iers, had at first possessed no female characters at all; and when
gradually they were introduced, it was in the coarsest barrack or
tap-room style. The Keltic tales, on the contrary, whether from national
tradition, or rather from longer familiarity with Christian culture and
greater idleness of life, naturally made women and women's love the
goal of a great many adventures which an effete nation could no longer
ascribe to patriotic movements. But this was not all. The religious
feeling of the day was extremely inclined to mysticism, in which
aesthetic, erotic, and all kinds of morbid and ill-defined tendencies
were united, which was more than anything else tinged with a
semi-Asiatic quietism, a longing for the passive ecstasy of Nirvana.
This religious side of mediaeval life was also gratified by the Arthurian
romances. Oddly enough, there existed an old Welsh or Breton tale about
the boy Peredur, who from a complete simpleton became the prince of
chivalry, and his many adventures connected with a certain mysterious
blood-dripping lance, and a still more mysterious basin or _grail_ (an
allusion to which is said by M. de la Villemarque to be contained in the
originally Keltic name of Percival), which possessed magic properties
akin to those of the purse of Fortunatus, or the pipkin in the story of
"Little pot, boil!" The story, whose original mythical meaning had been
lost in the several centuries of Christianity, was very decayed and
obscure; and the fact of the blood on the lance being that of a murdered
kinsman of Peredur, and of the basin containing the head of the same
person cut off by Gloucester witches, was evidently insufficient to
account for all the mystery with which these objects were surrounded.
The French poets of the Middle Ages, strongly imbued with Oriental
legends brought back by the Crusaders, saw at a glance the meaning of
the whole story: the lance was the lance with which Longinus had pierced
the Saviour's side; the Grail was the cup which had received His blood,
nay, it was the cup of the Last Supper. A tale about the preservation of
these precious relics by Joseph of Arimathaea, was immediately connected
therewith; a theory was set up (doubtless with the aid of quite
unchristian, Oriental legends) of a kind of kingdom of the keepers of
the Grail, of a vague half-material, half-spiritual state of bliss
connected with the service of the Grail, which fed its knights (and here
the Templars and their