II

The next change of scene shows the interior of the tower where

Klingsor practises his dark arts. A strain already known catches our

attention (the Sorcery-motif), and we become aware what influences

were at work in Kundry when her weariness succumbed to the lure of

sleep, what mesmeric call from Klingsor's hotly blooming, godless

pleasure-seat. The Klingsor-music introducing the second act stands

in picturesque contrast to the tender and thoughtful music opening

the first; curiously suggesting, as it does, lawlessness, cold evil

passions riding the soul hideously at a gallop. It has something vaguely

in common with portions of the Venus-music in Tannhäuser,--perhaps

its effect at once unbridled and joyless.

The sorcerer has from the battlements seen Parsifal approaching,

who, thrust out from the Castle of the Grail, had, by the peculiar

magic of the place, found the path to it obliterated. He had come

forth with the exalted but undefined sense of a great task to perform.

But, even as the road to the Castle of the Grail was difficult to

find, the road to Klingsor's castle was easy and overeasy; it would

seem that for the feet of a votary of the Grail all roads led to

it. Parsifal had seen it shining afar, and with childish shouts of

delight is drawing near. Klingsor, divining in him an enemy more

than usual dangerous, resorts, to make his ruin altogether sure,

to what are his supreme methods. He calls to his assistance once more

the ally by whose help the great Amfortas had been vanquished. With

mysterious passes and burning of gums, he summons that Formidable

Feminine: "Nameless one!... Most ancient of Devils!... Rose of

Hell!... Herodias!..." and amid the blue smoke-wreathes, uttering

the wail of a slave haled to the market-place, rises the form of

Kundry. She appears like one but half roused from the torpour of

sleep, and struggling with a terrible dream, or resisting some

terrible reality. All the answer she can give to his first words of

ironical congratulation, is in broken exclamations: "Oh! Oh! Deep

night.... Madness... Oh, wrath! Oh, misery!... Sleep! Sleep! Deep

sleep!... Death!..." and, in a subsequent outburst: "The curse!...

Oh, yearning!... Yearning!..."

Her history and hints of her extraordinarily complex personality

are to be gathered from the scene following and the scene later,

with Parsifal. The mysterious messenger of the Grail was anciently

Herodias, and meeting with the Man of Sorrows, she laughed. "Then,"

she herself relates, "He turned His eyes upon me...." Under the

curse involved in her action and the remorse generated by that

divine look, she cannot die, but goes, as she describes it, seeking

Him from world to world, to meet His eyes again. She tries in every

manner to expiate her sin, by service to others, by subjugation of

self, but the old nature is still not well out of her, the nature

of Herodias, and, at intervals, an infinite weariness of welldoing

overtakes her, a revival of the passions of her old life, and with

the cessation of struggle against them she falls into a death-like

sleep. In this condition, as if it represented a laying-off of the

armour of righteousness, her spirit is at the mercy of the powers

of evil. The necromancer Klingsor can conjure it up and force it

to his own uses.

In the centuries she has lived, she has borne many names. She has

but recently been the temptress of Amfortas, and at the reassumption

of the higher half of her dual nature, has, as the servant and

messenger of the Grail, striven to make amends, as far as she might,

for the mischief done by her in her other state. The curse under

which she lives has peculiar laws of its own, of which we just

vaguely feel the moral basis. In her character of temptress, while

desiring with intensity, in her Herodias part, the surrender of

the man to whose seduction she applies herself, yet with the other

side of her, the side of the penitent, which never quite slumbers,

she even more ardently and fundamentally desires his victory over

her arts, for, with her own frustration, she would be delivered from

her curse, she could die; from the enormous fatigue of centuries

of tormented earthly existence, find rest. Which is to say, perhaps,

that if once more she could meet and look into the eyes of complete

strength and purity, see an adequate approach to the Christ-spirit

shining out of whatsoever eyes, her redemption, so painfully worked

toward through centuries of alternate effort and relapse, would

be consummated; at that encounter, renewing, or confirming, faith

in the existence of perfect goodness, the evil within her, so long

vainly fought, would die, and her long trial be at end. So she

approaches every new adventure with, under her determined wiles,

the hope of failure; and when her subject is still and ever found

weak in her hands, experiences despair. And when a hero such as

Amfortas, undertaken with the undercurrent sense that he perhaps is

the unconquerable, whose resistance shall make him her deliverer,

vulgarly falls in her arms, the triumph of one side of her nature,

and the despair of the other, express themselves in terrible laughter.

The fruit of her experience with man is, as it affects the two

sides of her, a mixture of sinister cynicism and ineffable pity.

"Woe! Woe!" she laments, at Klingsor's mocking mention of Amfortas.

"Weak, he too! Weak--all of them! Through me, to my curse, all

lost as I am lost! Oh, eternal sleep, only balm, how, how shall

I win you?"

One can suppose in this Kundry, setting aside all details of personal

history, an intended personification of the

abstraction--(_Namenlose_,--Nameless One,) Eternal Feminine, with,

set in the high light, two of her broad traits, the best perhaps and

the worst: the passion for serving, tending, protecting, mothering,

and the passion for subduing man, proving herself more powerful

than the stronger, by remorseless practice upon his point of least

strength. This inveterate spirit of seduction it must be which

Klingsor apostrophises as "Most Ancient of Devils," and "Rose of

Hell."

The character of Kundry has many aspects, exhibited here and there

by a flash, but, when all is said, and before all else, what we are

watching is an upward-struggling human soul, whose storm-beaten

progress could never move us as it does did we not feel in her

simply our sister.

We saw her, forspent, crawl into the thicket to sleep. Now, Klingsor

who can command her while in that state, has compelled her to him

to accomplish the undoing of Parsifal. The idea is to her, all

heavy and clogged with sleep, the personality of the _Gralsbotin_

still in the ascendant, one of horror only. With wails of protest

at having been waked, and lamentation over what is proposed, she

refuses to obey, rejecting Klingsor's claim to be her master. Even

when he puts his request in the form of the suggestion: "He who

should defy you would set you free. Try it then with the boy at

hand!" she stubbornly refuses. "He is even now climbing the rampart!"

Klingsor persists. Kundry wrings her hands. "Woe! Woe! Have I waked

for this? Must I, indeed?... Must I?" At which first intimation

of weakening, Klingsor ceases to press his authority, and adopts

a different method of persuasion. Climbing to the battlement, he

describes the approaching figure: "Ha! He is beautiful, the boy!"

"Oh! Oh!" moans Kundry, "woe is me!"

Klingsor blows his horn, to warn the garrison of the palace--the

host of the victims of folly, the lost knights--of the approaching

enemy. A commotion is heard of arms caught up in haste and of fighting;

Klingsor from his post follows the contest, with glee in the daring

of the beautiful boy, who has snatched the sword from one of his

assailants and with it, one against the swarm, is cutting his way

through them. Kundry, ceasing from her moans, has begun to laugh,

and as Klingsor continues his report of the skirmish laughs more and

more uncontrollably. "They yield, they flee, each of them carries

home his wound! Ha! How proudly he stands upon the rampart! How the

roses bloom and smile in his cheeks, as, in childlike amazement,

he gazes down upon the solitary garden! ... Hey! Kundry!" But with

her laughter ending in a scream, Kundry has abruptly vanished.

"What? Already at work?" muses Klingsor. "Ha ha! I knew the charm

which will always bring you back into my service!" Then turning

his attention once more to the youthful intruder filling his eyes

with the unimagined glories of the garden: "You there, fledgling!

Whatever prophecy may have had to say concerning you, too young

and green you have fallen into my power. Purity wrested from you,

you will become my willing subject!"

The tower, with Klingsor, vanishes from sight; there lies outspread

before us the enchanted garden, glowing, tropical, displaying the

last luxuriance of flowers; and we see for ourselves Parsifal standing

upon the wall, calmly gazing. A swarm of beautiful young creatures,

waked by the clash of arms have, even as their lovers turned and fled

to cover, rushed forth to discover what is the matter. With confused

cries they pour from the palace and, recognising in Parsifal the

whole of the enemy, assail him with abuse scarcely more unendurable

than a pelting with thorny rose-buds. "You there! You there! Why

did you do us this injury? A curse upon you! A curse upon you!"

As Parsifal undismayed leaps down into the garden, they fall to

twittering like angry sparrows: "Ha! You bold thing! Do you dare to

brave us? Why did you beat our beloved?" And the raw boy, acquitting

himself rather neatly for such a beginner: "Ought I not to have beaten

them? They were barring my passage to you!" "You wanted to come to

us? Had you ever seen us before?" "Never had I seen anything so

pretty. I speak rightly, do I not, in calling you lovely?" A rapid

change takes place in the attitude toward him of the exceedingly

pretty persons. They adorn themselves in haste, fantastically, to

charm him, with the flowers of the garden; singing a wooing song,

of the most melting, persuasive, irresistible, they weave around

him, circling as in a child's game of ring-a-rosy, sweeping the

heady perfumes of their garlands under his nostrils. They do not

appear wholly human, but rather like strange tall-stemmed animated

flowers, swaying and jostling in the wind, and whose odor should have

turned into music; or, better still, like incarnate emanations from

the intoxicating flower-beds of this magical Garden of the Senses.

Parsifal stands in their midst, pleased and watchful, fleetingly

again like Siegfried, with his cheerful calm and poise. "How sweet

you smell! ... Are you flowers?" They close around him more and

more smotheringly, with caresses more and more pressing. He gently

pushes them away. "You wild, lovely, crowding flowers! If I am

to play with you, let me have room!" As they do not obey, and in

addition fall to quarrelling among themselves over him, half-vexed,

he repels them and is turning for retreat, when a voice is heard

from a blossoming thicket near-by: "Parsifal! Stay!..." The flowers,

startled, at once hold still. The youth stands still, too, struck.

_Parsifal_.... He remembers that as one of the names his mother

had called him by, once, as she lay asleep and dreaming. The voice

continues: "Here remain, Parsifal.... You simple light-o'-loves,

depart from him. Early withering flowers, he is destined to other

things than dalliance with you!" The flock of flowers, reluctantly,

lingering as long as they dare, withdraw, their last word one of

derision: "You beautiful one! You proud one! You... fool!" With

whispered laughter they vanish into the house, and Parsifal, in

the once more solitary garden, asks himself: "Was it all a dream?"

For the first time touched with timidity, he turns towards the

blossoming bower from which the voice had come. The branches part,

and reveal Kundry, youthful, gorgeously apparelled and superlatively

beautiful, lying upon a flowery bank. "Did you mean the name you

spoke for me, who have no name?" Parsifal asks, standing shyly

apart.

"I called you, guileless Innocent, Parsifal.... By this name your

father Gamuret, expiring in Arabian land, called his unborn son.

I have sought you here to tell you this...."

"Never had I seen," sighs Parsifal, "never dreamed, such a thing

as I now see and am filled with awe!... Are you, too, a flower

in this garden of flowers?" "No, Parsifal. Far, far away is my

home. I came here only that you might find me. I came from distant

lands where I witnessed many things...." With the calm notes of

the Arch-enchantress, perfectly sure of her power, she unfolds to

him the story of his own past further back than he can remember,

which is of the things she professes to have ocularly witnessed,--his

life with Herzeleide; she relates the death of the latter from grief

over his loss. She takes him in hand with easy masterliness in

the art of reducing a youthful heart. She does not stint to appear

to one so boyish much older and very wise. Not one discomposing

word does she utter about love,--but she brings his heart to a

state of fusion by the picture of his mother's sorrowful end, and

when, overcome by anguish and remorse, he sinks at her feet with

the cry: "What have I done?... Sweetest, loveliest mother! Your

son, your son must bring about your death!..." she gently places

her arm about his neck and administers needed comfort: "Never before

had you known sorrow, and so have not known either the sweetness of

consolation. Let sorrow and regret be washed away in the consolation

proffered to you by Love!" But Parsifal, the compassionate, cannot

so soon be diverted from the rending thought of his mother, and

continues despite the fair arm on his neck and the balmy breath in

his hair, with his passionate self-reproach: "My mother! I could

forget my mother! Ha! What else have I forgotten? What, indeed, have

I ever remembered? Naught but utter folly dwells in me!" Kundry

again attempts setting him right with himself and offers the cheer:

"Acknowledgment of your fault will place a term to remorse.

Consciousness of folly will turn folly into sense...." Then, not

quite relevantly, "Learn to know the love which enfolded Gamuret

when Herzeleide's affection burningly overflowed,..." With the

assurance that she who gave him life now sends him as a mother's

last blessing the First Kiss of Love, she bends over him and places

her lips upon his in a prolonged Wagnerian kiss. The sorcery-motif

is heard weaving its unholy snare. Of a sudden, with an abruptness

as unexpected as it is disconcerting, Parsifal tears himself from

her embrace, leaps to his feet, and pressing his hands to his heart,

as if there were the seat of an intolerable pain, "Amfortas!" he

cries, staring like one who sees ghosts, "the wound! the wound!..."

That has been the effect of her kiss upon his innocence, to give him

sudden clairvoyance into her nature, to cast a lightning flash upon

the past. He feels himself for a moment identified with Amfortas,

whom the woman had kissed as she kissed him. Amfortas's wound burns

in his own side. Not only that: the sinful, disorderly, unsubduable

passion torturing Amfortas, for a moment tortures equally Parsifal,

whose nature is thrown by it into a horror of self-hatred, and casts

itself upon frenzied prayer for deliverance and pardon. Pardon, for

although this experience can be thought an effect of mysterious

insight, Parsifal recognises as a crime that he should be in these

circumstances at all. He remembers that he had known himself as

one marked for a sacred mission. He remembers the vision of the

Grail, and that the Saviour had seemed to speak from it to his

inmost soul: "Deliver me! Save me from sin-polluted hands!" "And

I," he groans, "the fool! the coward! I could rush to the insensate

exploits of a boy!"

Kundry has been amazed and somewhat alarmed, but for a moment still,

as it appears, has not understood. She leaves her flowery couch

and approaches Parsifal, where he is kneeling in supplication to

the Lord of Mercy; with soft arts she attempts to reconquer his

attention, but with an effect wide of her expectation, for, while

she plies him with caresses, he is thinking, and we hear him think:

"Yes, that voice, even thus it fell upon his ear.... And that glance,

I recognise it clearly, which smiled away his peace.... So the

lip trembled for him. ... So the throat arched.... So the tresses

laughingly gleamed!... So the soft cheek pressed close against

his own,... and so, in league with all the sorrows, so her mouth

kissed away his soul's salvation!" As if the reinforcements from

Heaven, which he prayed, had suddenly reached him, he rises in

inspired strength, frees himself and thrusts her resolutely from

him: "Destroyer, away from me! Forever and ever away!"

From this onward he is a different Parsifal, not in the least a

boy any more. It is as if in the storm which swept him he had found

himself, his anchorage and his strength. And now we gather that

Kundry really has had an inkling of what is at work in him. She

drops at once the fairly simple methods she has up to this used, and,

it is not quite clear at first whether still as a mighty Huntress,

discarding one weapon and taking another better adapted to bring

down the quarry, or at last in true earnest, she invokes--pressing,

not to be denied--his pity. She reveals--and it is as if beauty and

splendour should lift the veil from a hidden ulcer--her strange

history, the ancient sin, the curse upon her, the despair that is

denied tears and can only voice itself in laughter. "Since your

heart is capable only of feeling the sorrows of others," she pleads,

"feel mine!" In him, as he has become within the hour, she recognises

a deliverer, but, illogically, thirsts the more for his love. From

this figure with the firm, compassionate eyes and the exalted

self-possession, something breathes which associates him to her

sense with the figure, sought by her through the centuries, of

the derided Victim. She feels herself face to face once more with

the Christ-spirit. But the blind desire of her dual personality

is that pardon should wear the form of love. Parsifal, with every

moment more firmly established in his strength and purpose, replies

to her madness with a calm homily,--his theme, how from the springs

of passion flow waters of thirst. Words of wisdom, eternal truths,

drop from the so young lips of the fool. Kundry, who has listened

in wonder, exclaims: "So it was my kiss which gave you universal

vision! The full cup of my love then would make you to a god!"

and coming back eagerly to her point: "Deliver the world, if such

is your mission. If an hour can make you to a god, let me, for

that hour, suffer damnation...." "For you, too, sinner, I will

find salvation," is Parsifal's mild reply. "Let me love you in your

godlikeness, that shall be salvation for me!" "Love and salvation

both shall reward you, if you will show me the way to Amfortas!"

It will have been remarked that Kundry in her singular rôle has

been playing fair; that, though life for her (which paradoxically

is death) depends upon failure, she has put forth her whole strength

in the temptation. But it is not at this juncture the penitent who

is in the ascendant, it is the evil side of Kundry, and at that

last request of Parsifal's, proving the vanity of her effort, a

great anger seizes her: "Never!" she cries, "never shall you find

him! The fallen king, let him perish! The wretch whom I laughed

and laughed and laughed at! Ha ha! Why--he was wounded with his

own spear.... And against yourself," she follows this, "I will

call to aid that weapon, if you give that sinner the honour of

your pity!" But, at the sound of her own words, her anger dropping:

"Ah, madness!... Pity! On me, do you have pity! One single hour

mine... and you shall be shown on your way!" With a renewal of

tenderness she attempts to clasp him; but at his abhorrent, "Unhappy

woman, away!" furious beside all bounds, she falls to shouting for

help against him, help to prevent his going. "Help! Here! Hold

the audacious one! Bar the roads against him! Bar the paths!..."

Then, addressing him in the blaze of her revengeful wrath: "And

though you should escape from here--and though you should find

all the roads in the world, the road which you seek you shall not

find! For all roads and paths which lead you away from me, I place

a curse upon them. Hopelessly--hopelessly shall you wander and

stray!..."

At her wild summoning the women have come running into the garden;

Klingsor has appeared on the threshold, armed with the Spear. This,

with the words: "The Fool shall be transfixed with his Master's

Spear!" he hurls at Parsifal. But the Spear stands miraculously

poised above the youth's head. He grasps it, with a face of ecstasy,

and draws in the air a great figure of the Cross. "By this sign

I dispel your sorceries! As this Spear shall close the wound it

made, let this lying splendour fall to wreck and desolation!" As

if shaken by an earthquake, the palace crumbles to ruin; the garden

withers away and turns to a barren waste; like broken and wilted

flowers the women are seen bestrewing the ground; Kundry falls

to earth with a great cry. And Parsifal, departing, turns on the

ruined wall for a last word to her,--painfully she lifts her head

for a last look--"You know where, only, you may see me again!"

meaning, we are left to feel, a plane sooner than a place.