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The "man of mystery," the "Quester" of Broadway, the elderly soldier of fortune, about whose reputed wealth and constant searching of faces wherever he was the idle gossip of the city's Bohemia had whirled to think that this man was the father I had never known, the father, alas! whom I had hoped never to know.
At one moment the object of the study will be the Fisher King, without any relation to the symbols he guards, or the land he rules; at the next it will be the relation of the Quester to the Fisher King, without any explanation of the tasks assigned to him by the story.
It would not have been the cure of the King: he was, apparently, in perfect health; it would not have been the restoration to verdure of the Land: the Land was not Waste; where, as in the case of Gawain, there is a Dead Knight, whose death is to be avenged, something might have been achieved, in the case of the overwhelming majority of the Perceval versions, which do not contain this feature, the dependence of the Curse upon the Quester reduces the story to incoherence.
And if we once grant this initial fact, and resolve that we will no longer, in the interests of an outworn critical tradition, deny the weight of scientific evidence in determining the real significance of the story, does it not inevitably follow, as a logical sequence, that such versions as fail to connect the misfortunes of the land directly with the disability of the king, but make them dependent upon the failure of the Quester, are, by that very fact, stamped as secondary versions.
Thus the sickness of the King, and the desolation of the land, are not necessarily connected as cause and effect, but, a point which seems hitherto unaccountably to have been overlooked, the latter is directly attributable to the Quester himself.
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