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At first thought the association of the words “Holy Graal” with scenes of evil life may seem startling to the reader. But the dramatic achievement of the knights of the Graal required the whole picture. The plotting of the sisters and the seduction scenes furnish dramatic motive and prepare us for the story of those knights who abandoned the quest. It must show the temptation resisted by Galahad, temptation that to a high nature was not temptation, as in the scene in the brothel, where the pure knight, born out of the sacramental love of Launcelot and Guenevere, saw but the lily beds.

It will be readily understood by all who knew Richard Hovey that he could not have intended to show that Galahad, the typical knight of purity, should have attained his height through any ascetic or otherwise morbid ideal of life. Not by living less than the best but by living all things better than the best is the whiteness of the soul attained. Speaking about Galahad in Taliesin he says:

“In him ye shall behold how light can look on darkness and forgive,
How love can walk in the mire and take no stain therefrom.”

The temptations of physical life, which mostly to the knights of legendary days meant the life of the flesh minus the soul, would not tempt Galahad more than they would many Galahads of later civilizations, —all those men by whom the sacramental nature of love has been really perceived.

That Galahad was to be shown in relation to women is apparent. We have the names of women introduced in the list of persons of the Holy Graal who are shown by the notes to be in Galahad's story. It is plain that if Galahad had “died a maid,” as we are told in a very early fragment of “Avalon,” it must have been from the absence from his life of a love as pure as that of which he was born, and because by his very nature nothing less than the spirituality of passion could to him have the name of love.

However portentous is the subject of sexual purity in woman, it is still partly a question of legal legitimacy, of social respectability, and of economic convenience.

The Galahad, or masculine idea of purity, “The Pure Knight,” one who stood above a knighthood in which loyalty to his lady in all her interests was the very basis of every knight's oath of arms, would be one in whom the renunciation was not a sacrifice of the passional but of the merely sensual. He would be one whom the consciousness of the sacramental love lifted to a plain quite beyond renunciation, —to inspiration. And such a one,— elected to the redemption of lost womanhood by restoring woman's faith in herself and love, through her faith in the untempting and untemptable man,—

the Galahad of the “Poem in Dramas” would have been.

The Holy Graal brings into direct contrast the characters of two illegally born sons, Mordred and Galahad. One is of superhuman goodness and power, the other of diabolical selfishness. Modred, tool of fate, gives opportunity to draw a character bruised and marred by his untoward relation to his environment; one, having not only a soul born to discords, but a life full of deprivations in the direction of family life and love and social opportunity, by lack of legal inheritance; all this with that virility in brain and body so often found outside of birth from the easy debauchery of married-life-propinquity.

Galahad one day finds himself called bastard. But he is one of those who many wear the word as a star on his brow, a consecration on his life, an invisible angel thought—such as some souls feel floating over them,—and in the great moments of life touching upon consciousness.

There are parents wickedly below the law of what makes a wholesome order for all. There are also those so subject to psychological law that they live above the order of the many. Mordred's ill-starred life arose among the former, Galahad's immaculate conception gave him being among the latter.

One might almost say that the whiteness of Galahad was like the whiteness of light, made up of all colors, out of which, as in diamond brilliance, all

color could flash, rather than any mere purity of cleanly, opaque, earthly white. In this connection one remembers the diamond sphere which Taliesin saw in the Graal chapel when Uriel knighted him poet, the diamond sphere a transparent light itself, flashing all colors, symbol of a wisdom containing all knowing, from clear heavenly blue through the burning spirit of yellow to the warm red flame of earthly things.

It was in the Holy Graal that Launcelot and Guenevere were to renounce their personal good in the service of society, Launcelot to go on the quest of the Graal and Guenevere to take up her cross by returning to Arthur and her rôle as mother of the realm. How inadequate a solution this action proved may be suggested by the one page of this play in which Guenevere meets Arthur. The situation is once more truly tragic, there being no solution. Turn which way she would she saw sin and suffering, the sacrifice of inner purity if she returned and the sacrifice of the peace of the realm if she did not.

The dignified ending of Tennyson's Guenevere in a convent, full of gentle deeds and repentance for her great sin in not having “loved the highest,” stands in marked contrast to her rôle in Richard Hovey's poem. Launcelot's confession to Dubric and his soliloquy before Rome bring to view, however, the pain he suffered at this point of his experience and show once more that the central character in the whole series of dramas is one not placed

in the list of persons. That character is the social system of the age.

After the departure of the knights on the quest of the Graal, the court at Camelot would have resumed its ordinary routine of life.

All through Southern and Northern Europe during the few hundred years in which we place the story of the Round Table, Courts of Love were of frequent occurrence. We find that a Court of Love was planned for one of the acts of “The Holy Graal.”

The falcon carrying the scroll with the laws which were to govern in these courts was said to come from Broceliande, a sometime location in the Arthur myths. So, doubtless, this naïve and interesting code, administered by a concourse of the great ladies of each locality, seems to have had great influence in the formation of the standards and customs regarding the behavior of both ladies and lovers through all Europe. These Courts of Love are credited by high authority as having created manners. This could not be without there being underneath a marked influence upon morals.

In fact, the early history of woman, first in an accidental relationship to man, then as something owned, and later as party to a marriage bargain without any pretense to what has lately been called romantic love, culminated in a condition of society in which spiritual and mystical personal attractions were recognized—and lived, with loyalty according to the ordinances of these “Courts” by persons not married to one another and also when either party might be stably married to some other.

Better a world with the love of the heart in it, even outside of marriage, than not at all. Naturally jealousies and dissensions arose, and by degrees husbands and wives began to see as the ideal, and to expect in marriage, friendship, and those mystic relations of affectionate loyalty which have now so completely become the ideal, that we must read history to remind us that our present expectation, even if it is not our constant attainment, is a wide advance upon martial conditions in earlier days. Having found the relations between love and the doctrine of the trinity in human kind, we now see that the greatest happiness and the best birth have their origin in an inextricable combination of physical, mental, and emotional attraction.

Our present ideal of love has come to include— on the physical plane—sensation, sympathy, instinct; then sentiment, adoration, intuition in the emotions; and judgment and conscience as the results of reason.

Such an ideal of love had the author of Launcelot and Guenevere.

The play opens at the Castle of Morgause, Queen of Orkney, with a scene of evil counsel between Morgause and Morgana, her sister.

Then Lamoracke, the lover of Morgause, comes to bid her good-by, saying that he has sworn a vow since he left her three days before; that a great wonder has happened at the Court of King Arthur, for Galahad, son of Launcelot, has taken the seat at the Round Table which Merlin, the Magician, had called the Siege Perilous, in which no man might sit and live until one came for whom it waited; that a vision of the Holy Graal had appeared to them assembled; and that Gawaine swore an oath, which they had all sworn after him, that for a twelvemonth and a day they would seek the Graal.

Morgause lures Lamoracke away from the idea of the quest and wins him to herself again, he thus being the first knight to fail in the performance of the vow.

Launcelot, before going on the quest confesses to Dubric, Archbishop of Canterbury, who gives him his blessing.

Arthur does not wish his knights to leave the Court and go on the quest of the Graal; but on seeing that Launcelot is determined to go, he bids him God speed.

Galahad then enters the hall and is by Launcelot presented to the king; then Arthur and Galahad are left alone together.

In the garden of Camelot we are introduced to Madelon, the saintly sister of Sir Percival, and Sendal, the temptress. The influence of these two women follows Galahad throughout the play; and from the notes we believe that Madalon dies, as in Malory's story, and that Sendal repents on realizing the purity and strength of Galahad, who releases her from her own evil nature as he did the prisoners in the “Castle of the Maidens” in the early legend.

Before leaving the Court, Launcelot and Galahad bid Guenevere good-by, and a scene between these three is the end of the first act.

After the departure of the Graal knights a “Court of Love” is held in the garden at Camelot, at which Arthur the King, Taliesin the poet, Dagonet the jester, Kaye the Lord Seneschal, the sad Galahault, Mordred, Agravaine, Guenevere, Fata Morgana and the women of the Court are present. Mordred and Agravaine, who have lingered after the departure of the other knights, say that they never really intended to seek the Graal.

At Tintagel, Morgause, Lamoracke and Agravaine plot together to send Sendal and Guimere, disguised in men's clothes, to meet the Graal knights on the road pretending to be desirous of joining the

quest and then to seduce them from the performance of their vow.

Galahad and Percival on their journey arrive at a beautiful garden which turns out to be the courtyard of a brothel, and there they meet Sendal and Guimere.

In the next act we have the attempt to carry out this plan. “The fickle Gawaine,” who has already fallen in love again, has resisted that new love and continued the quest.

Riding through the mountains, the Graal knights meet the women in their masculine disguise. The women, being attacked in revenge for their treachery, are saved by Galahad. Then Sendal confesses the plot, which implicates Morgause and Lamoracke. Gawaine, Morgause's son, furious at his mother and at Lamoracke, her lover, turns back for vengeance.

Meanwhile at Camelot Guenevere attempts to harmonize the tragic situation by turning to Arthur. Renunciation fails.

Gawaine goes to Tintagel and kills his mother and Lamoracke; then utterly disheartened, turns to his new love and gives up the quest of the Graal.

In another scene we are at Camelot again with King Arthur and Guenevere.

A note for the last scene of the fourth act shows it to have been between Galahad and Launcelot at Glastonbury, outside the Abbey, whither Launcelot comes on the miraculous ship which brings also the body of Madelon after her vicarious death. Here Galahad attains the Graal. From here Launcelot, broken in spirit, wanders away and is in the next

play, “Astolat,” cared for by Elaine and finally restored to strength, goes to Camelot only to pass through new sunderings in the experience of the death of Elaine and the jealousy of Guenevere, and the death of Arthur in the next play.

The last act is at Camelot. The Court is assembled in the garden when Bors and Launcelot return.

The play closes with a scene between Launcelot and Guenevere.