Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/238

 to make it more and more significant of mediæval Christianity, perhaps because the mysterious vessel called Grail suggested the sacred mystery of the sacramental cup. So Percival, a good worldly knight, the first hero of the Grail, was superseded in the early thirteenth century by Galahad, invented by an unknown romancer for the sole purpose, apparently, of being an ideally ascetic hero. Already the Grail had become the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper, and symbolical of the Communion Cup. A long account had been written of its journey from Palestine to Britain, which is not included in the "Morte d'Arthur." Marvels in the story were explained after the fashion of the scriptural interpretation of dreams. Sir Lancelot, Galahad's father, was made to "come but of the eighth degree from our Lord Jesu Christ." And among the many monkish grafts on the old pagan tree was that so-called "wonderful tale of King Solomon and his wife," and their three spindles, and Solomon's ship, all of which is not so "wonderful" as senseless.

If Malory's version of the Grail legend is characteristic of mediæval romance in introducing the superstition and ignorance of mediæval Christianity, it introduces also its mystical beauty. Galahad in his incomprehension of human temptation may lack human sympathy, but he is a very fair picture of innocent youth when, led by "a good old man, and an ancient, clothed all in white," he comes to sit in the siege perilous, in red arms himself and a "coat of red sendal," and "a mantel upon his shoulders that was furred with ermine." He must be a very hard-headed agnostic or insensitive puritan who is not awed by the "alighting" of "the grace of the Holy Ghost" on the knights when the Grail appears miraculously at Arthur's court, and impressed by the celebration of the Mass at Carbonek and Sarras.

Also in secular ways, Malory's Grail chapters are typical of mediæval romance. The institution of "courtly love" that is, a knight's unquestioning obedience to his lady, such as we see in Lancelot's devotion to Guinevere the obligation to the vows of knighthood, with its ideals of frankness, chastity, courtesy, and service to all who are weak and suffering, and also the forgetting of these vows in the heat of human passion all this may be found in Malory's chapters of the Grail, as in the rest of his "Morte d'Arthur."