her's sorrowful end, and
when, overcome by anguish and remorse, he sinks at her feet with
the cry: "What have I done?... Sweetest, loveliest mother! Your
son, your son must bring about your death!..." she gently places
her arm about his neck and administers needed comfort: "Never before
had you known sorrow, and so have not known either the sweetness of
consolation. Let sorrow and regret be washed away in the consolation
proffered to you by Love!" But Parsifal, the compassionate, cannot
so soon be diverted from the rending thought of his mother, and
continues despite the fair arm on his neck and the balmy breath in
his hair, with his passionate self-reproach: "My mother! I could
forget my mother! Ha! What else have I forgotten? What, indeed, have
I ever remembered? Naught but utter folly dwells in me!" Kundry
again attempts setting him right with himself and offers the cheer:
"Acknowledgment of your fault will place a term to remorse.
Consciousness of folly will turn folly into sense...." Then, not
quite relevantly, "Learn to know the love which enfolded Gamuret
when Herzeleide's affection burningly overflowed,..." With the
assurance that she who gave him life now sends him as a mother's
last blessing the First Kiss of Love, she bends over him and places
her lips upon his in a prolonged Wagnerian kiss. The sorcery-motif
is heard weaving its unholy snare. Of a sudden, with an abruptness
as unexpected as it is disconcerting, Parsifal tears himself from
her embrace, leaps to his feet, and pressing his hands to his heart,
as if there were the seat of an intolerable pain, "Amfortas!" he
cries, staring like one who sees ghosts, "the wound! the wound!..."
That has been the effect of her kiss upon his innocence, to give him
sudden clairvoyance into her nature, to cast a lightning flash upon
the past. He feels himself for a moment identified with Amfortas,
whom the woman had kissed as she kissed him. Amfortas's wound burns
in his own side. Not only that: the sinful, disorderly, unsubduable
passion torturing Amfortas, for a moment tortures equally Parsifal,
whose nature is thrown by it into a horror of self-hatred, and casts
itself upon frenzied prayer for deliverance and pardon. Pardon, for
although this experience can be thought an effect of mysterious
insight, Parsifal recognises as a crime that he should be in these
circumstances at all. He remembers that he had known himself as
one marked for a sacred mission. He remembers t