Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/388

354 Reviews. human father, drives him out from the solitudes in which his mother has reared him to seek the companionship of his fellow-men. (There is a point here to which I will return later.) In the genuine humanity of Perceval the world at large, not the cloister, found a congenial hero.

Seriously, is not all this trouble and ingenuity thrown away ? Is it not much more simple, much more natural, to believe that this story of Perceval, instinct with primitive life and vigour, brimful of archaic traits which find analogies all over the world, is a far older story than that of the shadowy ascetic mediaeval Galahad, the creature of a certain phase of thought and belief, knowing no existence outside the very limited range of certain romances? The number of romances in which Galahad figures is infinitesimal compared with those in which he is not even mentioned. Is not the idea of celibacy, as identical with and inseparable from chastity, an idea which is the very fons et origo of Galahad's character, of later date, as it is of more complex character, than the simple, natural conception of love and marriage, the central note of the Perceval story?

And in this very element of celibacy, so insisted upon in the Early History romances, I see the refutation of Wechssler's argument that the first Grail romances were written by knights turned hermit, rather than by monks. The hermits of mediaeval times were not the hermits of the primitive church and the Egyptian desert. A great number, probably the majority, had lived in the world, had loved, and lost the loved one by death or hopeless separation. These were not the men who would treat the natural wholesome love of man and woman, youth and maiden, with the contempt, and worse, of the writer of the Queste. Nor does it appear to me that there is any lack of theological dogma and tradition — rather a superabundance of these features; childish, perhaps, in expression, but then mediaeval monks were not all learned men; and did not even the school-men of a later date argue seriously as to how many angels could stand on the point of a needle? The one is the natural, the other the non-natural, way of viewing the question; and I believe the natural came first.

It has been objected before now, and with good reason, that if Galahad were the original hero of the quest, it is difficult to understand his entire disappearance from the Perceval romances,