Roedder—“Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.” 
117 
Its undercurrent of sadness makes it all the more lovable—indeed 
this is the token of all true humor: “There’s not a string at¬ 
tuned to mirth but has its chord in melancholy” sighs Thomas 
Hood, and “ Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure thrill the deep¬ 
est notes of woe” moans Robert Burns. 
Such glorious humor is not the chief trait of the earlier Hans 
Sachs, the one of the Marienbad sketch. He is far from conquer¬ 
ing the world; his humor is a rather pessimistic irony which at 
best toys with, and generally scorns and derides, the world. The 
changes in Hans Sachs’s philosophy of life incorporated in the 
second version may easily enough be explained on general grounds. 
When Wagner wrote the Marienbad sketch he had not yet reached 
the prime of life. When he finished the play he was almost fifty 
years old. His Lohengrin, the colossal Der Ring des Nihelungen, 
his Tristan und Isolde ,, as well as most of the theoretical writings, 
had in the meantime been completed. The happy period at Dres¬ 
den had been followed abruptly by his ten years’ exile in Switzer¬ 
land. New years of migration had succeeeded the latter. They 
had brought numerous handicaps to his development and creative¬ 
ness. He had gone through the most serious domestic and finan¬ 
cial distress, and suffered the bitterest disappointments, such as 
the open hostility of most of the contemporary critics to his work. 
But all these factors combined could not make him lose faith in his 
mission, and he felt now as sure of his ground and his place in the 
history of art as Schiller did when to clarify his views he wrote 
his treatise TJeber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung. 
The victory that Walter von Stolzing with his art wins in the 
Marienbad draft is at best half a victory—with Hans Sachs as 
there depicted the game is scarce worth the candle. Considering 
the superior greatness of Hans Sachs in the final execution, both 
as a poet and as a man, Walter’s victory is complete. Nor is its 
force lessened by the fact that in some respects Hans Sachs is 
decidedly the younger man’s superior even as a poet. Such he is, 
as Erich von Schrenck points out, 1. c., page 169ff., in the measure 
in which the naive artist—he who is one with nature—is superior 
to the sentimental one who seeks nature: 
“Sachs’s poetic pictures are delineated with bold, firm strokes* 
Walter is ever in danger of becoming verbose, sometimes even 
diffuse. Sachs shines in sunny clarity, Walter has something 
vague and romantic about him. . . . For Walter the poetry of 
dreams and the prose of actual life are much farther apart than 
