t be all that, and follow my advice, good and
short: summon up your energies for a master-song!"--"A beautiful
song, and a master-song, how am I to seize the distinction between
them?" asks the singer of the beautiful song which had been despised.
"My friend," Sachs explains, with a warmth as of tears and blood,
"in the beautiful days of youth, when the bosom expands high and
wide with the mighty transports of happy first love, many are they
who can achieve a beautiful song: the Spring-time it is which sings
for them! But let summer come, autumn and winter, the sorrows and
cares of life,--no dearth of wedded joys along-side!--christenings,
business, discord and difficulties, those who still after all that
can compass the singing of a beautiful song, those, mark me, are
entitled masters!" Aye, first, as a modern poet has said, warm
natural drops of blood; later, the alchemist's laborious spheres of
chemic gold. In youth, all-sufficient inspiration,--later, labour
and rule, with meritorious concentration substituting for impetus
and fire the beauty of careful form, and making durable in this
the evanescent dreams of youth. "Learn the master-rules in good
season," Sachs adds, "that they may be faithful guides to you,
helping you to preserve safely that which in the gracious years
of youth spring-time and love with exquisite throes bred in your
unconscious heart, that you may store and treasure it, and it may
not be lost!"--"But who--" Walther asks, inclined to cavil where
anything is concerned which relates to the master-singers, "Who
created these rules which stand in such high honour?"--"They were
sorely-needy masters," Sachs in his moved tones continues the charming
lesson, "spirits heavily weighted with the weariness of life; in
the wilderness of their distresses they created for themselves
an image, that they might retain vivid and lasting the memory of
young love, bearing the sign and stamp still, and breathing the
fragrance, of Spring!"--"But," Walther objects, suspicious of that
whole tribe of snuffy masters, for whom Sachs has the same charity
of a broad understanding which he has shown in Walter's own case,
"however can he for whom Spring is long past fix the essence of it
in an image?"--"He recreates it as well as he can," Sachs sums with
sudden curtness, recognising perhaps the futility of his attempt
against this so lively dislike; and passes on to the point more
important at this moment, to his thinking. "I b