118 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
for Sachs. Sachs looks upon all life as poetic, Walter flees from 
prosaic reality into the world of poetry. For Sachs everything, no 
matter how trite and trivial it may seem, becomes an object of 
poetic musing, Walter seeks his ‘poetic’ themes. Therefore Sachs 
is more versatile than Walter. Sachs takes joy in all things, he 
abandons himself to them. Walter selects, and always connects 
with his subject matter a relation to his own soul. Sachs is an 
objective poet with a subjective element, Walter is purely subjec¬ 
tive. . . . Sachs regards the hostile powers with the eyes of 
the wise man: he laughs at them and outwits them; Walter looks 
upon them with the eyes of a knight who places himself in posture 
for battle. Therefore Sachs’s poetry, like its creator, is humor¬ 
ous; Walter’s, pathetic ... Of course, both types of poets 
have their justification, their significance. This is beautifully 
shown in Sachs’s conduct. For he, who certainly is the greater, 
willingly bows before the young man who possesses one side of 
art that he, the mature poet, lacks. The sweetness of dream poetry, 
the perfume of romanticism have so captured Sachs’s susceptible 
poetic soul that the fiery ‘poet-hero’ appears to him as the true, 
heaven-gifted poet. His own workaday poetry seems to him irrele¬ 
vant in comparison . . . However, both types are needed: the 
sunny poetry of daylight with its clear features and sharp con¬ 
tours, with its irradiation and transfiguration of sober reality, as 
well as the vague moonlight poetry with its diffuse lines and myste¬ 
rious figures—naive and sentimental poetry. ’ ’ 
Naturally Wagner did not intend to exemplify in his work 
Schiller’s famous distinction—this is a by-product of the composer’s 
creation, and as such interesting in the extreme. Neither did he 
attempt a portrait of the historical Hans Sachs; at the time of the 
origin of the first sketch he expressed in no uncertain terms his 
disapproval of the biographical Goethe and Schiller dramas that 
were popular in the forties and fifties. Wagner simply desired to 
place among the circle of the mastersingers an eminent, real poet, 
such as the historic Hans Sachs was. It is worth while to observe 
that while the earlier Hans Sachs reminds us more of the Hans 
Sachs of the thirties and forties as Gervinus portrays him—for, as 
we have seen, Wagner designates Gervinus as one of his sources— 
the Hans Sachs as we have him today resembles more closely the 
Hans Sachs of the fifties in the same treatise. It may well be left 
to the reader to trace out the corresponding features in the passages 
quoted in the Appendix. When his general character was thus 
altered, Wagner quite naturally dropped the allusion to the Refor¬ 
mation in the first draft. Such an allusion seemed a matter of 
course in a drama the scene of which was laid in sixteenth century 
