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