Brooding o’er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.
THE LEGEND OF PARSIFAL
Some few years ago, when I was writing my play of Tristram and Iseult, a lady of my acquaintance, who was familiar with the music-drama by Wagner on the same theme, asked me by what means I had contrived to secure Madame Wagner’s consent to the use of the story for the English stage. Such ignorance of one of the most beautiful of the legends included in the Arthurian cycle, enshrined for English readers by Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal prose romance of Le Morte d’Arthur, is of course phenomenal and extreme, but it was matched by my experience a few days after the production of the play, when an enterprising newscutting agency, misled by some reference in the programme to the great chronicler, forwarded to the theatre a bundle of criticisms addressed to Sir Thomas Malory, Knight, oblivious of the fact that he had passed beyond the reach of censure in the closing years of the fifteenth century.
It is possible, however, that even among some of those to whom the source of the Tristram story is familiar, there may be here and there isolated worshippers of the great German composer who are hardly aware that the legend of Parsifal found its source in the same great body of Arthurian romance. Indeed, I have met with not a few to whom the identification of Parsifal with the British hero, Sir Perceval, comes somewhat as a surprise, and who are scarcely conscious that the whole legend of the “Holy Grail,” which forms the subject of Wagner’s opera, had its source in Britain, and was afterwards incorporated in romances that first saw the light in France. The writer who originally gave to the story its poetic form, and in whose work the purely human features of the narrative are already linked with the history of Christianity, was Crestien de Troyes, who began to write about 1150, and died before the end of the twelfth century. His poems embrace a number of the Arthurian stories, but it so happens that amongst them the “Conte del Graal” was left unfinished, and was afterwards completed by several writers, chief among whom, Wauchier, confessed that he had drawn his inspiration from the work of a Welshman, Bleheris, in whose version the “Grail” hero is not Sir Perceval but Sir Gawain.
But even before Crestien’s death the beauty of certain of these Arthurian legends had captured the imagination of Europe, and in the opening years of the thirteenth century we have the “Parzival” of Wolfram von Eschenbach, of Bavaria, who admits his knowledge of Crestien, but confesses a preference for a still older French version by Guyot, the Provençal. To Wolfram’s poem Wagner is directly indebted for that portion of the story which forms the basis of the opera. The Bavarian knight died about the year 1220, and his work forms a complete and beautiful poem, concluding with a recital of the fortunes of Lohengrin, the son of Parsifal, who, in his turn, became ruler of the Grail Kingdom. Here, as with Crestien, the link with Christianity is firmly established, and in a still later form of the story embodied by Malory the Christianising influence is further developed, and the Grail, now definitely identified with the Holy Cup, is assumed to have been brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea, who himself had filled it with the blood that flowed from the side of the Redeemer.
In all these later forms of the legend, however, certain features and incidents survive which clearly prove that the story owned an earlier, and a Pagan source. Even in Wolfram the Grail is not a cup, but a stone endowed with plenty-giving qualities, and the symbols, which in all later versions are bodily taken over for the service of the Church, we find on examination to possess a pre-Christian character and origin.