Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/253

Rh continuators. Robert de Borron, on the other hand, if to him the merit must be assigned, if he was not simply transcribing an older, forgotten version, was a more original thinker, if a less gifted writer. Although he was not able to entirely harmonise the conflicting accounts of which he made use, he yet succeeded in keeping close to the old lines of the legend whilst giving a consistent symbolical meaning to all its details. His work came too late, however, to exercise the influence it should have done upon the development of the legend; the writers who knew it were mere heapers together of adventures, and the very man who composed a sequel to it abandoned Robert's main conception.

The history of the Legend of the Holy Grail is, thus, the history of the gradual transformation of old Celtic folk-tales into a poem charged with Christian symbolism and mysticism. This transformation, at first the inevitable outcome of its pre-Christian development, was hastened later by the perception that it was a fitting vehicle for certain moral and spiritual ideas. These have been touched upon incidentally in the course of these studies, but they and their manifestation in modern as well as in mediæval literature deserve fuller notice.