to the earlier forms of Celtic folklore; and in Miss Jessie Weston’s
latest contribution to the literature of the subject, published in
June of the present year, a powerful plea is put forward for the
interpretation of the story in the light of the earlier forms of
nature-worship, linked by far-reaching tradition with the ritual of the
Adonis cult, and associated with the quest for the principle of Life
itself. It is unquestionably true that this theory explains as no other
can many of the features of the Grail story which have no relation to
Christianity. The Fisher King, the Guardian of the precious Grail, is
a title which cannot be understood unless we take account of primitive
tradition, in which the fish is widely employed as a symbol of life,
and the fate and character of the maimed king who guards the Grail,
as well as the mystic instruments which accompany its revelation,
are equally referable to Pagan ritual belonging to earlier forms of
nature-worship.
This is not the place to follow in detail the many intricate and
puzzling problems which beset the history of the Grail. It is,
indeed, a fascinating theme, and has already attracted the learning
and research of many scholars in England, Germany, and France, and
is perhaps destined, in the absence of some of the earlier texts
from which the legend was drawn, never to receive a final and wholly
satisfying solution. Here, however, we are concerned only with those
features of the story at a date when it had already received the stamp
of Christian sentiment, and more especially with that particular form
of it embodied by the composer, Richard Wagner, in his world-famous
opera.
Apart from the hero himself, the characters engaged in the drama are
not numerous. There is the aged Titurel; the wounded Amfortas whose
sufferings, imposed as the penalty of unlawful love, must endure till
the coming of the deliverer, Parsifal; Klingsor, the malign ruler of
the enchanted castle, served by the spell-bound Kundry, an enchantress,
only to be released from her thraldom by the knight who successfully
resists her witch-like fascinations; and Gurnemanz, through whose
aid and guidance the hero is finally enabled to accomplish his task.
All appear in Wolfram’s romance, under the names retained by Wagner;
and the types recur also in other versions of the legend, sometimes
under different names, and with endless variations in the adventures
befalling them. Parsifal is our own Sir Perceval, a knight of Arthur’s
Court, the Peredur of the Mabinogion, not, however, the earliest or
the latest hero of the Grail quest. Before him in historic position is
Sir Gawain, who, as already noted, plays the rôle of deliverer in the
poem of Bleheris; while in the later romances his place is taken by the
chaste Sir Galahad, the son of Sir Lancelot, who--by reason of his sin
with Guinevere--was denied the reward of achieving the quest in his
own person. In like manner the Grail King, Amfortas, takes on other
titles, according to the particular source of the legend, while the
part played by Kundry as the Grail messenger is only a variant of the
rôle assigned to the “Loathly Damsel,” with the added qualities of the
sorceress, who serves the sinister purpose of Klingsor in the enchanted
castle.
But a comparison of all these legends leaves undisturbed the fact
that in its original shape the story and its environment are British,
and, further, that it first took literary form in the work of a Welsh
poet. Issuing thence, as we now know, this and other of the Arthurian
romances spread like a flame over the Western world, finding their
principal exponents in Germany and France, but extending even to
Sicily, where there is still a tradition that in the mirage that floats
between the island and the mainland can be seen the sleeping form of
King Arthur embedded in the heart of Etna, and awaiting the sound of
the horn that shall summon him back to his kingdom. It is not a little
strange that these legends, doomed to the long sleep of King Arthur
himself, should have awakened to new vitality in the work of our own
modern poets, and should equally have attracted the genius of the great
German composer.
To those who are interested in the dramatic side of Wagner’s genius,
the study of Wolfram’s beautiful poem, to which he is directly
indebted, will not be without fruitful results. As a general comment,
it may be said that the dramatist misses something of the spirit of
romance, something also of the atmosphere of chivalry to be found in
the master whom he has followed. On the other hand, it will be clearly
seen that he had handled this material with the vision of a dramatist,
supported by an imagination which seizes, instinctively and surely,
upon personages and incidents that enforce the ethical message he seeks
to deliver. Perhaps the most beautiful part of Wolfram’s poem, of
necessity excluded from the closer action of drama, concerns Parsifal’s
earlier years, before he had won the right to carry arms as one of
the knights of King Arthur’s Court. Gahmuret, his father, in search
of adventure, had first taken service under Baruc, and had won the
love of the heathen queen, Belakane, who bore him a son, Feirefiz, the
father of Prester John. But before the birth of the child, Gahmuret,
returning to Europe, had sought and won the love of Queen Herzeleide,
the mother of the Grail hero. Gahmuret was manifestly very conscious of
his restless temperament, and duly warned his newly-won bride that what
had happened before might recur.
Then he looked on Queen Herzeleide, and he spake to her courteously:
“If in joy we would live, O Lady, then my warder thou shalt not be,
When loosed from the bonds of sorrow, for knighthood my heart is fain;
If thou holdest me back from Tourney I may practise such wiles again
As of old, when I fled from the lady whom I won with mine own right
hand,
When from strife she would fain have kept me, I fled from her folk and
land.”
Then she spake: “Set what bonds thou willest, by thy word I will still
abide.”
“Many spears would I break asunder and each month would to Tourney
ride,
Thou shalt murmur not, O Lady, when such knightly joust I’ld run!”
This she sware, so the tale was told me, and the maid and her lands he
won.
And yet, despite her brave front, Herzeleide was destined to endure
much sorrow at the hands of her restless lord. Before Parsifal was
born, he had already set out on fresh adventure, leaving his lonely
lady sick with longing for his return.
As for half a year he was absent, she looked for his coming sure,
For but in the thought of that meeting might the life of the Queen
endure.
Then brake the sword of her gladness thro’ the midst of the hilt in
twain,
Ah, me, and alas! for her mourning, that goodness should bear such
pain
And faith ever waken sorrow! Yea, so doth it run alway
With the life of men, and to-morrow must they mourn who rejoice
to-day!
Here follow the bitter tidings of Gahmuret’s death. Then, when the
child of sorrow came to be born, Herzeleide retreated from the Court,
and took refuge in a wild woodland, where Parsifal grew to manhood,
in ignorance of the world and its ways; in ignorance also of his high
lineage, for the Queen held that she had suffered enough through
knighthood and its adventures, and sought only to rescue her child from
the dangers of his father’s fate. I am drawing again upon Miss Jessie
Weston’s charming translation of Wolfram’s poem for this delightful
picture of Parsifal’s boyhood:
No knightly weapon she gave him save such as in childish play
He wrought himself from the bushes that grew on his lonely way.
A bow and arrows he made him, and with these in thoughtless glee,
He shot at the birds as they carolled o’erhead in the leafy tree.
But when the feathered songster of the woods at his feet lay dead,
In wonder and dumb amazement he bowed down his golden head,
And in childish wrath and sorrow tore the locks of his sunny hair
(For I wot well of all earth’s children was never a child so fair
As this boy, who, afar in the desert, from the haunts of mankind did
dwell,
Who bathed in the mountain streamlet, and roamed o’er the rock-strewn
fell!)
Then he thought him well how the music which his hand had for ever
stilled,
Had thrilled his soul with its sweetness; and his heart was with
sorrow filled,
And the ready tears of childhood flowed forth from their fountains
free,
And he ran to his mother weeping, and bowed him beside her knee.
It may be that this passage partly inspired Wagner in his treatment
of the incident of the stricken swan; but in the heart of Herzeleide,
Parsifal’s love of the birds only begot a fierce jealousy, and she sent
forth her servants to snare and slay the woodland choristers, so that
she might have no rival in her boy’s love. But the boy’s reproaches
touched the mother’s heart:
... “Now sweet, my mother, why trouble the birds so sore,
Forsooth they can ne’er have harmed thee, ah! leave them in peace once
more!”
And his mother kissed him gently, “Perchance I have wrought a wrong,
Of a truth the dear God who made them, He gave unto them their song,
And I would not that one of His creatures should sorrow because of
me.”
The turning-point in Parsifal’s career came a little later on, when on
his wondering eyes fell the vision of certain of King Arthur’s knights
who passed through the forest:
It chanced through a woodland thicket one morn as he took his way,
And brake from o’erhanging bushes full many a leafy spray,
That a pathway steep and winding rose sharply his track anear,
And the distant beat of horse-hoofs fell strange on his wondering ear.
Then the boy grasped his javelin firmly, and thought what the sound
might be;
“Perchance ’tis the Devil cometh; well, I care not if it be he!
Methinks I can still withstand him, be he never so fierce and grim,
Of a truth my lady mother she is o’er much afraid of him!”
As he stood there for combat ready, behold! in the morning light
Three knights rode into the clearing in glittering armour bright.
From head to foot were they armèd, each one on his gallant steed,
And the lad, as he saw their glory, thought each one a god indeed!
No longer he stood defiant, but knelt low upon his knee,
And cried, “God who helpest all men, I pray Thee have thought for me!”
From that hour the boy’s heart, like that of his father, was fired
by the spirit of adventure. How he followed after them in their
wanderings, and how, after much happening, he arrived at King Arthur’s
Court, were too long to tell. When she saw that his mind was made up
his mother put no obstacle in his path, but robed him in the garb of a
fool, thinking, in the cunning of her mother heart, and “the cruelty
of a mother’s love,” as the poet phrases it, that when the world mocked
him he would return to the forest again.
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.
To this popular view of the character Mrs. Kemble, in her notes on
Shakespeare, gives vivacious expression. Here we are told that Lady
Macbeth was not only devoid of “all the peculiar sensibilities of her
sex,” but that she was actually incapable of the feelings of remorse.
The sleepless madness of her closing hours was not, so we are assured,
the result of conscious guilt, for that was foreign to her nature: it
resembled rather the nightmare of a butcher who is haunted by the blood
in which his hands are imbrued. And as to her death, it was due in no
degree to the anguish of a stricken soul, but was in some occult way
directly traceable to the unconquerable wickedness of her heart.
“I think,” writes Mrs. Kemble, with the eager interest of a scientific
inquirer on the track of a new poison, “her life was destroyed by sin
as by a disease of which she was unconscious, and that she died of a
broken heart, while the impenetrable resolution of her will remained
unbowed. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak; the body
can sin but so much and survive; and other deadly passions besides
those of violence and sensuality can wear away its fine tissues and
undermine its wonderful fabric. The woman’s mortal frame succumbed to
the tremendous weight of sin and suffering which her immortal soul had
power to sustain; and having destroyed its temporal house of earthly
sojourn, that soul, unexhausted by its wickedness, went forth into its
new abode of eternity.”
Allowing for a certain feminine vehemence in the wording of the
indictment, this view of Lady Macbeth can scarcely be said to
exaggerate the current conception of her character. That it represents
a somewhat grotesque caricature of Shakespeare’s marvellous creation,
will plainly appear from even the most cursory examination of the
text, and has, indeed, already been pointed out on more than one
occasion. In 1867 Mr. P. W. Clayden, in the _Fortnightly Review_, made
a praiseworthy attempt to revive the finer outlines of Shakespeare’s
portrait, an attempt in which he had already been forestalled by Mr.
Fletcher in the _Westminster Review_ for 1844, and by a writer in the
_National Review_ for 1863.
The only reproach that can fairly be brought against the last-named
article, which for the rest deserves to rank as a careful and searching
piece of criticism, is that it has too much the tone of being delivered
as a brief in the lady’s favour. The advocacy of her cause, and the
consequent denunciation of the character of her husband, are both in a
style that seems rather to blur the imaginative beauty of the picture
as a whole. We are made to feel that we are sitting in a court of
law rather than at a poet’s feet, and we are sharply reminded of the
somewhat inappropriate arena into which the discussion has drifted by
the writer’s concluding assertion, that Macbeth was “one of the worst
villains” ever drawn by Shakespeare. Charges of this sort smack too
strongly of the forensic method, and have but little significance when
applied to the central figure of a great tragedy. If Macbeth stood at
the bar of the Old Bailey he would undoubtedly be convicted of murder,
and so, for that matter, would his wife; but it is the poet’s privilege
to lift the record of crime into an ideal atmosphere; and when, at
the magic bidding of genius, the closest secrets of the human heart
have been unlocked, and its inner workings laid bare, such epithets
as may be used to dismiss the record of a police case cease to be
instructive, and are scarcely even relevant to the wider issue that
has been raised. The character of Iago, with whom Macbeth is compared,
stands on different ground. It was there no part of Shakespeare’s task
to lift the impenetrable mask of malice which serves as the instrument
of Othello’s destruction. Iago is known to us only by his pitiless
delight in human torture, and by the sinister cruelty of which he
stands accused and convicted; while in the case of Macbeth, despite his
heavier record of actual crime, the evil that he wrought serves only
as the stepping-stone by which we are allowed to enter into the deeper
recesses of his soul.
But there is one point in the article to which we have referred that
has a profound interest for the student of the drama. It is the
writer’s main contention that the source of the error he seeks to
correct is to be traced to what he terms a distortion of the stage.
The figure of Lady Macbeth as now popularly accepted is represented
as the lineal descendant of the genius of Mrs. Siddons. It was her
incomparable art which first gave to the character the particular
stamp it now bears, and chased from the popular imagination the more
delicate creation of the poet’s brain. This charge carries with it, of
course, a splendid tribute to the artist’s powers, and the experience
of our own time proves that it may not be altogether unfounded. It is
not so long ago since the glamour of Salvini’s genius, with its superb
gifts of voice and bearing and its incomparable technical resource,
succeeded in effacing the Othello of Shakespeare, leaving us in its
stead a figure admirably effective for the purposes of the stage, but
sadly lacking in the higher and finer elements with which the character
had been endowed by the author. And it may be added that the witness
of contemporaries goes far to support this particular view of Mrs.
Siddons’ performance of the part. The poet Campbell testifies to the
extraordinary impression she created when he writes that “the moment
she seized the part she identified her image with it in the minds of
the living generation.” Boaden, her earlier biographer, speaking of her
first entrance on the scene, says, “The distinction of sex was only
external; ‘her spirits’ informed their tenement with the apathy of a
demon”; and evidence to the same effect is supplied by the interesting
notes of Professor Bell, first published some few years ago by
Professor Fleeming Jenkin.
“Of Lady Macbeth,” he writes, “there is not much in the play, but the
wonderful genius of Mrs. Siddons makes it the whole. She makes it tell
the whole story of the ambitious project, the disappointment, the
remorse, the sickness and despair of guilty ambition, the attainment
of whose object is no cure for the wounds of the spirit. Macbeth in
Kemble’s hand is only a co-operating part. I can conceive Garrick to
have sunk Lady Macbeth as much as Mrs. Siddons does Macbeth, yet when
you see Mrs. Siddons play the part you scarcely can believe that any
acting could make her part subordinate. Her turbulent and inhuman
strength of spirit does all. She turns Macbeth to her purpose, makes
him her mere instrument, guides, directs, and inspires the whole plot.
Like Macbeth’s evil genius, she hurries him on in the mad career of
ambition and cruelty from which his nature would have shrunk.”