Thus Wagner reveals still more clearly than in the “Flying Dutchman” with his “fabulous homesickness” an absolute trait and the inner view of that sentiment which here longs for salvation, to be mortal with the mortals. At the sight of the nobler qualities and real human dignity which Kundry for the first time in her life sees in the person of Parsifal, who has been born again through the recognition of the truth, she breaks down completely and with the only word that she now knows, “serve! serve!” she throws all evil selfishness away. For the first time it is now fully disclosed how deeply after all, and with what intensity those of alien race and religion serve the ideas, not so much of our own similarly narrow contracted race-life, but those ideas which have transformed us from a mere nation to an historical part of humanity that guards the world’s eternal treasure in this Holy Grail, as its last and grandest possession.
How fully is Goethe’s saying “the power that ever seeks the evil and yet produces good” realized. Kundry is the messenger of the same Holy Grail against which her lord and master conducts the fatal war. To all distant lands it is she that brings the higher element of culture, the purer humanity which she gets from the Grail and its life. Though the peculiar portraiture of Kundry is drawn from his own experience of the present, the poet has gone still further and pictured that omnipresent spirit of evil which can never by simple participation in the sorrows of others gain knowledge of the perpetual sorrow of the world. Klingsor summons from the chaotic, primeval foundation of the world, where good and evil still lie commingled, the blind instinct of nature, as that wonderful element in the world’s history which must everywhere be at once servant of the devil and messenger of grace, with the all-comprehensive words:
“Thy master calls thee, nameless one;
Primeval devil! rose of hell!
Herodias thou wast and what more?
Gundryggia there, Kundry here!”
It is the feminine Ahasrer, present in all ages and spheres, in our time revealing its tangible form in the ruling spirit of Judaism. As her sinful nature at last is overcome by Parsifal’s purity, and she humbly approaches him to receive the baptism that is awarded to every one who believes and acts in the spirit of pure humanity, he proclaims, when he has withstood her temptation and thereby has regained from Klingsor the holy lance of the Grail, the impending catastrophe by tracing with the lance the sign of the cross and saying:
“With this sign thy spell I banish!
Even as it heals the wound
Which with it thou hast dealt—
So may thy delusive splendor in grief and ruin fall.”
When in the last century, Roman Catholicism had become sensual and worldly through Jesuitism, and Protestantism had put on either the straight-jacket of orthodoxy or had been diluted with rationalism, there came to the surface, outside of the religious sects, secret societies, such as the Freemasons. In their well-meant but flat humanitarian idealism, those strangers to our race and religion, the hitherto despised Jews, also took active part and what “delusive splendor” have they not since then provided for themselves in literature and art and general ways of life? A single actual resurrection of that sign in which we Germans alone have attained world-culture and world-importance has “in grief and ruin destroyed” all this, and we hope in truth that we are now approaching a new epoch of our spiritual as well as moral existence. Just as, out of the first awakening of a pure human feeling such as Christianity brought us, there rose in contrast to priesthood a work like the “Magic Flute,” child-like, artless but devoutly pure and full of feeling, so now there resounds like the mighty watchword of this full national resurrection, Wagner’s “Parsifal.”
Let us see how the poem itself has done this and what it signifies.
According to the legend of the Holy Grail, already artistically resurrected by the master in “Lohengrin,” the chalice from which Christ had drank with His disciples at the last supper, and in which His blood had been received at the cross, had been brought into the western world by a host of angels at a time of most serious danger to the pure gospel of Christianity. King Titurel had erected for it the temple and castle of Monsalvat in the north of Spain, where knights of absolute purity of mind guard it and receive spiritual as well as bodily nourishment from its miraculous powers. This sanctuary can only be found by the pure. The king keeps the holy lance, which had opened the Savior’s wound, and with it holds in check the hostile heathen. Klingsor, the sorcerer, on the southern decline of the mountain, rules the latter. He had likewise once been seized with remorse for his sins, his “pain of untamed longings and the most terrible pressure of hellish desires,” and had mutilated himself and then seeking deliverance had wandered to the Holy Grail. Amfortas however, Titurel’s son, now king of the Grail, perceived his impurity and sternly turned away the evil sorcerer, who only seeks release for worldly gain.
Angered thereat, the latter now contrives through the agency of Kundry, who appears in the highest and most bewitching beauty, encircling the king himself with the snares of passion, to obtain power over him and to wrest from him the lance with which he wounds him. This wound will burn until the holy lance shall be regained. This then is the supreme deed to be accomplished. The Grail itself at one time has proclaimed during the keenest pangs of the suffering king, that it shall be regained by him who, deficient in worldly knowledge, shall from pure sympathy with his terrible sufferings recognize the sufferings of humanity and through such blissful faith bring to it new redemption. The body of humanity, which Christianity had called into new life, had been invaded by a consuming poison and only so far as by the full unconsciousness of innocence, its genius itself was re-awakened, was it possible to again expel the poison.
In the forest of the castle old Gurnemanz and two shield-bearers lie slumbering at early dawn. The solemn morning-call of the Grail is heard and they all rise to pray and then await the sick king who is to take a soothing bath in the near lake. All medicinal herbs have proved useless. Kundry shortly after suddenly appears in savage, strange attire and proffers balm from Arabia. The king is carried forward. We listen to his lamentations. He thanks Kundry, who, however, roughly declines all thanks. The shield-bearers show indignation at this but are reprimanded by Gurnemanz who says: “She serves the Grail and her zeal with which she now helps us and herself at the same time is in atonement for former sins.” When she is missing too long, a misfortune surely is in store for the knights. She preserves for them by the opposing forces of her nature the true and good in their consciousness and purpose. With that he tells them Klingsor has established on the other side of the mountain, toward the land of the Arabian infidels, a magic garden with seductively beautiful women to menace them by enticing the knights there and ruining them. In the attempt to destroy this harbor of sin the king had carried away the wound and lost the lance which, according to the revelation of the Grail, only “the simple fool knowing by compassion” could recover.