Such, then, had been the growth of the legend in one direction. The original incidents were either transformed, mutilated, or, where they kept their first shape, underwent no ethical deepening or widening. The talismans themselves had been transferred from Celtic to Christian mythology, but their fate was still bound up with the otherworld. He who would seek them must turn his back upon this earth from which the Palace Spiritual and the City of Sarras were even more remote than Avalon or Tir-na n-Og. Was no other course open? Could not framework and incidents of the Celtic tales be retained, and yet, raised to a loftier, wider level, become a fit vehicle for philosophic thought and moral exhortation? One side of popular tradition figured the hero as wresting the talismans from the otherworld powers for the benefit of his fellow men. Could not this form of the myth be made to yield a human, practical conception of the Quest and Winning of the Holy Grail?
We are luckily not reduced to conjecture in this matter. A work largely fulfilling these hypothetical requirements exists in the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach. On the whole it is the most interesting individual work of modern European literature prior to the Divina Commedia, and its author has a better claim than any other mediæval poet to be called a man of genius. He must, of course, be measured by the standard of his time. It would be useless to expect from him that homogeneity of narrative, that artistic proportion of style first met with 150 years later in Italy, and which from Italy passed into all European literatures. Compared with the unknown poets who gave their present shape to the Nibelungenlied or to the Chanson de Roland he is an individual writer, but he is far from deserving this epithet even in the sense that Chaucer deserves it. His subject dominates him. Even when his philosophic mind is conceiving it under a new aspect he anxiously holds to the traditional form. Hence great inconsistencies in his treatment of the theme, hence, too, the frequent difficulty in interpreting his meaning, the frequent doubt as to how far the interpretation is correct. Here, as in the discussion respecting the origines of the Grail legend, resort must often be had to conjecture, and any solution of the fascinating problems involved is necessarily and largely subjective.
Wolfram’s relation to his predecessors must be taken into account in estimating the value of the Parzival. The earlier portion of his work differs entirely, as we have seen, from any existing French romance; so does the finish in so far as it agrees with the opening. The greater part of the story is closely parallel to Chrestien; there are points of contact, peculiar to these two writers, with Gerbert. Little invention, properly so called, of incident can be traced in the Parzival. The part common to it and Chrestien is incomparably fuller and more interesting in the German poet, but the main outlines are the same. Wolfram has, however, been at some pains to let us know what was his conception of the legend. That much is allowed to remain at variance therewith is a clear proof of his timidity of invention.
Doubt, he says, is the most potent corrupter of the soul. Whoso gives himself over to unfaith and unsteadfastness treadeth in truth the downward path. God Himself is very faithfulness. Strife against Him, doubt of Him, is the highest sin. But humility and repentance may expiate it, and he who thus repents may be chosen by God for the Grail Kingship, the summit of earthly holiness. Peace of soul and all earthly power are the chosen one’s; alone, unlawful desire and the company of sinners are denied him by the Grail.
How is this leading conception worked out? The framework and the march of incidents are the same as in the Conte du Graal. One capital change at once, however, lifts the story to a higher level. The Fisher King suffers from a wound received in the cause of unlawful love, in disobedience to those heavenly commands which govern the Grail community. The healing question can be put only by one worthy to take up the high office Amfortas has dishonoured, in virtue of having passed through the strife of doubt, and become reconciled to God by repentance and humble trust. If Parzival neglected to put the question on his first arrival at the Grail Castle, it was that in the conceit of youth he fancied all wisdom was his. Childish insistence upon his mother’s counsels had brought down reproof upon him; he had learnt the world’s wisdom from Gurnemanz, he had shown himself in defence of Conduiramur a valiant knight, worthy of power and woman’s love. When brought into contact with the torturing sorrow of Amfortas, he is too full of himself, of his teacher’s wisdom, to rightly use the opportunity.
The profound significance of the question which at once releases the sinner, and announces the one way in which the sin may be cancelled, namely, by the coming of a worthier successor, is due, if we may credit Birch-Hirschfeld, to an accident. Wolfram only knew Chrestien. The latter never explains the real nature of the Grail, and the German poet’s knowledge of French was too slight to put him on the right track. The question, “Whom serve they with the Grail?” which he found in Chrestien, was necessarily meaningless to him, and he replaced it by his, “Uncle, what is it tortures thee?” The change may be the result of accident as is so much else in this marvellous legend, but it required a man of genius to turn the accident to such account. It is the insistence upon charity as the herald and token of spiritual perfection that makes the grandeur of Wolfram’s poem, and raises it so immeasureably above the Queste.
The same human spirit is visible in the delineation of the Grail Kingship as the type of the highest good. Wolfram’s theology is distinctively antinomian—no man may win the Grail in his own strength; it choseth whom it will—and has been claimed on the one hand[154] as a reflex of orthodox Catholic belief, on the other as a herald of the Lutheran doctrine of grace.[155] Theological experts may be left to fight out this question among themselves. Apart from this, Wolfram has a practical sense of the value of human effort. With him the Quest is not to be achieved by utter isolation from this earth and its struggles. The chief function of the Grail Kingdom is to supply an abiding type of a divinely ordered Society; it also trains up leaders for those communities which lack them. It is a civilising power as well as a Palace Spiritual.
In the relation of man to Heaven, Wolfram, whilst fully accepting the doctrines of his age, appeals to the modern spirit with far greater power and directness than the Queste. In the other great question of the legend, the relation of man to woman, he is likewise nearer to us, although it must be confessed that he builds better than he knows. To the love ideal of his day, based wholly upon passion and vanity and severed from all family feeling, he opposes the wedded love of Parzival and Conduiramur. The hero’s recollection of the mother of his children is the one saving influence throughout the years of doubt and discouragement which follow Kundrie’s reproaches. Whilst still staggering under this blow, so cruelly undeserved as it seems to him, he can wish his friend and comrade, Gawain, a woman chaste and good, whom he may love and who shall be his guardian angel. The thought of Conduiramur holds him aloof from the offered love of Orgeluse. In his last and bitterest fight, with his unknown brother, when it had nigh gone with him to his death, he recalls her and renews the combat with fresh strength. She it is for whom he wins the highest earthly crown, of which her pure, womanly heart makes her worthy. Reunion with her and with his children is Parzival’s first taste of the joy that is henceforth to be his.
Passages may easily be multiplied that tally ill with the ideas of the poem as here briefly set forth. But the existence of these ideas is patent to the unprejudiced reader. Despite its many shortcomings, the poem which contains them is the noblest and most human outcome of that mingled strain of Celtic fancy and Christian symbolism whose history we have traced.[156]
In Wolfram, equally with the majority of the French romance writers, there is little consistency in the formal use of the mystic talismans. Be the reason what it may, Wolfram certainly never thought of associating the Grail with the Last Supper. But its religious character is, at times, as marked with him as with Robert de Borron or the author of the Queste. It is the actual vehicle of the Deity’s commands; it restrains from sin; it suffers no unchaste servant; it may be seen of no heathen; the simple beholding of it preserves men from death. This last characteristic would be thought in modern times a sufficient tribute to the original nature of the old pagan cauldron of increase and rejuvenescence. But Wolfram was of his time, and followed his models faithfully. Along with the lofty spiritual attributes of his Grail, he pictures in drastic fashion its food-dispensing powers. The mystic stone, fallen from Heaven itself, renewed each Good Friday by direct action of the Spirit, becomes all at once a mere victual producing machine. We can see how little Wolfram liked this feature of his model, and how he felt the contrast between it and his own more spiritual conception. But here, as elsewhere in the poem, he allowed much to stand against which his better judgment protested. His own share in the development of the legend must be gauged by what is distinctively his, not by what he has in common with others. Judged thus, he must be said to have developed the Christian symbolic side of the legend as much as the human philosophic side. If in Robert de Borron the Grail touches its highest symbolic level through its identification with the body of the dead and risen Lord, we can trace in Wolfram the germ of that approximation of the Grail-Quester to the earthly career of the Saviour which Wagner was to develop more than 600 years later.[157]