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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Four Arthurian Romances by Chretien DeTroyes: who, so far as we know, first recounted the romantic adventures
of Arthur's knights, Gawain. Yvain, Erec, Lancelot, and Perceval,
has been forgotten; whereas posterity has been kinder to his
debtors, Wolfram yon Eschenbach, Malory, Lord Tennyson, and
Richard Wagner. The present volume has grown out of the desire
to place these romances of adventure before the reader of English
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
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