f a master, you owe to-day your highest
happiness. If then you apply to the question a grateful mind: how
can that art be of no account which holds such prizes? That our
masters cared for it in their own way, that according to their
lights they were faithful to it, that is what has preserved it.
Though it no longer is aristocratic, as in the times when it was
fostered by princes and courts, yet despite the stress of evil
years it has remained German, it has remained sincere. And if it had
prospered nowhere but among us, with our burdens and restrictions,
you can see in what honour it is held here. What more do you require
of the masters?... Have a care! Evil contingencies threaten! Should
the day come when the German people and kingdom fall asunder, its
princes, seduced by false outlandish splendours, would soon no
longer understand the language of their own people, and outlandish
error, outlandish vanities, would be sown by them in German soil.
In that day, should it come, no one would know any longer what
is German and genuine, did it not survive by grace of the German
masters! Then honour the German masters! By that spell shall you
command good genii! And if you second them by your favour, holy
Rome may pass away in smoke: we shall still have our holy German
art!"

Nobly and contritely Walther bows his head, and Sachs hangs about
his neck the collar of the guild. Eva, fired, takes from her lover's
fair curls the laurel-wreath, and presses it upon the grisled head
of the master. He stands radiant between the two whose happiness
is his work. The populace wave their hats and kerchiefs, cheering,
"Hail, Sachs! Hans Sachs! Hail Nuremberg's beloved Hans Sachs!"

One cannot help imagining, in "Meistersinger," a fragment of
autobiography, a recollection of days when Wagner must have heard
on all sides concerning his work what we still occasionally hear,
such words as he puts into the mouth of Beckmesser: "_Kein Absatz
wo, kein' Coloratur! Von Melodei auch nicht eine Spur!_" No pause
anywhere for breath! No appropriate colouring! Of melody not the
remotest trace!

No pause anywhere for breath! The headlong rush it has of genius.
No appropriate colouring! The colouring happens merely to be new.
Of melody not the remotest trace,--when in this opera particularly
the composer casts melodies up in the air like golden balls and
juggles with them; when, like a conjurer, he goes on taking fresh
roses in absurd abundance out of