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It is a sort of intoxication, a madness, a vertigo. Read the strange Mabinogi of Peredur, or its French imitation Parceval le Gallois; its pages are, as it were, dewy with feminine sentiment. Woman appears therein as a kind of vague vision, an intermediary between man and the supernatural world. I am acquainted with no literature that offers anything analogous to this.
In the miniatures which occasionally accompany the romance of Parceval, the Grail is in the form of a pyx, appearing at all the solemn moments of the poem as a miraculous source of succour.
The motive that sets Parceval a-field in the French romance, as well as in the Welsh version, is a family motive; he seeks the Holy Grail as a talisman to cure his uncle the Fisherman- King, in such a way that the religious idea is still subordinated to the profane intention. In the German version, on the other hand, full as it is of mysticism and theology, the Grail has a temple and priests.
One of the most celebrated ladies of Arthur's court, Luned, becomes a saint and a martyr for her chastity, her festival being celebrated on August 1st. She it is who figures in the French romances under the name of Lunette. In them Parceval becomes the model of the devout knight.
As to the Holy Grail, it must be avowed that the mystic cup, the object after which the French Parceval and the German Parsifal go in search, has not nearly the same importance among the Welsh. In the romance of Peredur it only figures in an episodical fashion, and without a well-defined religious intention.
If we now pass to the French romance of Parceval, we find that all this phantasmagoria clothes a very different significance. The lance is that with which Longus pierced Christ's side, the Grail or basin is that in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the divine blood.
It is also to be remarked that, even in Parceval, the mystical idea is not as yet completely developed, that the trouvere seems to treat this strange theme as a narrative which he has found already complete, and the meaning of which he can scarcely guess.
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