"Now observe, while as it penetrates into the nature of things, the imagination is pre-eminently a beholder of things as they are, it is, in its creative function, an eminent beholder of things when and where they are not; a seer, that is, in the prophetic sense, calling the things that are not as though they were; and forever delighting to dwell on that which is not tangibly present.... Fancy plays like a squirrel in its circular prison and is happy; but imagination is a pilgrim on the earth, and her home is in heaven."
The fundamental elements of the music of "Parsifal" are suffering and aspiration. When they are apprehended the ethical purpose of the drama becomes plain. But not till then.
II.
The investigations of scholars determined long ago that the legend which is at the bottom of Wagner's drama is formed of two portions which were once distinct. One of these portions is concerned with the origin and wanderings of the Holy Grail prior to the time when it became the object of the Quest which occupied so much of the attention of the knights of King Arthur's Round Table; the second portion is concerned with that Quest. The relative age of the two portions of the legend and the genesis of each have caused much controversy, which has thrown a great deal of light on mediæval civilization. We are little concerned in that controversy, however, except so far as it enlightens us as to the real nature of the legend, and helps us to understand how the Grail became the loftiest symbol of Christian faith, and the Grail Quest the highest duty of Christian knighthood.
Formerly it was believed that the Grail was the product of Christian legends which had become grafted on the Arthurian romances. Now it is asserted, and with much show of probability, that the Grail, like those romances, is Celtic in origin, and became what it is represented in the legend by being endowed with a symbolism which originally it lacked. For our view of the case, since we are not concerned with literary criticism, this, too, is a matter of indifference, except so far as it helps us to understand a proposition much broader and more significant. The Holy Grail and the Seeker after it are both relics of what, long before Christianity was in existence, was a universal possession among Aryan peoples. Each has a multitude of prototypes among the mythological apparatus and personages of the peoples of the Indo-European family. To the class of popular heroes which figure in the tales whose essential elements Von Hahn has formulated in his Arische Aussetzung und Rückkehr Formel (see Chapter IV.), Parsifal belongs as well as Siegfried. A parallel between the two might be carried through many details of their early life and riper adventures. Both are born to a mother, far from her home, of a father who is dead; both are brought up in a wilderness; both are in youth passionate and violent of disposition; both are thrown for companionship on the animals of the forests in which they are reared. There are other elements held in common by the tales of which Wagner makes no mention in his version of the Percival legend. A significant one is the mending of a broken sword, a talisman, which act in the old Percival legends, as well as in the tale of Siegfried, is the sign of the hero's election to a high mission; but this need not now detain us.
Wagner has been much criticized for changing the name of his hero from Percival or Percivale, as we know it in English literature, and Parzival, as he found it in the greatest of all the Grail epics, that of Wolfram von Eschenbach, to Parsifal. Criticism of this kind is often wasted. In making the change Wagner exercised a poet's privilege for an obvious purpose—he made the name an index of his hero's moral character. The suggestion came from Görres. According to this scholar, whose derivation has long been set aside as fanciful, Fal in the Arabian tongue signifies "foolish," and Parsi "pure one." By changing the order of the words we obtain Parsi-fal—pure, or guileless, fool. It is thus that Kundry expounds his name to the hero in Wagner's drama, when she tells him the story of his birth. In Wolfram's poem he is also called foolish because his mother dressed him in motley when he left her, broken-hearted, to go out into the world in search of knighthood. The French Perceval signifies simply one who goes "through the Valley." A Welsh tale of at least equal antiquity with the preserved French romances calls the hero Peredur, which has been interpreted into "the seeker after the basin or the dish," this signification being again in harmony with the principal incident of the French form of the legend, greal in old French meaning a dish. Wolfram, under the influence of his model, claims nothing for the name of his hero except that it means "right through the middle," but Meyer-Markau, who seems to have accepted the theory that the tale is originally Keltic, strove to give dramatic propriety to the name by pointing out that in Welsh, Breton, and Cornish, par signifies lad; syw, in Welsh, clad or decorated, and fall, scantily, poorly, ill, foolishly, wretchedly. Out of these words, then, he compounded Par-syw-fall, a lad who is ill-clad. Plausibility, if nothing else, is lent to this derivation by the circumstances under which the hero's mother sent him out into the world. In the hope that the rude treatment which would be heaped upon him would return him to her arms, she dressed him in fool's clothing:
"'Thorenkleider soll mein Kind
An seinem lichten Leibe tragen:
Schlägt und rauft man ihn darum,
So kommt er mir wohl wieder.'
Weh, was litt die Arme da!
Nun nahm sie grobes Sacktuch her
Und schnitt ihm Hemd und Hose draus
In einem Stück, das bis zum Knie
Des nackten Beins nur reichte.
Das war als Narrenkleid bekannt.
Oben sah man eine Kappe." [J]
III.
Interesting as this speculation is, however, we are now concerned only with one element of it. Whatever his name may signify, it is obvious that Parsifal was an innocent, a simplex, a fool. It is this trait which enables us to identify him with his prototype in Aryan folk-lore. He is the hero of what the English folk-lorists call "The Great Fool Tales," and the Germans "Dümmlingsmärchen." In the following outline of a very old poetic narrative of the Kelts, called by students "The Lay of the Great Fool," may be found all that part of Parsifal's youthful history which, in Wagner's drama, is learned either from his own lips or those of Kundry:
Once there were two knightly brothers, of whom one was childless while the other had two sons. A strife breaks out between them, and the father is slain with his sons. The wicked knight then sends word to the widow that if she should give birth to another son, he, too, must be put to death. She does give birth to a son, and to save his life sends him into the wilderness to be reared by a kitchen wench who has a love-son. The lads grow up strong and hardy. One day the knightly lad runs down a deer, kills it, and of its skin makes himself a motley suit of clothes. He slays his foster-brother for laughing at him in his strange dress, catches a wild horse, rides to his uncle's palace, and though when asked his name he can only answer "Great Fool," he is recognized. Thus his adventures begin. He avenges the wrongs of his mother. This Great Fool is the original Seeker after the Grail.