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CHAPTER X.

 

Popularity of the Arthurian Romance—Reasons for that Popularity—Affinities of the Mediæval Romances with early Celtic Literature; Importance of the Individual Hero; Knighthood; the rôle of Woman; the Celtic Fairy and the Mediæval Lady; the Supernatural—M. Renan's views—The Quest in English Literature, Malory—The earliest form of the Legend, Chrestien, his continuators—The Queste and its Ideal—The Sex-Relations in the Middle Ages—Criticism of Mr. Furnivall's estimate of the moral import of the Queste—The Merits of the Queste—The Chastity Ideal in the later versions—Modern English Treatments: Tennyson, Hawker—Possible Source of the Chastity Ideal in Popular Tradition—The Perceval Quest in Wolfram; his Moral Conception; the Question; Parzival and Conduiramur—The Parzival Quest and Faust—Wagner's Parsifal—The Christian element in the Legend—Ethical Ideas in the folk-tale originals of the Grail Romances: the Great Fool, the Sleeping Beauty—Conclusion.

 

Few legends have attained such wide celebrity, or been accepted as so thoroughly symbolical of one master conception, as that of the Holy Grail. Poets and thinkers from mediæval times to our own days have used it as a type of the loftiest goal of man's effort. There must be something in the romances which first embodied this conception to account for the enduring favour it has enjoyed. Nor is it that we read into the old legend meanings and teachings undreamt of before our day. At a comparatively early stage in the legend's existence its capacities were perceived, and the works which were the outcome of that perception became the breviary and the exemplar of their age. There are reasons, both general and special, why the Celtic mythic tales grew as they did, and had such overwhelming vogue in their new shapes. In no portion of the vast Arthurian cycle is it more needful or more instructive to see what these reasons were than in that which recounts the fortunes of the Grail.

The tales of Peredur and Gwalchmai, bound up with the