Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/274

248 up with the otherworld. He who would seek them must turn his back upon this earth from which the Palace Spiritual and the City of Sarras were even more remote than Avalon or Tir-na n-Og. Was no other course open? Could not framework and incidents of the Celtic tales be retained, and yet, raised to a loftier, wider level, become a fit vehicle for philosophic thought and moral exhortation? One side of popular tradition figured the hero as wresting the talismans from the otherworld powers for the benefit of his fellow men. Could not this form of the myth be made to yield a human, practical conception of the Quest and Winning of the Holy Grail?

We are luckily not reduced to conjecture in this matter. A work largely fulfilling these hypothetical requirements exists in the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach. On the whole it is the most interesting individual work of modern European literature prior to the Divina Commedia, and its author has a better claim than any other mediæval poet to be called a man of genius. He must, of course, be measured by the standard of his time. It would be useless to expect from him that homogeneity of narrative, that artistic proportion of style first met with 150 years later in Italy, and which from Italy passed into all European literatures. Compared with the unknown poets who gave their present shape to the Nibelungenlied or to the Chanson de Roland he is an individual writer, but he is far from deserving this epithet even in the sense that Chaucer deserves it. His subject dominates him. Even when his philosophic mind is conceiving it under a new aspect he anxiously holds to the traditional form. Hence great inconsistencies in his treatment of the theme, hence, too, the frequent difficulty in interpreting his meaning, the frequent doubt as to how far the interpretation is correct. Here, as in the discussion respecting the origines of the Grail legend, resort must often be had to conjecture, and any solution of the fascinating problems involved is necessarily and largely subjective.

Wolfram's relation to his predecessors must be taken into account in estimating the value of the Parzival. The earlier portion of his work differs entirely, as we have seen, from any existing French romance; so does the finish in so far as it agrees