Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/283

Rh a magician; the hero drinks of the proffered cup, despite his love's remonstrances, and forthwith loses his two legs. This is obviously a form of the widely-spread myth which forbids the visitant to the otherworld to partake of aught there under penalty of never returning to earth. But this mythical motif has taken an ethical shape in popular fancy. According to Kennedy's version, it is the hero's excess in draining the cup to the dregs which calls for punishment. This change is of the same nature as that noted with regard to a similar incident in the Grail romances. There, the old mythic taboo of sleeping or speaking in the otherworld called at last for an explanation, and found one in Wolfram's philosophic conception. The parallel does not end here. Perceval may retrieve his fault, and so may the Great Fool; Wolfram makes his hero win salvation by steadfast faith, the folk-tale makes its hero in the face of every form of temptation a pattern of steadfast loyalty to the absent friend and to the pledged word. It may, or may not, be considered to the advantage of the folk-tale that, unlike the mediæval romance, it deals neither in mysticism nor in asceticism. The sin and atonement of the Great Fool are such as the popular mind can grasp; he is an example of human weakness and human strength. The woman he loves is no temptress, no representative of the evil principle—on the contrary, she is ever by his side to counsel and to cheer him.

When it is remembered that the two off-shoots, romantic-legendary and popular, from the one traditional stem have grown up in perfect independence of each other, the kinship of moral idea is startling. The folk-lorist has often cause to wonder at the spontaneous flower-like character of the object of his study; folk-tradition seems to obey fixed laws of growth and to be no product of man's free thought and speech. The few partisans of the theory that folk-tradition is only a later and weakened echo of the higher culture of the race are invited to study the present case. A Celtic tale, after supplying an important element to the Christianised Grail legend, has gone on its way entirely unaffected by the new shape which that legend assumed, and yet it has worked out a moral conception of fundamental likeness to one set forth in the legend. It would be difficult to find a more perfect instance of the