ghts, summons Kundry, the maid, subject to his
witchcraft--in other words to that evil moral law which the individual
alone is unable to resist--and reproachfully says:

Shame! that with the brood of knights,
Thou should'st like a beast be maintained!

The German class-pride which regarded the Jew as a body servant is
strongly enough characterized and our own ancient injustice still more
sharply expressed in his words:

"Thus may the whole body of knights
In deadly conflict each other destroy."

Thus Wagner reveals still more clearly than in the "Flying Dutchman"
with his "fabulous homesickness" an absolute trait and the inner view
of that sentiment which here longs for salvation, to be mortal with
the mortals. At the sight of the nobler qualities and real human
dignity which Kundry for the first time in her life sees in the person
of Parsifal, who has been born again through the recognition of the
truth, she breaks down completely and with the only word that she now
knows, "serve! serve!" she throws all evil selfishness away. For the
first time it is now fully disclosed how deeply after all, and with
what intensity those of alien race and religion serve the ideas, not
so much of our own similarly narrow contracted race-life, but those
ideas which have transformed us from a mere nation to an historical
part of humanity that guards the world's eternal treasure in this Holy
Grail, as its last and grandest possession.

How fully is Goethe's saying "the power that ever seeks the evil and
yet produces good" realized. Kundry is the messenger of the same Holy
Grail against which her lord and master conducts the fatal war. To all
distant lands it is she that brings the higher element of culture,
the purer humanity which she gets from the Grail and its life. Though
the peculiar portraiture of Kundry is drawn from his own experience
of the present, the poet has gone still further and pictured that
omnipresent spirit of evil which can never by simple participation in
the sorrows of others gain knowledge of the perpetual sorrow of the
world. Klingsor summons from the chaotic, primeval foundation of the
world, where good and evil still lie commingled, the blind instinct of
nature, as that wonderful element in the world's history which must
everywhere be at once servant of the devil and messenger of grace,
with the all-comprehensive words:

"Thy master calls thee, nameless one;
Primeval devil!