persons ill-defined, without any sense of the
relative importance of anything, without clear perception of what it is
all about, or at least without the power of keeping the matter straight
before the reader. A story, in point of fact, which is no story at all,
but a mere series of rambling adventures (adventures which are scarcely
adventures, having no point or plot) of various people with not much
connection and no individuality--Gachmuret, Parzifal, Gawain,
Loherangrein, Anfortas, Feirefis--pale ghosts of beings, moving in a
country of Kennaqwhere, Aquitaine, Anjou, Brittany, Wales, Spain, and
heaven knows what wondrous Oriental places; a misty country with woods
and towns and castles which are infinitely far apart and yet quite near
each other; which seem to sail about like cloud castles round the only
solid place in the book, Plimizoel, where Arthur's court, with round
table constantly spread, is for ever established. A no place, nowhere;
yet full of details; minute inventories of the splendid furniture of
castles (castles where? how reached?); infinitely inferior in this
matter even to the Nibelungenlied, where you are made to feel so vividly
(one of the few modern and therefore clear things therein) the long,
dreary road from Worms to Bechlarn, and thence to Etzelburg, though of
none of them is there anything beyond a name. For the Nibelungen story
had been localized in what to narrator and audience was a reality, the
country in which themselves lived, where themselves might seek out the
abbey in which Siegfried was buried, the well in the Odenwald near which
he was stabbed; where they knew from merchant and pilgrim the road taken
by the Nibelungs from Santen to Worms, by the Burgundians from Worms to
Hungary. But here in "Parzifal" we are in a mere vague world of
anywhere, the world of Keltic and Oriental romance become mere cloudland
to the Thuringian knight. And similarly have the heroes of other
nations, the Arthurs, Gawains, Gachmurets, of Wales and Anjou, become
mere vague names; they have become liquified, lost all shape and local
habitation. They are mere names, these ladies and knights of Herr
Wolfram, names with fair pink and white faces, names magnificently
draped in bejewelled Oriental stuffs and embossed armour; they have no
home, no work, nothing to do. This is the most remarkable characteristic
of "Parzifal," and what makes it so typical of the process of growing
inane through overmuch alteration, wh