rthly
trials of Tristram, of Guenevere, of Ruedger, of Renaud? Where the moral
struggles of the Middle Ages? Where is Godfrey, or Francis, or Dominick?
Nowhere. All has disappeared, melted away; Christianity and Paganism
themselves have melted away or into each other, as in the easy meeting
of the Pagan Feirefis and the Christian Parzifal, and in the double
marriage of Gachmuret with the Indian Belakane and the Welsh Herzeloid;
there remains only a kind of Buddhistic Nirvana of vague passive
perfection, but without any renunciation; and in a world devoid of evil
and full of excellent brocade and armour and eatables, and lovely
maidens who dress and undress you, and chastely kiss you on the mouth; a
world without desire, aspiration, or combat, vacantly happy and
virtuous. A world purely ideal, divorced from all reality, unsubstantial
like the kingdom of Gloriana, but, unlike Spenser's, quite unshadowed by
any puritan sadness, by any sense of evil, untroubled by allegorical
vices; cheerful, serene, filled with flowers and song of birds, but as
unreal as the illuminated arabesques of a missal. In truth, perhaps more
to be compared with an eighteenth century pastoral, an ideal created
almost in opposition to reality; a dream of passiveness and liberty (as
of light leaves blown about) as the ideal of the fiercely troubled,
struggling, tightly fettered feudal world. The ideal, perhaps, of only
one moment, scarcely of a whole civilization; or rather (how express my
feeling?) an accidental combination of an instant, as of spectre vapour
arisen from the mixture of Kelt and Teuton, of Frank and Moslem. Is it
Christian, Pagan, Mohammedan? None of all these. A simple-looking
vaporous chaos of incongruous, but not conflicting, elements: a poem of
virtue without object, of knighthood without work, of religion without
belief; in this like its central interest, the Grail: a mystery, a cup,
a stone; a thing which heals, feeds, speaks; animate or inanimate? Stone
of the Caaba or chalice of the Sacrament? Merely a mysterious holy of
holies and good of goods, which does everything and nothings means
nothing and requires nothing--is nothing.

III.

Thus was obliterated, in all its national and traditional meaning, the
heroic cycle of Arthur; and by the same process of slow adaptation to
new intellectual requirements which had completely wiped out of men's
memory the heroic tales of Siegfried, which had entirely altered the
origina