At the Montsalvat of _Lohengrin_--ah! what a different Montsalvat--Amfortas, lord of the tribe of monks, has flirted with a lady, and a magician, Klingsor, has seized the sacred spear with which Christ's side was pierced and inflicted on Amfortas an incurable wound. That is the state of affairs when the curtain rises. Gurnemanz, a faithful warder, talks with sundry squires, not yet fully degraded to the order of knighthood, and tells them how through a certain wondrous woman Amfortas fell from his high estate. The wondrous woman, Kundry, disguised as a sort of Indian squaw, enters, coming, she says, from far lands; exhausted, she flings herself in a thicket to sleep--sleep--she says. Gurnemanz does not know who she is--nor, for that small matter, do I--but she comes and serves these knight-monks faithfully for whiles and then disappears; and generally, it seems, during her period of disappearance disaster falls on some treasured pearl of a saint of a knight. Enter Parsifal, "the pure fool"--Siegfried with all his bull-strength and energy shorn away. He carries a bow and arrow, and promptly shoots a Swan, one of the prides of Montsalvat. He is too stupid to understand that he has done any wrong--wrong to a helpless bird or his own nature. Gurnemanz explains in very unconvincing accents; Parsifal, the poor, "pure" fool, bursts into tears, breaks his weapons and throws them away. And now the reader must bear with me if I am both tedious and inexplicable in my explanation. At some unknown period in the past it was prophesied that only the "pure fool" taught by suffering could redeem suffering Amfortas: mankind, that is, could only be made perfect by a perfect idiot. Gurnemanz thinks he has found the required man--and he has, if only he knew it--and he takes him on the most curious promenade in the history of mankind--to the Hall of the Grail. The two men do not walk: it is the scenery that walks. "Here," says Gurnemanz, "time and space are one." Arrived there, we are confronted by a scene much more Oriental than anything we know of mediæval Christianity: a sort of mosque with a huge dome, a circular set of Lockhart's Cocoa-rooms tables and benches; at the back a mysterious catafalque. The pure fool is pushed aside; Amfortas is carried in; he screams in agony of spirit; and then the service begins. It is a sheer burlesque of the Lord's Supper. When the last chords of the mysterious choir in the dome have died away, Gurnemanz asks Parsifal what he comprehends of it all. "Nothing," Parsifal replies, and is immediately turned out of doors.