modern conception.  For this reason the loss of Christian’s “Tristan” makes a terrible gap in art, for Christian’s poem would have given the first and best idea of what led to courteous love.  The “Tristan” was written before 1160, and belonged to the cycle of Queen Eleanor of England rather than to that of her daughter Mary of Troyes; but the subject was one neither of courtesy nor of France; it belonged to an age far behind the eleventh century, or even the tenth, or indeed any century within the range of French history; and it was as little fitted for Christian’s way of treatment as for any avowed burlesque.  The original Tristan—­critics say—­was not French, and neither Tristan nor Isolde had ever a drop of French blood in their veins.  In their form as Christian received it, they were Celts or Scots; they came from Brittany, Wales, Ireland, the northern ocean, or farther still.  Behind the Welsh Tristan, which passed probably through England to Normandy and thence to France and Champagne, critics detect a far more ancient figure living in a form of society that France could not remember ever to have known.  King Marc was a tribal chief of the Stone Age whose subjects loved the forest and lived on the sea or in caves; King Marc’s royal hall was a common shelter on the banks of a stream, where every one was at home, and king, queen, knights, attendants, and dwarf slept on the floor, on beds laid down where they pleased; Tristan’s weapons were the bow and stone knife; he never saw a horse or a spear; his ideas of loyalty and Isolde’s ideas of marriage were as vague as Marc’s royal authority; and all were alike unconscious of law, chivalry, or church.  The note they sang was more unlike the note of Christian, if possible, than that of Richard Wagner; it was the simplest expression of rude and primitive love, as one could perhaps find it among North American Indians, though hardly so defiant even there, and certainly in the Icelandic Sagas hardly so lawless; but it was a note of real passion, and touched the deepest chords of sympathy in the artificial society of the twelfth century, as it did in that of the nineteenth.  The task of the French poet was to tone it down and give it the fashionable dress, the pointed shoes and long sleeves, of the time.  “The Frenchman,” says Gaston Paris, “is specially interested in making his story entertaining for the society it is meant for; he is ‘social’; that is, of the world; he smiles at the adventures he tells, and delicately lets you see that he is not their dupe; he exerts himself to give to his style a constant elegance, a uniform polish, in which a few neatly turned, clever phrases sparkle here and there; above all, he wants to please, and thinks of his audience more than of his subject.”