"What a difference there is between women," Wolfram exclaims. It seems to him the way of modern womanhood to be disloyal, worldly, selfish, like men: but in the days of which he writes in his chief poem there was a lady Herzeloide, to whom after her husband's death in the wars, the sun was a cloud, the world's joy lost, night and day alike, who for heavenly riches chose earthly poverty, and leaving her estates went with her retainers far into the unreclaimed forest to bring up her infant safe from the strife and wiles of men. This only heritage of her lost lord was the boy Parzival. She trusted that by hiding him away from all knowledge of the world, she might always keep him her own. She exacted an oath from her servants that they would never let him hear of knights and knighthood, and while they cleared farming land in the heart of the woods, she cared for the child. It was a desolate place, but she was not looking for meadows and flowers; she gave no thought to wreaths, whether red or yellow.[11]
The child grew into boyhood, and was indulged in making bows and arrows. As he played in the woods, he shot some of the birds. But after he saw them dead, he remembered how they had sung, and he cried. Every morning he went to a stream to bathe. There was nothing to trouble him, except the singing of the birds over his head: but that was so sweet that his breast grew strained with feeling; and he ran to his mother in tears. She asked what ailed him, but "like children even now it may be," he could not tell her. But she kept the riddle in her heart, and one day she found him gazing up at the trees listening to the birds, and she saw how his breast heaved as they sang. It seemed to her that she hated them, she did not know why. She wanted to stop their singing, and bade her farm hands snare and kill them. But the birds were too quick; most of them remained and kept on singing. The boy asked his mother what harm the birds did, and if the war upon them might not cease. She kissed his lips:
"Why am I opposing highest God? Shall the birds lose their happiness because of me?"
"Nay, mother, what is God?"
"My son, He is brighter than the day; He took upon himself the likeness of man. When trouble comes upon thee, pray to him: his faithfulness upholds the world. The Devil is darkness; turn thy thoughts from him, and from unbelief."
This passage is Wolfram's invention; the brilliant Gallic poet whose romance he followed could not have contrived it. This sympathy with nature belongs to our later era; it seems less strange to meet it in Keats, when the boy Apollo wanders out alone in the morning twilight:
"The nightingale had ceased, and a few stars
Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush
Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle
There was no covert, no retired cave
Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves.
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess,
He listened and he wept, and his bright tears
Went trickling down the golden bow he held."
One recalls nothing in the two centuries which Wolfram touches that equals this picture of the mother watching her child's baptism with the sad and precious gift of soul, as he stands gazing upward in his forest trance, or listening to his dawning perplexities, or teaching him his first religious lesson, or jealous of the birds, because his dreamy love for them dimly warned her of a mysterious growing soul that would not remain within her simple call. Those lines in the Princess of the faith in womankind and the trust in all things high, that come easy to the son of a good mother, certainly are appropriate to Parzival, whose faith held true and simple through his whole career as the foremost knight of chivalric legend, living for a spiritual ideal, unseduced by beauty and the ways of courts from loyalty to his first wedlock:
"True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
The description of Parzival's meeting with the knights, his mistaking them in their bright armor for angels, and his eagerness to make his way to Arthur's court are narrated by Chrestien with his own excellent vivacity, and here Wolfram only follows.
The Welsh version of the story in the Mabinogi of Peredur, though disappointing, contains a naïve sketch of the boy's rustic attempt to imitate the knight's trappings. But for the full tenderness of his mother's parting as he goes out from home to the fierce world we must turn again to the German.[12]