'Parsifal' As DramaAuthor(s): Lucy BeckettSource: Music & Letters, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Jul., 1971), pp. 259-271Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/734522Accessed: 27/07/2010 15:02

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'PARSIFAL' AS DRAMA

BY Lucy BECKETT

Verliess er unsre Gleise, schritt er doch fest und unbeirrt. Wollt ihr nach Regeln messen, was nicht nach eurer Regeln Lauf, der eignen Spur vergessen, sucht davon erst die Regeln auf!

'Die Meistersinger', Act I.

A LARGE part of the confusion which clouds many people's app- reciation of 'Parsifal' derives from their application to it of inappropriate distinctions between religion and art. The commonest assumption brought to bear on the work might be formulated like this: whereas religion is of its nature particular and exclusive, a specific set of beliefs-that is, constituting one religion as opposed to another, art is general and inclusive, able to take as its subject- matter anything, believed or not believed, real or imagined, that the artist may happen to choose. According to this assumption any work of art with some degree of specific religious content is to that extent 'about' that particular religion. Whether or not it qualifies in the general judgment as 'a religious work' will depend on how closely what it portrays matches the orthodoxy concerned, and even to what extent it is thought that the artist himself believed in it.

If 'Parsifal' is approached with such assumptions in mind, the evaluations of it that are arrived at will be exactly those one would expect. Its Christian plot and symbolic machinery-the Grail, the sanctified knighthood, the holy spear, mortal sin, innocence, redemption and the rest-lead readily to the conclusion that it is in some sense 'about' Christianity. What is thought of it thereafter will depend on the recipient's own view of Christianity as a separate issue as well as on his liking for Wagner in general and the work itself in particular. The Christian who is drawn to it is likely to judge it 'a religious work' in spite of its startling deviations from certain Christian norms; the Christian who is repelled by it will decide that these deviations represent a dangerous perversion of his own beliefs. The non-Christian, sheltering perhaps behind a liberal respect for the integrity of a structure of belief that means little to him, may share one or other of these opinions, though the emphasis with which he states it will be quite different. The favourable agnostic, like Ernest Newman, will think 'Parsifal' 'a religious work', but will proceed immediately to rise above such considerations to some sort of 'pure' musical appreciation:

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The truth is that a good many of Wagner's characters and dramatic motives seem rather foolish to us nowadays. For my part I do not know or care whether or how Parsifal is to 'redeem' the world. The word 'redemption' has no meaning for me in the sense in which Wagner and the theologians use it ... But to appreciate a work of art it is not in the least necessary to subscribe to its author's philoso- phical or religious opinions; a rationalist can be as deeply thrilled by the Matthew Passion as any Christian can be. The 'thesis' of a work of art is the one thing in it that does not concern us as artists."

The unsympathetic rationalist, on the other hand, is as liable as the repelled Christian to use Wagner's deviations from Christian norms as a stick to beat the work with, though this may be only part of a wider attack. A recent example is Mr. Robert Gutman (whose loathing of Wagner, and especially of 'Parsifal', is typified by his frequent use of Nietzsche, of all people, as an impartial witness in the Wagner case):

It remains an enigma of genius that Wagner was able to yoke all this bizarre paraphernalia embracing the catalogue of his neuroses to both an allegory of the fallen and redeemed Aryan and a symbolic representation of the developing human soul, to overlay the whole with a rather cheap and cracking veneer of fake Catholicism, and yet achieve a monumental masterpiece . . . Though the journey from crapulence to the altar is often short, it is nonetheless amazing that Parsifal was ever considered a Christian work. 'If Wagner was a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Church Father!' Nietzsche cried. That many find a performance of the opera an offensive experience is easily understood.2

What emerges from an examination of such judgments is the special nature of the critical problems raised by 'Parsifal.' Its close relationship with Christianity can be neither denied nor ignored. Yet to describe this relationship in any of the ways referred to above will obscure rather than clarify a proper appreciation of the work. If it is seen principally as either supporting or undermining the separate and self-contained structure of Christian belief its autono- mous existence as a peculiarly original work of art will cease to carry the weight it should. If, by contrast, its connection with issues that have to be described as religious is diminished to insignificance, whether by airy neglect (Newman) or by deflationary scorn (Gutman), the work will be susceptible to critical enquiry only in the limbo of aesthetics. This last is a marginal region of swirling critical fog. How can Mr. Gutman refer to 'Parsifal' as "a monu- mental masterpiece" when, as is obvious, he hates and despises everything that the work appears to him to embody? Only, pre- sumably, by closing nine-tenths of his mind, as well as his eyes, and listening to the music as if it came from outer space. A sane and civilized writer like Newman, who was deeply engaged with the 'thesis' of, for instance, 'Tristan', is only driven to say: "The 'thesis'

I 'Wagner as Man and Artist', 2nd ed. (London, 1924), p. 377. 2 'Richard Wagner, the Man, his Mind, and his Music' (London, 1968), p. 439.

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of a work of art is the one thing in it that does not concern us as artists" by a work whose difficulties he cannot dissolve except by pretending they are not there. His suggestion that there is a category of musical works to which 'Parsifal' and the 'St. Matthew Passion' both belong confuses the issue still further, but in a way that may help to indicate a better approach to the whole problem.

The 'St. Matthew Passion' is an excellent example of a religious work, definable as such in terms of the assumption with which we began. It concerns itself with specifically Christian subject-matter and serves Christian belief as a structure existing outside itself. The listener therefore, whatever his feelings about Christianity, knows where he is, just as he knows where he is with a cathedral or Dante or the poems of George Herbert. With 'Parsifal' the situation is different. Although its subject-matter appears to be specifically Christian, it does not serve Christian beliefs as an external set of certainties; it is not 'about' Christianity as a separate entity in which one may or may not believe. Newman thinks it is and wishes it were not; Gutman thinks it is not but would find it less repulsive if it were. Each falls back on the view that what is to be said in favour of the work can be said only for the music; and though the distance between the grateful enthusiasm and grudging distrust with which they say it is very wide, each is thereby revealing a serious critical failure. For Wagner's music must not and cannot be considered in the pure void of aesthetics. More than any other composer he was a dramatist -which means that every bar of his major works is irretrievably impure, tainted, as it were, with the human, the particular, the relative and the relevant. (This is true even of his most 'abstract' preludes, for instance that to Act III of 'Parsifal'. His remark to Cosima while he was composing this confirms the point, in in- dicating by how much more than mere plot the music is adulterated: "My preludes have to be elementarisch [going down to fundamentals], not dramatic, like the Leonore overture, for then the drama itself would be superfluous".) It was exactly this taint that he was des- cribing when he used of his own work the phrase "music fertilized by poetry". And it is this taint, the fertilization of the abstract by the concrete, that makes it proper to speak, in Wagner's case, of the musical element in the drama rather than of the dramatic element in the music. This being so, any view of 'Parsifal' which fails to reckon with it as a dramatic whole, as a meaningful account of some sphere of human reality, is bound to be inadequate. But if we abandon conclusions about art and religion that are drawn from consideration of other works, and begin with the certainty that 'Parsifal' is a drama, we find that the question of its relationship to Christianity becomes at once clearer and more complex.

The sphere of human reality with which the drama of 'Parsifal' deals is the religious sphere. There are many to whom this state- ment will seem a contradiction in terms. 'Parsifal' is not for them;

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and the fact that they may be devoted to the 'St. Matthew Passion' is in itself a proof of the absolute difference in kind between the two works. Whereas Bach's subject is the Christian story, Wagner's is a story of his own invention (in both senses: he discovered the particular legend that suited his own purposes and elaborated it out of his own head), and here, in the word 'story', we have a clue to the nature of 'Parsifal'. If we accept that the Christian story is a drama that contains within itself a significant account of certain central areas of human interest, and if we also accept that 'Parsifal' can be described in exactly these same words, it will emerge that 'Parsifal' is in a parallel relation to the Christian story, rather than in the subordinate relation of the 'St. Matthew Passion.' In 'Interpretations of Poetry and Religion', published only i6 years after the completion of 'Parsifal', George Santayana treated Christi- anity in a manner which sharply illuminates this parallel relation:

The system was a great poem which, besides being well constructed in itself, was allegorical of actual experience, and contained, as in a hieroglyph, a very deep knowledge of the world and of the human mind . . . The great characteristic of Christianity, inherited from Judaism, was that its scheme was historical. Not existences but events were the subject of its primary interest. It presented a story, not a cosmology . .. Christian fictions were at least significant; they beguiled the intellect no doubt, and were mistaken for accounts of external fact; but they enlightened the imagination; they made men understand, as never before or since, the pathos and nobility of his life, the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanctity, the trans- cendence and the humanity of the divine. For the divine was reached by the idealization of the human . . . That fallacy from which the Pagan religion alone has been free, that 7tp'i5-ov wes6So of all fanaticism, the natural but hopeless misunderstanding of imagining that poetry in order to be religion, in order to be the inspiration of life, must first deny that it is poetry and deceive us about the facts with which we have to deal-this misunderstanding has marred the work of the Christian imagination and condemned it, if we may trust appearances, to be transitory.3

It cannot be too strongly stressed that these remarks have nothing whatever in common with such enterprises as 'The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature'-or 'Parsifal' designed to be listened to as music. On the contrary, they are at least as much about the serious potentialities of art at its highest as they are about religion, and they reveal at least as much about 'Parsifal' as they do about Christianity. Nor, if we bear in mind Santayana's implied warning about the varieties of truth, need it be lacking in respect towards the Christian structure to suggest that a way of looking at it may also be the way to look at a strange stage work by an idiosyncratic nineteenth- century genius. For whatever one may think of the appropriateness to Christianity of Santayana's reflections, they are surely appropriate to 'Parsifal'.

3 Op. cit., pp. 88, go, 98, I 15.

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'Parsifal' is a fiction, a drama constructed of plot and characters, action and the consequences of action, the significance of the whole edifice lying in its manifold relevance to central human concerns. Not 'about' Christianity, it is, like Christianity, 'about' a world which contains good and evil, innocence and guilt, an ideal, however it may be perceived, trials of moral strength, and the possibility of moral judgment, moral effort and moral victory. Those who believe that such things are not part of the real and permanent texture of human life, but are mere concepts that have been left about as useless flotsam by the receding tide of Christianity, are those who will find the phrase "the religious sphere of human reality" a contradiction in terms, and to them 'Parsifal' will seem a lengthy embarrassment unless they shut their minds to everything in it except the beautiful noise it makes. For the rest, its extraordinary integrity and autonomy as a dramatic structure will be both the source and the outward form of its power. Though the Christian, the Freudian, the Jungian, the political fanatic and the racialist may each be able to find in the work some justification for claiming its true 'meaning' to be that discernible in the light of his own beliefs, each will be forced to leave much else out of account. It is from within itself alone that a complete interpretation of 'Parsifal' can be put together.

The deepest motive force of the work is the saving of the Grail from what has happened to it as the result of Amfortas's failure to resist Kundry in Klingsor's garden. To say this is immediately to call in question the nature of the Grail itself. Its physical presence may be an almost insuperable producer's nightmare, but in the whole context of the drama it is no mere magical object, a dead item of medieval symbolic machinery tastelessly appropriated by Wagner for its ancient Christian connotations. On the contrary, it is not only the moral sanction of the dramatic action, but is itself made, as it were, to form a part of that action. Just as Wagner's music may be described as the abstract fertilized by the concrete, so the Grail may be described as an abstraction brought down into the concrete world of plot and character, an absolute made relative by being built into the very fabric of the drama. Its significance is neither fixed nor self-contained as that of a simple miraculous relic would be. The symbolic power it exerts-what it means-is directly affected by human action; and this fact is the key to the whole work. The guilt and self-abhorrence that Amfortas feels derives not only from his own moral defeat but from the fact that this defeat, because of his peculiar nearness to and responsibility for the Grail, has harmed the Grail by making its clear manifestation to others impossible. The Grail, in other words, depends for its very existence as an embodiment of the good upon the virtue of those closest to it, and Amfortas's failure is greater than the failures of all the other knights who have fallen through Kundry to Klingsor, because of

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his unique closeness to the Grail. This dependence of the Grail upon the moral quality of human

action is several times indicated by Gurnemanz. The Grail will not exist in the world in any meaningful sense-that is, it will not be seen to exist-without the knights who guard it and so guarantee its manifestation; but no knight will ever come to serve it except by the path of virtue. Gumnemanz addresses the Knappen in Act I as:

Die seinem Dienst ihr zugesindet auf Pfaden, die kein Sunder findet;

and he is making the same point when, later in the act, he answers Parsifal's enquiry about the Grail with the words:

Das sagt sich nicht; doch bist du selbst zu ihm erkoren, bleibt dir die Kunde unverloren.

Thus the Grail will not be recognized for what it is except by him who has already chosen not it, but the way to it. It is Parsifal's virtue that Gurnemanz is testing by taking him to the temple of the Grail:

Lass' mich seh'n, bist du ein Thor und rein, welch Wissen dir auch mag beschieden sein.

And at the end of the act, when Parsifal shakes his head in reply to the question: "Weisst du, was du sah'st?", it is the necessary virtue that Gumemanz realises he lacks: "Du bist doch eben nur ein Thor!" Thus deftly is an essential distinction made: to be merely innocent is not the same as to be good, and Parsifal, who as yet does not even know the difference between good and bad ("Die mich bedrohten, waren sie b6s'? Wer ist gut ?"), must not only acquire this knowledge but, having acquired it, retain his innocence by a moral victory of his own, and prove the power even of this through a long period of lonely uncertainty, before he can return to rescue the Grail from the consequences of Amfortas's defeat. "Durch Mitleid wissend der reine Thor": the prophetic phrase that describes Parsifal carries all this within itself.

Amfortas's wound only Parsifal can cure, because only he is capable of the moral stature which will endow his victory with the power to cancel out Amfortas's defeat. To put this another way, only Parsifal is capable of replacing Amfortas in his position of closeness to, and ultimate responsibility for, the Grail. At the end of the work he does not merely heal Amfortas, he assumes his position and replaces him as king: the wound is not only, or even principally, something terrible that has happened to Amfortas, it is also, and chiefly, something terrible that has happened to the Grail, and this explains not only the depth of Amfortas's anguish but the extent of the disastrous effects the wound has on others. At Amfortas's first

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entry in the first act, for instance, he is told that Gawan, a knight never heard of again, has disappeared without leave on one more fruitless errand to find a cure for the king. "Ohn' Urlaub?", he replies,

Moge das er suhnen, dass schlecht er Gralsgebote halt!

and the troubled reference to the Grail motive in the orchestra shows that the tiny episode represents the beginning of the disorder, the cracking of the careful structure of the Grail and its knights, that Amfortas is causing. Already he longs to die, wishing to identify the prophesied saviour with death:

"Der reine Thor"... duirft' ich den Tod ihn nennen!

and by the opening of the third act this longing, by forcing him to leave unrevealed the life-giving Grail, has not only killed Titurel, but reduced the knighthood to meaningless disarray. As Gurnemanz tells Parsifal:

Darob versiechte unsrer Helden Kraft: nie kommt uns Botschaft mehr, noch Ruf zu heil'gen Kampfen aus der Ferne; bleich und elend wankt umher die Muth- und Fiihrer-lose Ritterschaft.

By wanting to die-the natural consequence of his original crime- Amfortas compounds his offence and the injury to the Grail. For his refusal to fulfil his office actually prevents the Grail from existing: if he who is closest to the good, who has the power to make it manifest, fails it, then it is not there for the benefit of the less gifted, the less responsible. Hence Parsifal's final rescue of Amfortas in both healing him and replacing him is simultaneously, and more im- portantly, the rescue of the Grail.

Hochsten Heiles Wunder: Erlosung dem Erloser!

the whole brotherhood sings at the very end of the work: if the Grail has saved Parsifal it is only because Parsifal has saved the Grail.

Parsifal's journey towards this conclusion is, of course, the central story of the work. It has begun even before his first appear- ance in Act I. He tells Gurnemanz and Kundry that he left his mother and began his wanderings through the world because he saw a glittering company of knights riding by the wood's edge. Nothing more is said of these knights, whom Parsifal could not find,

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but obviously they are the knights of the Grail, glimpsed in the days of order and heroism before Amfortas's fall. As with Gawan, the fragment has its place in the edifice. The swan that Parsifal kills, which might be thought simply a device for bringing him into the action (Mr. Gutman thinks it an example of Wagner's sentimental feeling for animals), has a much larger place. Gurnemanz forces the boy to look at what he has done:

Er war uns hold: was ist er nun dir? Hier-schau' her!-hier traf'st du ihn:

da starrt noch das Blut, matt hangen die Flugel; das Schneegefieder dunkel befleckt;

and then, when he breaks his bow, Gurnemanz sings:

Sag' Knab' ! Erkennst du deine grosse Schuld?

This moment is not only the dawning upon Parsifal of moral responsibility and the knowledge of guilt, shortly afterwards re- inforced by Kundry's news of his mother's death; it also pre-figures the horror that he is about to see and to feel in the temple: the wounded Amfortas lying stricken and bloody on his couch. The words: "Erkennst du deine grosse Schuld?" are even accompanied by the motive usually associated with Amfortas's suffering. Wagner's treatment in both words and music of this incident-and the motive is heard again in Act III when Gurnemanz asks Kundry if she recognizes Parsifal: "Erkennst du ihn? Der ist's, der einst den Schwan erlegt"-shows the extreme psychological subtlety of his methods.

The connection between suffering and guilt is made in Parsifal's mind through the swan. The sight of Amfortas reminds him of the swan he has killed, and so Amfortas's suffering, which he has not caused, becomes identified with the suffering he has caused, and Amfortas's guilt with his own. This inextricable confusion of himself with Amfortas, which involves also a sense of responsibility towards the Grail parallel with Amfortas's own, is what becomes terrifyingly clear to him at the shattering moment of Kundry's kiss. In the outburst that immediately follows this revelation he identifies not only himself with Amfortas, but Amfortas's cries of pain with those he imagines the injured Grail to have uttered:

Die Wunde sah' ich bluten:- nun blutet sie mir selbst-. . . Des Heiland's Klage da vernehm' ich, die Klage, ach! die Klage um das verrath'ne Heiligthum "erldse, rette mich aus schuldbefleckten Handen!"

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And when, in the third act, Gurnemanz asks him where he is going, his answer refers as much to the Grail as to Amfortas:

Zu ihm, dess' tiefe Klagen ich th6rig staunend einst vernahm, dem nun ich Heil zu bringen mich auserlesen wahnen darf.

In Parsifal's journey towards the saving of the Grail the part played by Kundry is crucial. Because of her own irreversible crime against the good (here, in the story of the woman who laughed in the face of the suffering Christ, Wagner does draw upon specifically Christian legend) she has become Klingsor's tool in his campaign to extinguish the power of the Grail for ever by destroying the order that keeps it in being. As the early part of Act II makes clear, Klingsor knows that Kundry's agony is to be aware of the good but to be unable to achieve, by herself, the moral stature to regain it. Her serving of the knights who in turn serve the Grail is ultimately in vain because when Klingsor uses her to destroy these same knights, they fail to resist her. Klingsor, whose self-castration signifies his own complete abandonment of moral responsibility, which lies in the power to choose, also knows that only the positive moral deed of a good man who chooses to resist her can save Kundry and thus ruin his own scheme. And this, with the devil's invincible confidence in the infinite corruptibility of man, he does not believe will ever happen:

Feil sind sie alle, biet' ich den rechten Preis; der festeste fallt, sinkt er dir in die Arme.

What Klingsor underrates is simply Parsifal's moral capacity, his power to choose and to resist; as he sees him approach he sings:

Was-auch Weissagung dir wies,- zu jung und dumm fiel'st du in meine Gewalt.

In the attempted seduction which is the crisis of the work Parsifal prevails against an attack of extraordinary force and com- plexity. Kundry's hailing of him by his name-the first time it is heard-epitomizes her knowledge of him, that knowledge of his origins and past which he himself has never had. Her news (surely Kundry's own name carries the feeling of Kunde within it) that his mother's death was caused by grief at his disappearance, and there- fore that he himself has been guilty of causing mortal human suffering, is followed by the terrible sophistry of these lines:

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Bekenntniss wird Schuld und Reue enden. Erkenntniss in Sinn die Thorheit wenden-

which is to say that Parsifal, having learnt to distinguish the good from the bad, should immediately discount the qualitative difference between the two and thus abdicate the responsibility he has dis- covered. In the long dialogue that follows the cataclysmic kiss the identities of Parsifal and Amfortas become confused in Kundry's mind as well as in Parsifal's. Kundry's crescendo of appeals for salvation in the union with Parsifal that would once again deny her salvation rise to a climax in which her words are fraught with an ambiguity that only Parsifal can penetrate. Her salvation, and the Grail's, must come not from a repetition of Amfortas's fall, but from a reversal of it. This is the nature of the heroic moral effort that alone can break the long destructive sequence which Klingsor by means of Kundry has effected; and by such an effort Parsifal can not only rescue the Grail from its present danger but put it beyond Klingsor's reach. For Klingsor, the embodiment of evil as the Grail is of good, can operate only through human failure, as the Grail through human triumph, and the release of Kundry ends his power over the Grail's knights.

To Kundry's cry:

Lass' mich dich Gottlichen lieben, Erlosung gabst du dann mir

Parsifal replies:

Lieb' und Erlosung soll dir lohnen, zeigest du zu Amfortas mir den Weg;

and his words carry a double load of significance. Not only is the old struggle that underlies Wagner's works between the power of sex and the power of the renunciation of sex encapsulated and in a measure resolved in the shift of meaning in the words Liebe and Erldsung between Kundry's use of them and Parsifal's. There is another irony, almost equally strong, in Parsifal's promise to save her on the condition that she shows him the way to Amfortas: this is exactly what she has already done, and Parsifal, by resisting the temptation that ruined Amfortas, has already both saved Kundry and found the cure for Amfortas and the Grail. But Kundry's power, the power of temptation and confusion, is not yet exhausted, and just before Klingsor's futile attempt to undo what Parsifal by his own strength has achieved, she curses Parsifal to wander through the world and not to find the one path that he seeks:

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Wehr't ihm die Wege! Wehr't ihm die Pfade! Und floh'st du von hier, und fandest alle Wege der Welt, den Weg, den du such'st, dess' Pfade sollst du nicht finden!

In the terms of the whole drama the point of this curse and of its effectiveness-for the Parsifal of Act III is much changed by the sorrows of long and apparently hopeless wandering-is clear. The experience through which Parsifal has first discovered the nature of his obligation to the Grail and then fulfilled it, the experience of his meeting with Kundry, is of a complexity and an emotional violence that cannot without pain and difficulty be transcended. Parsifal, having glimpsed the good and understood his own relation to it, must now retain his vision through a world of troubles and uncertainties until, in the end, his patience and continuing efforts to find his way back to the Grail will have gained him the full moral stature that he needs to replace Amfortas and simultaneously over- come the lasting hold that Kundry has on him. The wandering and the suffering that he later describes to Gurnemanz: "Der Irmiss und der Leiden Pfade kam ich . . ." are the substance (die Elemente, as Wagner would have put it) of the marvellous Prelude to the third act, and as it dies away it is the re-awakening of the healed and chastened Kundry that we first see on the stage, as if Parsifal, by achieving in himself what makes it possible for him to return to the Grail, has also finally defeated the power in her to deflect and to confuse. In Parsifal's own mind this power manifests itself as his own guilt, his own fault. When Gurnemanz tells him of the new disasters that have overtaken the Grail, he cries out with despairing remorse:

Und ich-ich bin's, der all' diess Elend schuf! Ha! Welcher Sunden, welcher Frevel Schuld muss dieses Thoren-Haupt seit Ewigkeit belasten ...

And it is only when Kundry and Gurnemanz together wash the dust of his travels from him that he at last believes he has come home.

The first part of the third act is perhaps the most moving scene that Wagner ever wrote. The long weariness of Parsifal's wanderings and the resigned sadness of Gurnemanz, whose world has been broken in the damage done to the Grail by Amfortas, slowly dissolve into the peace and joy of the realization that Parsifal has at last returned to restore the Grail's guardianship and hence the Grail itself. The spear which Amfortas lost to Klingsor, and which Parsifal at the moment of his triumph retrieved, symbolizes that which the

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Grail had lost in Amfortas's fall. It is that which Parsifal regained by his own victory; and it is that which he has kept safe through all his trials in order in the end to return it to the Grail and thus with it to cure Amfortas's wound. He describes how he has guarded it to, Gumemanz:

Da musste Verzweiflung mich fassen, das Heilthum heil mir zu bergen, um das zu hiuten, das zu wahren ich Wunden jeder Wehr' mir gewann ... fuhrt' ich ihn mir zur Seite, den ich nun heim geleite, der dort dir schimmert heil und hehr,- des Grales heil'gen Speer.

Although the music here rises in a tremendous surge of triumph, the real climax of the scene is the Good Friday music, to which Gurnemanz gently sings of the peacefulness of nature smiling upon redeemed man. The same gentleness and the same sense of recon- ciliation and harmony appear in Parsifal's last lines addressed to Kundry, who, like the Grail itself, has been enabled by Parsifal to shed the horror in which she was embroiled:

Ich sah' sie welken, die mir lachten: ob heut' sie nach Erlosung schmachten?

Auch deine Thrane wird zum Segensthaue: du weinest-sieh! es lacht die Aue.

It is not only unnecessary but unhelpful to apply an external system of thought to 'Parsifal'. The work must be considered as a drama. "I will write no more operas", Wagner announced while plan- ning 'The Ring'. "As I do not wish to invent an arbitrary title for my works, I call them dramas, a term which will at least indicate clearly the standpoint from which the thing I offer should be accepted". As a drama it has a logic of its own, an integrity of character and action, and also a concreteness, which make the translation of its terms into any others destructively inappropriate. The most that can be said of it in terms other than its own is that it concerns the discovery and the preservation of the good in a world which militates against the good, and also that it conceives of the good as something which depends for its existence upon human perception, human choice and human action. It should not be forgotten that the whole work which immediately preceded 'Parsifal' was 'Die Meistersinger' (the poem of 'The Ring' was completed long before). Wagner wrote the first prose sketch of 'Parsifal' while he was composing 'Die Meistersinger', and one sentence from it:

"Great is the magic power of him who craves; yet greater still of him who renounces", shows that the path from 'Tristan' to 'Parsifal' should not be thought to have by-passed 'Die Meistersinger', which

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is also a work concerned with the choice and preservation both of the good and of an order which makes possible the manifestation of the good.

"The highest ideality is the comprehension of the real", wrote Santayana in the book already quoted, and continued:

Poetry is not at its best when it depicts a further possible experience, but when it initiates us, by feigning something which as an experience is inlpossible, into the meaning of the experience we have actually had.

The highest example of this kind ofpoetry is religion; and although disfigured and misunderstood by the simplicity of men who believe in it without being capable of that imaginative interpretation of life in which its truth consists, yet this religion is even then often bene- ficent, because it colours life harmoniously with the ideal. Religion may falsely represent the ideal as a reality, but we must remember that the ideal, if not so represented, would be despised by the majority of men, who cannot understand that the value of things is moral, and who therefore attribute to what is moral a natural existence, thinking thus to vindicate its importance and value. But value lies in meaning, not in substance.4

4 Op. Ci., p. 284.

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