The Wagnerian Romances. Gertrude Hall Brownell

at the sound of her own words, her anger dropping: "Ah, madness! … Pity! On me, do you have pity! One single hour mine … and you shall be shown on your way!" With a renewal of tenderness she attempts to clasp him; but at his abhorrent, "Unhappy woman, away!" furious beside all bounds, she falls to shouting for help against him, help to prevent his going. "Help! Here! Hold the audacious one! Bar the roads against him! Bar the paths! … " Then, addressing him in the blaze of her revengeful wrath: "And though you should escape from here—and though you should find all the roads in the world, the road which you seek you shall not find! For all roads and paths which lead you away from me, I place a curse upon them. Hopelessly—hopelessly shall you wander and stray! … "

      At her wild summoning the women have come running into the garden; Klingsor has appeared on the threshold, armed with the Spear. This, with the words: "The Fool shall be transfixed with his Master's Spear!" he hurls at Parsifal. But the Spear stands miraculously poised above the youth's head. He grasps it, with a face of ecstasy, and draws in the air a great figure of the Cross. "By this sign I dispel your sorceries! As this Spear shall close the wound it made, let this lying splendour fall to wreck and desolation!" As if shaken by an earthquake, the palace crumbles to ruin; the garden withers away and turns to a barren waste; like broken and wilted flowers the women are seen bestrewing the ground; Kundry falls to earth with a great cry. And Parsifal, departing, turns on the ruined wall for a last word to her—painfully she lifts her head for a last look—"You know where, only, you may see me again!" meaning, we are left to feel, a plane sooner than a place.

III

       Table of Contents

      Again the Domain of the Grail, where, on the outskirts of the forest, beside a spring, the old-grown Gurnemanz has built himself a hermit's cell. It is long after and much is changed. There is sadness in the air, but it is of an unfretful gentle sort, almost sweet; the sadness of a solitude visited by high thoughts, memories of calamity softened in retrospect, present crosses made supportable by faith and the light cast on the path already of an approaching event which is to mark a new epoch in the life of the Order. A sadness in the air and a something holy. It is Spring-time and it is Good-Friday; the trees are in blossom and the meadow at the forest's edge is spotted with new flowers. We are never, through the first part of the act, left unconscious for long of the sweetness of surrounding nature and the hour; it comes like whiffs of perfume, every now and then, reminding us that the earth has renewed herself and the day is holy, until at last these stray intimations have led to a clear and rounded statement in the Good-Friday Charm.

      Forth from his cell comes Gurnemanz, to be recognized as a knight of the Grail only by the straight under-tunic of the Order. He has heard a groan, not to be mistaken for the cry of a hurt animal. As it is repeated, it strikes his ear as a sound known to him of old. Anxiously searching among the matted thorn-trees, he discovers Kundry, as once before, rigid and to all appearance dead. He chafes and calls and brings her back to consciousness. She is the Kundry of the first act, but so changed—pale with the strained pallor of one lately exorcised; the wildness and roughness all gone out of her face, and in its place a strange rapt fixity; in her bearing an unknown humility. In silence she recovers remembrance of the facts of her existence; mechanically orders her hair and garments, and without a word leaves Gurnemanz to set about the work of a servant. As she is moving towards the hut, he asks: "Have you no word for me? Is this my thanks for having waked you once more out of the sleep of death?" And she brings forth brokenly the last words she is heard to utter: "To serve! … To serve! … " the only need now of her being. "How different her bearing is," Gurnemanz muses, "from what it used to be! Is it the influence of the holy day?" She brings from the cell a water-jar, and, gazing off into the distance while it fills, sees among the trees some one approaching, to which, by a sign, she calls Gurnemanz's attention. He marvels at the figure in sable armour; but we, saddened and slowed as it is, have recognized the Parsifal-motif heralding it. The sable knight is faring slowly on his way, with closed helmet, bowed head and lowered spear, unconscious of his observers, until, when he drops on a grassy knoll to rest, Gurnemanz greets and addresses him: "Have you lost your way? Shall I guide you?" Receiving no answer to this or the questions which follow, save by signs of the head, he with the bluffness we remember offers a reprimand: "If your vow binds you not to speak to me, my vow obliges me to tell you what is befitting. You are upon a consecrated spot, it is improper here to go in armour, with closed helmet, with shield and spear. And of all days upon this one! Do you not know what holy day it is?" The knight gently shakes his head. "Among what heathen have you lived, not to be aware that this is the most holy Good-Friday? Lay down, forthwith, your arms! Do not offend the Lord, who on this day, unarmed in very truth, offered His sacred blood in atonement for the sins of the world!" The knight upon this, still without a word, drives the haft of his spear into the ground, lays down his arms and sinks upon his knees in prayer before the Spear. The removal of his helmet has revealed the face of Parsifal, but another Parsifal, even as Kundry is another. The stage-directions have no word concerning it, but it must be in accordance with the custom of Bayreuth that the latter Parsifal presents a resemblance to the traditional representations of the Saviour; the idea being, we must think, to indicate, stamped on the exterior man, this soul's aspiration towards likeness with the Divine Pattern; or, perhaps, visibly to state that here, too, is a gentle and selfless lover of men, all of whose forces bent on a mission of deliverance.

      Gurnemanz, watching him attentively, recognises the slayer, long ago, of the swan, the stupid boy whom he had turned out of the temple. Then he recognises, too, the Spear.

      Parsifal, rising from his prayer, gazes quietly around him and recognises Gurnemanz. To the question of the latter, how and whence he comes, he replies: "I am come by ways of wandering and pain. Can I believe myself at last delivered from them, since I hear once more the rustle of this forest, and behold you, worthy elder? Or am I still baffled in my search for the right road? Everything looks changed. … " "What road is it you seek?" Gurnemanz inquires. "The road to him whose profound wail I heard of yore in wondering stupidity, and the instrument of whose healing I now dare believe myself elected to be. … " All this long time he has vainly sought the road back to the Grail, whether hindered by Kundry's curse, or cut off by some stain left upon his nature from his brief hour in the deadly garden, which must be cleansed by such prolonged ordeal. He relates the desperate battle in all his wanderings to keep safe the Sacred Spear—which, behold, he is now bringing home! Gurnemanz's joy bursts forth unbounded. Then he, too, makes his friend even over the past. Since the day of his presence among them, the trouble then revealed to him has increased to the last point of distress. Amfortas, revolting against the torments of his soul, and desiring naught but death, refuses to perform the office of the Grail, by which his life would be prolonged. The knights, deprived of their heavenly nourishment, deprived of a leader, have lost their old strength and courage. They seek their sustenance of herbs and roots, like the animals, in the forest. No longer are they called to holy warfare in distant lands. Titurel, unrenewed by the vision of the Grail, is dead. … At the relation of these mournful events, grief assails Parsifal, who holds himself responsible for all this wretchedness, by reason of his long-delayed return, which he must regard as a consequence of sins and folly of his own—grief beyond what the human frame is fitted to endure, and he is again swooning, as at the evil news in the first act. Kundry hurries with water from the cell, but Gurnemanz stops her; he has in thought larger purifications for the pilgrim in whom his prophetic mind discerns one ordained to fulfill this very day a sacred office. "So let him be made clean of all stain, let the dust be washed from him of his long wandering." They ease him upon the moss beside the consecrated spring, remove his greaves and coat of mail. As he revives a little, he asks faintly: "Shall I be taken to-day to Amfortas?" Gurnemanz assures him that he shall, for on this day the burial of Titurel takes place, which Gurnemanz must attend, and Amfortas has pledged himself, in honour of his father, to uncover once more the Grail. Kundry during this, on her knees, has been bathing the pilgrim's feet. He watches her, at her devoted lowly task, in wonder: "You have washed my feet," he speaks; "let now the friend pour water on my head!" Gurnemanz obeys, besprinkling him with a baptismal intention. Kundry takes from her bosom a golden phial, and, having poured ointment on his feet, dries them, in the custom of the day when she was Herodias, with her long hair;