108 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
well as Beckmesser. The latter simply is the personification of 
mastersong carried to its last consequences, and as such he stands 
out in the prelude to the work. In him Wagner chastises all that 
is foolish in the mastersinger’s ways, with a smile, for all great 
comedy ridendo castigat mores. For the subject of this chastise¬ 
ment Wagner 
1 ‘ chooses only things which are temporary aberrations from the 
good. What is strong and pure and wholesome in the art of the 
mastersingers he permits to pass through his satirical fires un¬ 
scathed. Classicism in its original sense, as the conservator of 
that which is highest and best in art, he leaves unharmed. ' ' (Kreh- 
biel, p. 96). 
Beckmesser is, then, the arch exponent of the rule-of-thumb pe¬ 
dantry and formalism; the worshipper of the ossified common¬ 
place ; a stubborn believer in the necessity of the unchanging main¬ 
tenance of a status which the progress of time has long since ren¬ 
dered untenable ; such an upholder of tradition that he would re¬ 
gard the best possible innovation as worthless in comparison to 
the imitation of inferior models, provided that these be old; an 
example of Robert Burns's statement, which is more emphatic than 
is consistent with our latter day notions of good breeding, that 
“a man may be an excellent judge of poetry by square and rule, 
and after all be a d—— blockhead "-—except that Beckmesser has 
ceased to be an excellent judge. But while he is pavilioned in the 
glittering pride of his supposed accomplishments as a mastersinger, 
he is by no means unaware of his lack of personal attractiveness 
to the fair sex, and so he endeavors to assure himself of the sup¬ 
port of Eva's father, and does not approve of the stipulation that 
Eva herself may reject the successful competitor in the singing 
contest if he is not to her liking. As a further consequence, he 
strives to remove his rival Walter von Stolzing by declaring him 
versungen at the test; and as his follies advance in geometrical pro¬ 
gression, he at last becomes a thief and steals what at the time he 
regards as the song with which Hans Sachs would enter the lists 
on St. John's Day. Many critics, sincere admirers of Wagner's 
art among them, have taken exception to this character delineation. 
Thus Krehbiel says, 1. e., page 80: 
“Beckmesser ought not to have been made the blundering idiot 
and foolish knave that he appears to be in the stage versions, but 
at the worst a shortsighted, narrowminded, and perhaps malicious 
