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ghts, summons Kundry, the maid, subject to his witchcraft--in other words to that evil moral law which the individual alone is unable to resist--and reproachfully says: Shame! that with the brood of knights, Thou should'st like a beast be maintained! The German class-pride which regarded the Jew as a body servant is strongly enough characterized and our own ancient injustice still more sharply expressed in his words: "Thus may the whole body of knights In deadly conflict each other destroy." Thus Wagner reveals still more clearly than in the "Flying Dutchman" with his "fabulous homesickness" an absolute trait and the inner view of that sentiment which here longs for salvation, to be mortal with the mortals. At the sight of the nobler qualities and real human dignity which Kundry for the first time in her life sees in the person of Parsifal, who has been born again through the recognition of the truth, she breaks down completely and with the only word that she now knows, "serve! serve!" she throws all evil selfishness away. For the first time it is now fully disclosed how deeply after all, and with what intensity those of alien race and religion serve the ideas, not so much of our own similarly narrow contracted race-life, but those ideas which have transformed us from a mere nation to an historical part of humanity that guards the world's eternal treasure in this Holy Grail, as its last and grandest possession. How fully is Goethe's saying "the power that ever seeks the evil and yet produces good" realized. Kundry is the messenger of the same Holy Grail against which her lord and master conducts the fatal war. To all distant lands it is she that brings the higher element of culture, the purer humanity which she gets from the Grail and its life. Though the peculiar portraiture of Kundry is drawn from his own experience of the present, the poet has gone still further and pictured that omnipresent spirit of evil which can never by simple participation in the sorrows of others gain knowledge of the perpetual sorrow of the world. Klingsor summons from the chaotic, primeval foundation of the world, where good and evil still lie commingled, the blind instinct of nature, as that wonderful element in the world's history which must everywhere be at once servant of the devil and messenger of grace, with the all-comprehensive words: "Thy master calls thee, nameless one; Primeval devil!
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