It is much to be regretted by all lovers of English poetry that Hawker’s Quest of the Sangraal was never completed. The first and only chant is a magnificent fragment; with the exception of the Laureate’s Sir Galahad, the finest piece of pure literature in the cycle. Hawker, alone, perhaps of moderns, could have kept the mediæval tone and spirit, and yet brought the Quest into contact with the needs and ideas of to-day.
[152]Cf.Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, II, 811, and his references.
[153]The ideas held by many peoples in a primitive stage of culture respecting virginity are worthy careful study. Some physiological basis may be found for them in the phenomena of hysteria, which must necessarily have appeared to such peoples evidences of divine or demoniac possession, and at that stage are hardly likely to have been met with save among unmarried women. In the French witch trials these phenomena are often presented by nuns, in whose case they were probably the outcome of a life at once celibate and inactive. On the other hand the persons accused of witchcraft were as a rule of the most abandoned character, and it is a, morally speaking, degraded class which has furnished Professor Charcot and his pupils with the subjects in whom they have identified all the phenomena that confront the student of witch trials.
[154]Domanig, Parzival-Studien, I, II, 1878-80.
[155]San-Marte, Parzival-Studien, I-III, 1861-63.
[156]Some readers may be anxious to read Wolfram’s work to whom twelfth-century German would offer great difficulties. A few words on the translation into modern German may, therefore, not be out of place. San-Marte’s original translation (1839-41) is full of gross blunders and mistranslations, and, what is worse, of passages foisted into the text to support the translator’s own interpretation of the poem as a whole. Simrock’s, which followed, is extremely close, but difficult and unpleasing. San Marte’s second edition, corrected from Simrock, is a great advance upon the first; but even here the translator has too often allowed his own gloss to replace Wolfram’s statement. A thoroughly faithful yet pleasing rendering is a desideratum.
[157]J. Van Santen, Zur Beurtheilung Wolfram von Eschenbach, Wesel, 1882, has attacked Wolfram for his acceptance of the morality of the day, and has, on that ground, denied him any ethical or philosophic merit. The pamphlet is useful for its references, but otherwise worthless. The fact that Wolfram does acceptMinnedienstonly gives greater value to his picture of a nobler and purer ideal of love, whilst to refuse recognition of his other qualities on this account is much as who should deny Dante’s claim to be regarded as a teacher and thinker because of his acceptance of the hideous mediæval hell.
[158]In the Geheimnisse Goethe shows some slight trace of the Parzival legend, and the words in which the teaching of the poem are summed up: “Von der Gewalt, die alle Wesen bindet, BefreitderMensch sich der sich überwindet,” may be looked upon as an eighteenth century rendering of Wolfram’s conception.
[159]We may here note an admirable example of the inevitable, spontaneous character of the growth of certain conceptions, especially of such as have been partly shaped by the folk-mind. There is nothing in Wolfram or in the French romances to show that the fortunes of the loathly damsel (Wagner’s Kundry) are in any way bound up with the success of the Quest. But we have seen that the Celtic folk-tales represent the loathly damsel as the real protagonist of the story. She cannot be freed unless the hero do his task. Precisely the same situation as in Wagner, who was thus led back to the primitivedonnée, although he can only have known intermediary stages in which its signification had been quite lost.
[160]Cf.the reproaches addressed to Potter Thompson (supra,p. 198). That the visitor to the Bespelled Castle should be reproached, at once, for his failure to do as he ought, seems to be a feature of the earliest forms of the story.Cf.Campbell’s Three Soldiers (supra,p. 196). If Wolfram had another source than Chrestien it was one which partook more of the unspelling than of the feud quest formula. Hence the presence of the feature here.
[161]In Wolfram’s work there is a much closer connection between the Gawain quest and the remainder of the poem than in Chrestien. Orgueilleuse, to win whose love Gawain accomplishes his feats, is a former love of Amfortas, the Grail King, who won for her a rich treasure and was wounded in her service. Klinschor, too, the lord of the Magic Castle, is brought into contact with Orgueilleuse, whom he helps against Gramoflanz. It is difficult to say whether this testifies to an earlier or later stage of growth of the legend. The winning of Orgueilleuse as the consequence of accomplishing the feat of the Ford Perillous and plucking the branch is strongly insisted upon by Wolfram and not mentioned by Chrestien, though it is possible he might have intended to wed the two had he finished his poem. In this respect, however, and taking these two works as they stand, Wolfram’s account seems decidedly the earlier. In another point, too, he seems to have preserved the older form. Besides his Kundrie la Sorcière (the loathly damsel) he has a Kundrie la Belle, whom I take to be the loathly damsel released from the transforming spell.