Reviews.
361
much debated subject. We need all the light we can get; but in spite of much reading, much ingenuity, and many suggestive hints, Herr Wechssler has not given us a work of enduring value. It is not so much that I dissent from the conclusions reached—they have been reached before and by other paths—as that I believe the methods employed to be radically unsound and entirely incompatible with scientific scholarship, that I have felt impelled to write thus strongly in opposition.[1]
- ↑ Whilst thoroughly concurring in Miss Weston's criticism, I maybe allowed to point out that as regards the most perplexing incident of the Grail legend, the question omitted by Perceval at his first visit to the Fisher King, an incident unexplained by every other student of the legend, Dr. Wechssler approves my suggestion. His words are: "Nutt schlägt eine Erklarung vor, die ich überaus wahrscheinlich finde." What was my suggestion? That the incident is traceable back to the geasa or taboos of early Irish saga; that it survived on into the mediaeval Arthurian romance, that it was completely misunderstood by the French adapters of the earlier Celtic stories, and that to this misunderstanding is due the obscure and inconsistent way in which it is presented by them. The suggestion involves, of course, the existence of a Perceval story innocent of all Christian admixture, based upon themes and conventions familiar in Irish romantic legends of the pre-eleventh century; yet although Dr. Wechssler approves the suggestion, he, as I understand him, rejects what it logically involves, and without which it has no claim to consideration. This is an even more striking instance than those adduced by Miss Weston of the author's inability to see the drift of his own statements and to follow up an argument to its logical conclusion.
