spear by the aid of Kundry's unholy beauty. Kundry 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 love spell.[1] 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 the "pure fool," knowing nought of sin or suffering. It had 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' torture thrill through him. The pain of the physical wound is his, but far more, the agony of the sinner who has been unworthy 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.
In the latest version of the Perceval Quest, as in the Galahad Quest, the ideal of chastity is thus paramount. This result is due to Wagner's dramatic treatment of the theme. The conception that knowledge of sin and fellowship in suffering are requisite to enable man to resist temptation, and that thus alone does he acquire the needful strength to assist his fellows, however true and profound, can obviously only be worked out on the stage
- ↑ We may here note an admirable example of the inevitable, spontaneous character of the growth of certain conceptions, especially of such as have been partly shaped by the folk-mind. There is nothing in Wolfram or in the French romances to show that the fortunes of the loathly damsel (Wagner's Kundry) are in any way bound up with the success of the Quest. But we have seen that the Celtic folk-tales represent the loathly damsel as the real protagonist of the story. She cannot be freed unless the hero do his task. Precisely the same situation as in Wagner, who was thus led back to the primitive donnée, although he can only have known intermediary stages in which its signification had been quite lost.
