Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/293

 The Legend of the Holy Grail. 281

ture ; Crestien, an imaginative artist, so transformed the narratives he treated, that his beautiful and fanciful poems, animated by psy- chologic principles which form their constitutive elements, must be presumed to have borne little resemblance to the lost compositions which supplied their germs ; while, in turn, these preceding produc- tions were probably themselves artistic and literary, remote from the character of folk-tales out of the debris of which they were constructed. In respect to locality and nomenclature, such fictions are to be considered as purely the arbitrary addition of cultivated romancers, who elected to lay the scene in a conventional British antiquity.

It is with the work of Crestien that the known history of the tale begins ; he may have obtained suggestions from the European variant of the history of the Buddha ; in his hands, the part of the narrative dealing with Perceval describes the education of a simple youth in the three fields of arms, love, and ethics. For the first section, he set out from the popular jest ; the ignorant youth, enamored of the radiance belonging to knights, seeks that dignity at the hands of Arthur; successively by his mother and teacher Perceval is in- structed respecting the central duties of knighthood, namely, the service of ladies, charity, and piety. For the love story, the poet had only to utilize the familiar theme reciting the rescue of a be- sieged damsel. There remained the necessity of learning to be " of measure," of attaining self-control ; for this, the trouvere had re- course to a literary material of which the roots go back to Hellenic literature of the best Athenian period, setting forth reticence in speech as chief of virtues. Whether, in this essay, the author re- constructed a situation given by his predecessors, or whether the portion of the poem dealing with the idea is of his own construction as respects the skeleton as well as the flesh, will always remain a matter of conjecture ; in any case, the psychologic conception con- stitutes the determining influence, which has gathered about it, as filings arranging themselves around the pole of a magnet, the tradi- tional elements, attracted as separate atoms.

In the course of his narration, the poet had occasion to mention a vessel used to hold the oblate, which, according to a favorite concep- tion of the time, constituted the sole food of a personage devoted to religion. In this story, the graal had a place only accidental ; but it so happened that, in consequence of the incompleteness of the romance, the author's intent was open to misinterpretation ; the vessel was expounded as identical, first with the eucharistic cup, afterwards with the paschal dish. These explanations gave oppor- tunity to romancers affecting a conventional piety, though in the main animated by literary motives, who undertook to produce fash-

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