Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/276

250 the sinner, and announces the one way in which the sin may be cancelled, namely, by the coming of a worthier successor, is due, if we may credit Birch-Hirschfeld, to an accident. Wolfram only knew Chrestien. The latter never explains the real nature of the Grail, and the German poet's knowledge of French was too slight to put him on the right track. The question, "Whom serve they with the Grail?" which he found in Chrestien, was necessarily meaningless to him, and he replaced it by his, "Uncle, what is it tortures thee?" The change may be the result of accident as is so much else in this marvellous legend, but it required a man of genius to turn the accident to such account. It is the insistence upon charity as the herald and token of spiritual perfection that makes the grandeur of Wolfram's poem, and raises it so immeasureably above the Queste.

The same human spirit is visible in the delineation of the Grail Kingship as the type of the highest good. Wolfram's theology is distinctively antinomian—no man may win the Grail in his own strength; it choseth whom it will—and has been claimed on the one hand as a reflex of orthodox Catholic belief, on the other as a herald of the Lutheran doctrine of grace. Theological experts may be left to fight out this question among themselves. Apart from this, Wolfram has a practical sense of the value of human effort. With him the Quest is not to be achieved by utter isolation from this earth and its struggles. The chief function of the Grail Kingdom is to supply an abiding type of a divinely ordered Society; it also trains up leaders for those communities which lack them. It is a civilising power as well as a Palace Spiritual.

In the relation of man to Heaven, Wolfram, whilst fully accepting the doctrines of his age, appeals to the modern spirit with far greater power and directness than the Queste. In the other great question of the legend, the relation of man to woman, he is likewise nearer to us, although it must be confessed that he builds better than he knows. To the love ideal of his day, based wholly upon passion and vanity and severed from all family feeling, he