what, of course, it had never been before: the vehicle to carry a
rich freight of chivalric customs and ideals. As an ideal of
social conduct, the code of chivalry never touched the middle and
lower classes, but it was the religion of the aristocracy and of
the twelfth-century "honnete homme". Never was literature in any
age closer to the ideals of a social class. So true is this that
it is difficult to determine whether social practices called
forth the literature, or whether, as in the case of the
seventeenth-century pastoral romance in France, it is truer to
say that literature suggested to society its ideals. Be that as
it may, it is proper to observe that the French romances of
adventure portray late mediaeval aristocracy as it fain would be.
For the glaring inconsistencies between the reality and the
ideal, one may turn to the chronicles of the period. Yet, even
history tells of many an ugly sin rebuked and of many a gallant
deed performed because of the courteous ideals of chivalry. The
debt of our own social code to this literature of courtesy and
frequent self-sacrifice is perfectly manifest.

What Chretien's immediate and specific source was for his
romances is of deep interest to the student. Unfortunately, he
has left us in doubt. He speaks in the vaguest way of the
materials he used. There is no evidence that he had any Celtic
written source. We are thus thrown back upon Latin or French
literary originals which are lost, or upon current continental
lore going back to a Celtic source. This very difficult problem
is as yet unsolved in the case of Chretien, as it is in the case
of the Anglo-Norman Beroul, who wrote of Tristan about 1150. The
material evidently was at hand and Chretien appropriated it,
without much understanding of its primitive spirit, but