The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal: Book I: II. Epochs of the Legend

II

EPOCHS OF THE LEGEND

A minute inquiry into the materials, and their sources, of a moving and stately legend is opposed to the purposes and interests of the general reader, though to him I speak accidentally, and apart from any sense of election I must in honesty commend him to abstain, resting satisfied that for him and his consanguinities the Graal has two epochs only in literature--those of Sir Thomas Malory and the Idylls of the King. As Tennyson was indebted to Malory, except for things of his own invention, so it is through his gracious poems that many people have been sent back to the old book of chivalry from which he reproduced his motives and sometimes derived his words. But without entering into the domain of archæology, even some ordinary persons, and certainly the literate reader, will know well enough that there are branches of the legend, both old and new, outside these two palmary names, and that some of them are close enough to their hands. They will be familiar with the Cornish poet Robert Stephen Hawker, whose "Quest of the San Graal" has, as Madame de Staël once said of Saint-Martin, "some sublime gleams." They will have realised that the old French romance of Perceval le Gallois, as translated into English of an archaic kind, ever beautiful and stately, by Dr. Sebastian Evans, is a gorgeous chronicle, full of richly painted pictures and endless pageants. They will know also more dimly that there is a German cycle of the Graal traditions--that Titurel, Parsifal, Lohengrin, to whom a strange and wonderful life beyond all common teachings of Nature, all common conventions