Roedder—‘‘Die Meistersinger von Niirriberg.” 
119 
Germany, but as it stands, the result of this great movement ap¬ 
pears destructive rather than constructive—the Reformation is not 
treated as one of the great fructifying epochs of the race but as 
subversive of the last remnants of poetry and artistic endeavor. 30 
By infusing into Hans Sachs’s veins drops of his own blood, 
Wagner has endowed his hero with a broader human appeal than 
the genial cobbler-poet of the sixteenth century could ever have 
for our own time. His innermost life, as we have seen, is too deep 
for words—a linguistic expression of the depth of his love, the in¬ 
tensity of his grief, and the greatness of his self-conquest would 
have destroyed the glorious virility of this character. But twin- 
born with the words, the expression of the masculine conceptual 
thought of the poet, is music, in which the feminine lyrism of the 
emotion finds its voice. It constitutes the lasting triumph of Wag¬ 
ner’s genius that in his dramas we have “ music not written for 
the text nor text written for the music, but music and text created 
at the same time, the melody mirroring forth the soul of the 
words.” One need not himself be a poet, full of limitless feeling 
struggling with the limited utterance of words, to fathom that a 
new art has here been given birth, fulfilling the age-long yearning 
of sage and poet. To the word-tone-poet the lines of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes ‘ ‘ The flowering moments of our mind lose half their petals 
in our speech” do not apply. Music imparts to these our flower¬ 
ing moments immortal beauty of color and imperishable fragrance. 
30 The praise of practical political activity in connection with the reference 
to the Reformation, so alien to Wagner’s ways of thinking in his later years, 
Julius Burghold, l.c., attributes to the interest and sympathy with which the 
coming Revolution of 1848 was even then filling Wagner’s soul. It seems to 
me more likely that Gervinus had at least a large share in it—all the more 
so since, as Golther points out, l.c., page 297, this praise of practical political 
life is really a superfluous departure even in the original version, as is evi¬ 
dent from the young knight’s answer to Hans Sachs’s admonitions, “Very 
well, master! But now I need a wife.” Together with the allusion to tne 
Reformation, all the extraneous elements of the original scholarly apparatus 
were excised, i. e., the references to the Heldenbuch, to Wolfram and his Par- 
zival, to the Nibelungenlied with Siegfried and Kriemhild, of whom Walter 
was to sing before the masters in St. Catherine’s. Only the reference to Wal¬ 
ter von der Vogelweide remained—naturally enough, for the mastersingers 
counted him as one of the founders of their art, and Walter’s baptismal name, 
for the earlier Konrad, was given him with a definite purpose. 
