At such a point the Welsh writer’s abundance of description is not merely pretty; it is fitting. What he thus dwells upon until we must feel it because we can see it, is an important moment in the story. But in general he blurs his story by spending equal elaboration on what is quite subordinate, or even irrelevant. His incidents claim attention equally in succession; Chrétien’s are lengthened or shortened with a sense of their narrative values. For Chrétien, relying less on the traditional picturesque description, has the better narrative. Using descriptive detail less for itself, he uses it more to bring out character or give to important moments salience. Instead of merely accumulating adventures and telling each for what it is worth by itself, as is the habit of the longer romances, he has selective art enough to bring out those that will keep attention on the conquest of the proud, selfish devotion of the husband by the nobler devotion of the wife. And at the end he impresses the significance of the whole course of adventures, the meaning of the story as a whole. He discerns, though he does not always achieve, the narrative force of unified progress. How far the art of such romances was studied in the middle age appears again on comparison of the fourteenth-century _Ywain and Gawain_ with its original, Chrétien’s _Chevalier au Lion_. The Englishman, without losing anything of the plot, reduces the length one-third by compressing, modifying, or even omitting Chrétien’s detail. And since Chrétien’s detail is not merely added for richness, but spent to bring out character or mood, a change here is a change in the total effect, a shifting of interest from the persons to the events. Thus to Chrétien the central situation is this. A widow forced to marry again, as medieval widows were if they had property, accepts the slayer of her husband. How would she feel? Might she not, from making a virtue of necessity, come to love her second husband if he were young and brave? If, tiring of her riches and ease, he would be off to his wars again, would she forgive him for breaking his promise to return on a day? And might he not then, learning from the loss of her to value her truly, devote himself to winning her back by proving his better manhood? The situation is almost the reverse of that in _Erec_. Such questions of character and feeling lead Chrétien to dwell upon the scenes between Ywain and Alundyne, and even to comment satirically now and then on their mental attitudes. Most of this the English translator omits.