The Wagnerian Romances. Gertrude Hall Brownell
evil when we return good for it." Kundry turns sadly away: "I never do good! … All I desire is rest! … Rest!" And while Gurnemanz is still occupied with restoring Parsifal, she slowly walks, as if powerfully drawn and intensely resisting, toward a tangled copse. She appears struggling with inexpressible weariness; the music gives a hint of something unnatural and evil in the spell of sleep falling leadenly upon her, expressing at the same time an irresistible element in it of attraction. The dark, wild-haired messenger of the Grail, the despised subordinate, suddenly assumes to our sense a much greater importance than up to this moment. Her personality looms large with an unexplained effect of tragedy. "Only rest! Rest for the weary one!" she murmurs yearningly; "sleep! Oh, let nobody wake me!" Terror checks her for a moment: "No! No! I must not sleep!" she shudders, "I am afraid!" She falls to violent trembling. But whatever it is compelling her is too strong at last. Her arms fall unnerved, her head bows languidly, and she moves feebly whither she is drawn. "Useless resistance! … The hour is come. Sleep. … Sleep. … I must!" Having reached the thicket she drops on the earth among the bushes.
The sun is now high, the king is borne homeward from the bath. The thought has struck Gurnemanz that here under his hands is surely as exquisite a Thor as could well be, and the experiment suggests itself of taking him to the temple, where, as he tells him, if he be pure, the Grail will be to him meat and drink. He places the arm of the still strengthless youth about his neck, and gently upholds him as they start on their way. "Who is the Grail?" asks Parsifal, as they walk. "That may not be put into words," replies Gurnemanz, "but, if you are of the chosen, you cannot fail to learn. And, see now! I believe I know who you are. No road leads through the land to the Grail, and no one could find the way except Itself guided him. … " "I am scarcely moving," says the wondering boy, "yet it seems to me we have already gone a long way. … "
And, indeed, the forest has been miraculously gliding past. It ends before a granite wall in which a great portal stands open. This gives entrance into ascending rocky galleries; sounds of clarions come stealing to the ear; church-bells are heard—and we are presently translated into the interior of the Castle of the Grail, the great domed hall.
Parsifal entering with Gurnemanz stops still beside the threshold, spell-bound in presence of all the lofty beauty: "Now watch with attention," his guide instructs him, before leaving him where he stands, "and let us see, if you are a simple soul and pure, what light shall be vouchsafed you."
The scene now enacting itself before him is well calculated to strike the imagination of the boy from the lonely moors. The knights of the Grail, beautiful in their clear robes, enter in procession, chanting. When they cease, the singing is taken up by younger voices, of personages unseen up in the dome, and, after them, by children's voices from the airy summit of the dome, floating, angelic. The wounded king is brought in on his litter, and laid upon the high canopied seat before the altar, upon which the shrine is placed enclosing the Grail. The knights have ranged themselves along tables prepared with silver goblets. In the silence of recollection which falls upon all, a voice is heard, as if from the grave: "My son Amfortas, are you at your post?" It is the aged Titurel, whose resting-place is a recess behind the altar and the raised seat. There he is kept alive solely by the contemplation of the Grail, mystical means of life and strength. "Are you at your post? Shall I look upon the Grail once more and live?" But long-gathering despair to-day reaches its climax in Amfortas, at the necessity to perform the rite required. The torture to him cannot be measured of the vision which creates ecstasy in the others. "Woeful inheritance fallen to me!" he complains, in his passion of revolt against this divine infliction, "that I, the only sinner among all, should be condemned to be keeper of holiest holies, and call down blessings upon those purer than I!" But the worst of his anguish is still that when the holy blood glows in the Cup, and, in sympathy, the blood gushes forth anew from the wound in his side—the wound made by the same Spear—the consciousness ever returns to burning life that, whereas those holy drops were shed in a heavenly compassion for the misery of man, these are unregenerate blood, hot with sinful human passion and longing, which no chastening has availed to drive out. The wretched king is praying for the mercy of deliverance through death, when, from the high dome, the words rain softly of the promise of redemption—through the Fool. Recovering courage, Amfortas proceeds with the rite. While he kneels in prayer before the Chalice, which young acolytes have taken from the shrine and reverently uncovered, a mysterious darkness gathers over all. A ray of light suddenly falls through this, upon the Chalice, which begins softly to glow, and brightens to a deep luminous purple-red. Amfortas lifts it and waves it over the kneeling people. The words of the Last Communion are heard, sung by the soaring voices in the dome: "Take my body—Take my blood—For the sake of our love! Take my blood—Take my body—And remember me!"
The ceremony accomplished, Amfortas sets down the Cup, which begins to pale; as it fades, the twilight lightens. When the common light of day has completely returned, the knights sit down to the repast of consecrated Bread placed for them, and Wine poured, by the acolytes. At the end of it, they earnestly grasp one another's hands in renewal of their bond of brotherhood.
Amfortas is perceived to be suffering from the renewed bleeding of his wound. He is laid upon the litter once more and borne away. The knights depart in orderly procession, the hall is gradually deserted.
Parsifal remains standing on the same spot. He has hardly moved, except, when Amfortas's anguished cry rang out, to clutch at his heart. Gurnemanz, when he sat down at the table with the other knights, signed to him to come and share in the holy feast, but he did not stir. The impression can be apprehended of the solemn scene upon the white page of the boy's mind. A spirit of religion has breathed through it all, so exalted, so warm, so personal; the passionate mediæval Christianity which expressed itself in crusades and religious orders and knight-errantry. The cry of the Saviour (Erlösung's Held, Hero of Redemption, the poet characteristically calls him) has rung so piercingly, there seems but one answer from a humanly constituted simple heart: "Did you indeed suffer so much and die for love of me and my brothers? How then can I the most quickly spend and scatter all my strength and blood in gratitude to you?" Parsifal has brought to these things a consciousness not blurred and overscored by worldly knowledge and desires, a native capacity for love of others uninterfered with by the developed consideration of self. His fresh instinct has gathered the meaning of what he sees, novel to him as it is; "wise through compassion," he has gotten the measure and character perfectly of Amfortas's sufferings, foreign as they are to his experience; he has gotten the spirit of the facts of Christ. One especial message, over and above the rest, he has received to himself, shot into his heart upon a ray from the glowing Grail held before his gaze by Amfortas: that the Saviour embodied in the Grail must be delivered from the sin-sullied hands now holding it. He has seemed to hear the appeal of the Saviour, poignant, to be so delivered. He is left, when the vision fades, with the sense of this necessity—involving for himself, though he knows not how, a duty and a quest: Amfortas must be healed, the Sacred Treasure must be taken into keeping by purer hands.
Gurnemanz approaches him hopefully: "Well, did you understand what you saw?" But Parsifal, still in his trance of wonder, only shakes his head. It is too deep for words, what he has felt.
To Gurnemanz he now seems a hopeless and unprofitable fool, who has no place in the noble company. "You are a fool, it is a fact, and you are nothing else!" he declares. Opening a side-door, he without further ceremony pushes him out by the shoulders, with a sour little joke: "Take my advice: Let the swans alone hereafter, and, gander that you are, find yourself a goose!" As he turns from the door, there falls from above, as if some echo of it had clung to the high dome after all the singers had left, the strain: "Wise through compassion. … The immaculate fool. … "
II
The next change of scene shows the interior of the tower where Klingsor practises his dark arts. A strain already known catches our attention (the Sorcery-motif), and we become aware what influences were at work in Kundry when her weariness succumbed to the lure of sleep, what mesmeric call from Klingsor's hotly blooming, godless pleasure-seat. The Klingsor-music introducing the second act stands in picturesque contrast