It is at this point in the mental development of our hero that he makes his entrance into Wagner’s opera. As already noted, full and skilful use is made by the modern author of the dramatic material which the legend discloses. In the associated characters of Kundry and Klingsor he has given logical and coherent form to much that lies scattered and disjointed in Wolfram’s poem; and he has built up the character of Parsifal, adding to the simpler conception of the older writer an element of conscious philosophy that makes a strong appeal to the countrymen of Goethe. Not, be it said, that the outline left by Wolfram was indefinite or uncertain. Already in the legend Parsifal’s personality is clearly marked. “A brave man,” says Wolfram, “yet slowly wise is he whom I hail my hero,” and the steady growth of wisdom based on sympathy and suffering is clearly traced in Parsifal’s successive visits to the Grail Castle. It is the ignorance of innocence and egotism that on the first occasion keeps his lips dumb, when the sympathy he was afterwards to acquire might have prompted the simple question that would have set the sufferer free, while it was the richer experience that came as his after inheritance which enabled him finally to achieve the liberation of the wounded Amfortas. Of that first visit of Parsifal to the Castle, Wolfram writes:
Yet one, uncalled, rode thither, and evil did then befall,
For foolish he was, and witless, and sin-laden from thence did fare,
Since he asked not his host of his sorrow and the woe that he saw him bear.
No man would I blame, yet this man I ween for his sins must pay
Since he asked not the longed-for question which all sorrow had put away.
And in these lines we may find the germ of Wagner’s more conscious and more didactic conception, wherein we miss something of the simplicity, something also of the rich humanity of the twelfth-century poet. This sense of loss in the modern presentment of the theme, loss in the spirit of romance, and in the impression of free and unfettered humanity, is perhaps an individual impression; and I may conclude with a tribute to Wagner’s genius by the late Alfred Nutt, which certainly does ample justice to the composer’s contribution to the story, as he accepted it from the hands of the Bavarian knight.
“Kundry,” he writes, “is Wagner’s great contribution to the legend. She is the Herodias whom Christ, for her laughter, doomed to wander till He come again. Subject to the powers of evil, she must tempt and lure to their destruction the Grail warriors. And yet she would find release and salvation could a man resist her witch-like spell. She knows this. The scene between the unwilling temptress, whose success would but doom her afresh, and the virgin Parsifal thus becomes tragic in the extreme. How does this affect Amfortas and the Grail? In this way. Parsifal is a ‘pure fool,’ knowing naught of sin or suffering. It has been foretold of him he should become ‘wise by fellow-suffering,’ and so it proves. The overmastering rush of desire unseals his eyes, clears his mind. Heart-wounded by the shaft of passion, he feels Amfortas’s torture thrill through him. The pain of the physical wound is his, but far more the agony of the sinner who has been unworthy of his high trust, and who, soiled by carnal sin, must yet daily come in contact with the Grail, symbol of the highest purity and holiness. The strength which comes of the new-born knowledge enables him to resist sensual longing, and thereby to release both Kundry and Amfortas.”
SEX IN TRAGEDY
In the popular view of the play of Macbeth the relation of the two principal characters may be said to lie beyond the region of doubt or discussion. According to the tradition of the stage, supported in this instance by a respectable array of critical authority, the motive-power of the drama is not supplied by the “vaulting ambition” of Macbeth himself, but is to be sought rather in the sinister strength and inhuman cruelty of his guilty partner. In virtue of her unshaken resolution and her superior resource, Lady Macbeth is regarded as the dominating influence in this awful record of crime, and it may indeed be doubted whether any part of equal length—for, counted by actual lines, it is one of the shortest in all tragic drama—has ever left so strong a stamp on the popular imagination. Nor is the prevalent conception of Lady Macbeth’s character lacking at all in distinctness of definition. The outlines of the portrait are sharply and deeply impressed: and as she is commonly represented to us, it takes the form of a sexless creature endowed with the temper of a man and the heart of a fiend. The embodiment of all those fiercer passions that are deemed to be most repugnant to the ideal of womanhood, and moved by a will that is deaf to the pleadings of humanity and inaccessible to the voice of eternal law, she is regarded as the evil genius of her husband, crushing by the weight of her stronger individuality the constant promptings of his better nature, and sweeping him with irresistible force into a bottomless abyss of crime.