"[G] Four Arthurian Romances" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeTroyes Chretien)

in a prose version based directly upon the oldest form in which
they exist.

Such extravagant claims for Chretien's art have been made in some
quarters that one feels disinclined to give them even an echo
here. The modem reader may form his own estimate of the poet's
art, and that estimate will probably not be high. Monotony, lack
of proportion, vain repetitions, insufficient motivation,
wearisome subtleties, and threatened, if not actual, indelicacy
are among the most salient defects which will arrest, and mayhap
confound, the reader unfamiliar with mediaeval literary craft.
No greater service can be performed by an editor in such a case
than to prepare the reader to overlook these common faults, and
to set before him the literary significance of this twelfth-century poet.

Chretien de Troyes wrote in Champagne during the third quarter of
the twelfth century. Of his life we know neither the beginning
nor the end, but we know that between 1160 and 1172 he lived,
perhaps as herald-at-arms (according to Gaston Paris, based on
"Lancelot" 5591-94) at Troyes, where was the court of his
patroness, the Countess Marie de Champagne. She was the daughter
of Louis VII, and of that famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, as she is
called in English histories, who, coming from the South of France
in 1137, first to Paris and later to England, may have had some
share in the introduction of those ideals of courtesy and woman
service which were soon to become the cult of European society.
The Countess Marie, possessing her royal mother's tastes and
gifts, made of her court a social experiment station, where these
Provencal ideals of a perfect society were planted afresh in
congenial soil. It appears from contemporary testimony that the
authority of this celebrated feudal dame was weighty, and widely
felt. The old city of Troyes, where she held her court, must be
set down large in any map of literary history. For it was there
that Chretien was led to write four romances which together form
the most complete expression we possess from a single author of
the ideals of French chivalry. These romances, written in
eight-syllable rhyming couplets, treat respectively of Erec and
Enide, Cliges, Yvain, and Lancelot. Another poem, "Perceval le
Gallois", was composed about 1175 for Philip, Count of Flanders,
to whom Chretien was attached during his last years. This last
poem is not included in the present translation because of its
extraordinary length of 32,000 verses, because Chretien wrote
only the first 9000 verses, and because Miss Jessie L. Weston has
given us an English version of Wolfram's wellknown "Parzival",
which tells substantially the same story, though in a different
spirit. To have included this poem, of which he wrote less than
one-third, in the works of Chretien would have been unjust to
him. It is true the romance of "Lancelot" was not completed by
Chretien, we are told, but the poem is his in such large part
that one would be over-scrupulous not to call it his. The other