Let us be quite clear on this point. Galahad may have in a measure supplanted Perceval, but he has neither dispossessed nor robbed him. He has taken over no one of his characteristics, no one of his feats. Such traces of the Perceval story as remain are found in connection with Perceval himself; he, too, achieves the Grail Queste. He has undergone a change, and a change for the worse, but that was quite as much due to the evolution of the Grail as a Christian talisman as to the invention of Galahad. The hero of the Didot Perceval and Perceval li Gallois is as inferior to the hero of Chrétien and Wolfram as is the Perceval of the Galahad Queste. The truth is that Perceval is still the Grail hero, but he shares that character with another whose invention is due to special and easily discernible causes.[150]
The point of view of the writer of the Queste is not that of the compilers of the Lancelot. As I remarked in the previous chapter, the view taken by the Lancelot of the relations between the hero and the queen is frankly unmoral. Neither is blamed for his or her action, neither is apparently conscious of wrong-doing. In the Queste Lancelot's conscience is sorely vexed, and his sin insisted upon. The compilers of the Lancelot have a very courtly respect for women—the author of the Queste despises them utterly. The interest of the Lancelot lies in the relation between the sexes—the respective duties of knight and lady—the theme which inspires the Queste is their abiding separation.
Again, compare the treatment of the various characters of the story in the two respective sections. Next to Galahad and Perceval, the hero of the Queste is Bohort (Bors). But for a single youthful lapse he yields in nothing to those doughty champions of celibacy: his purity, alike of body and soul, is emphatically insisted upon; his confession fills the priest who receives it with a fervour of admiration; yet it is precisely this saintly youth who, in the section preceding and following the Queste (the Lancelot and the Mort Artur), is the confidant and go-between of Lancelot and Guinevere. It is Bohort who seeks Lancelot at the secret bidding of the queen, Bohort who carries love-tokens between them, who arranges meetings. It is he and Lionel who consult the queen as to the delicate question of Lancelot's future relations with the lady who has cured him from the illness caused by drinking the poisoned spring; he who is the confidant of Guinevere's indignation at the supposed love-affair between Lancelot and the maiden of Escarloet; and if he tries to prevent the last fatal meeting between them it is with no view of hindering a wrong to his lord Arthur, but solely because he has reason to suspect the trap laid for the lovers. The two presentments not simply fail to agree, but stand in flat contradiction with each other.
Lionel, again, is throughout the Lancelot a valiant knight, warmly attached alike to his brother and to his cousin. Like Bohort he takes Lancelot's part on every occasion, with him he quits the court when the queen, in an access of jealousy, banishes Lancelot. When he is finally slain both Bohort and Lancelot are overcome with grief. But the Queste paints him in the most repulsive colours: violent, brutal, and unreasoning to a degree. He is so indignant with his brother for going to the rescue of a maiden rather than of himself (when both are equally in danger) that he does his best to kill him in revenge. He does kill an unoffending hermit, and a fellow knight of the Round Table who would intervene, and finally it needs a special interposition of Providence to part the two brothers before a fatal issue to the conflict forced on by Lionel has taken place.
Hector, Lancelot's half-brother, who in the later Lancelot story is one of the bravest and most distinguished knights of the court, is in the Queste held up to scorn and rebuke; while the author of this romance has no colours too black in which to paint the character of Gawain, who, though deposed from his position of chief hero, is, throughout the Lancelot proper, treated with the greatest respect. He is entirely loved and trusted by king and queen, and if his valour is in the long-run surpassed by that of Lancelot, the compiler is careful to preserve his honour intact by pointing out, first, that he never recovered from the severe wounds received in the war with Galehault, second, that he was over twenty years Lancelot's senior. The final conflict between them, the most deadly in which Lancelot was ever engaged, was fought when Gawain was seventy-two and Arthur ninety-two years of age; further, as we shall see presently, in some versions the conclusion is more of the character of a drawn battle than of a defeat for Gawain.[151]
It is, I think, quite clear that the Galahad-Grail romances are the work of another hand than that responsible for the main body of the Lancelot cycle; and the work of one who was at small pains to harmonise his story with the branches already existing. It is indeed doubtful whether the writer had any thorough acquaintance with the legend as a whole. It is noteworthy that the points of contact with what we may perhaps call the 'secular' section are all restricted to the later part of the story, that commencing with what M. Paulin Paris called the Agravain section. Between the Grand S. Graal, the Galahad Queste, and the later part of the Lancelot there are a number of what we may call cross-references, the precise value of which will be very difficult to determine. But they do not stray outside a certain limit—they are restricted to Lancelot, the Knight of the Round Table, the queen's lover, and father of the Grail Winner—they do not appear to know Lancelot the protégé of the Lady of the Lake. In this character the Grail romances ignore him, nor do they appear to know anything of his most famous adventure, the freeing of Guinevere from Meleagant.[152]
It is the later and not the earlier Lancelot story which is known to the writer of the Queste; and the more we study the romance the plainer this becomes. The Lancelot romance may really be divided into two great divisions, the Enfances, Charrette, and Galehault section, which is practically unaffected by the Grail tradition, though it shows evident signs of contact with the Perceval story; and the latter portion which (saving the Mort Artur, unaffected except by the addition of the concluding Queste paragraph, easily removed) has been redacted under the influence of the Galahad-Grail accretion.
Till the versions concerned have been critically examined we cannot determine the value or gauge the evidence of the matter common to the Lancelot, Grand S. Graal, and Queste. The most noticeable instances are the following: the keeping of the Grail at Castle Corbenic, the founding of which is related in the Grand S. Graal; the characters of King Pelles and his father, with regard to whom the evidence varies,—as a rule, the character of the Fisher King appears to be confined to the former, that of the Maimed King to the latter (the author of the Queste appears to have no idea that the two characters are one and the same);—the daughter of King Pelles, and his son Eliezer. This latter is, I think, peculiar to the Lancelot-Galahad story, the Perceval versions do not know him. The adventure of the broken sword borne by Eliezer, told both in Lancelot and Grand S. Graal, and achieved, though without satisfactory explanation, in Queste.[153] The Boiling Fountain and Bleeding Tomb adventures, also told in the two first, partly achieved in the Lancelot, and achievement summarily announced in Queste. The Perilous Cemetery, origin stated in Grand S. Graal, vainly attempted by Gawain and Hector in Lancelot, final achievement barely recorded in Queste.
In these last instances the story may well have been in the Lancelot, and taken over by the compiler of Grand S. Graal; the Queste makes very little of them; they only serve to keep up the connection between the 'secular' and 'religious' sections.
With regard to the Corbenic-Grail adventures, I am inclined, as I said before, to look upon them as due to the influence of the Gawain story, and as already existing, in a purely adventurous form, in the Lancelot, before it was formally united to the Grail Quest.