstiva Regis, which is admittedly Somerset=Meleagant of Gorres, whose chief city is
The concluding portion of the poem is by Godefroy de Leigni, who, however, worked with Chrétien's knowledge and approval, so that practically the work may be held to be Chrétien's throughout.
Livre,
The manifold discrepancies of Chrétien's version were long ago remarked upon by M. Gaston Paris, and even Professor Foerster, with all his enthusiasm for the poet, is constrained to admit their existence, but he considers some of the puzzles were of Chrétien's own making, and he intended later to clear them up. Why then did he not explain them to Godefroy de Leigni, who finished the poem with Chrétien's approval?
I do not here include either the mediæval Welsh fragments or Malory's account. The meaning of the former cannot be accurately ascertained, and the latter practically represents the same version as that of the
Cf. Simrock,