I have said that, barring the church and tablet, there are no relics of the old guild to be found in the Nuremberg of to-day. Until lately it was supposed that the Municipal Library contained a number of autographic manuscripts by Hans Sachs, but when I asked for them, they were produced with the statement that they were no longer looked upon as genuine. It did not require much investigation to convince me that the claim long maintained that they were autographs of the cobbler-poet rested wholly on presumption. Sachs autographs are extremely scarce. The Royal Library at Berlin possesses a volume of master-songs known to be in the handwriting of Sachs (among them is one by Beckmesser), but when I was in the Prussian capital this treasure was in Dresden, whither it had been sent to enable a literary student to utilize it in the preparation of a book on Sachs. A Berlin scholar, whom I found at work in the Nuremberg Library gathering material for a new biography of Sachs, informed me that the greatest number of Sachs autographs, and they not many, had been found in Zwickau, whither they had been brought by some member of the Sachs family many years ago. There are, then, no manuscript relics of him who was the chief glory of the Nuremberg guild in the old town. You may drink a glass of wine at the street-corner where tradition says the old poet cobbled and composed, but the house is a modern one. Of his companions in the guild I found no manuscripts in the library, and not one of them left his mark in any way on the town. But I did find a number of old manuscriptvolumes dating back two hundred years or more, which served to vitalize in a peculiarly interesting manner the record which the learned old Wagenseil left behind him, and some of the personages of Wagner's comedy. Those who have taken the trouble to investigate the source to which Wagner went for the people and customs introduced in his "Meistersinger von Nürnberg" (Wagenseil's book) know that the names of the master-singers who figure in the comedy once belonged to veritable members of the Nuremberg guild. Wagenseil mentions them as singers whose memories were cherished in his day, and some of them were also mentioned by an older author, whose book, devoted chiefly to the Strassburg guild, which at one time was even more famous than that of Nuremberg, is referred to by Wagenseil. The book of the Strassburg writer, singularly enough, was known to Wagenseil only as a manuscript, and such it remained until two or three decades ago, when it was printed by a literary society at Stuttgart. In Wagenseil's day it was valued so highly that it was kept wrapped in silk, like the sacred scrolls of the Jews, a circumstance that enabled the pedantic Orientalist to air his learning on the subject for many pages in his wofully discursive but extremely interesting book. But if Wagenseil had not given his testimony, I could now bear witness to the fact that Conrad Nachtigal, Hans Schwartz, Conrad Vogelgesang, Sixtus Beckmesser, Hans Folz, Fritz Kothner, Balthasar Zorn, andVeit Pogner once lived as well as Hans Sachs. I have read some of their poems and copied some of the melodies invented by them and utilized by their successors in the guild. The volumes containing these curiosities of literature have been in the Municipal Library over one hundred years. In the catalogue of the Bibliotheca Norica Williana, printed one hundred and sixteen years ago, they are mentioned as having been purchased from an old master-singer. Five of them are small oblong books of music paper, upon which some old masters or apprentices in the art of master-song have copied melodies which were much used at the meetings in St. Catherine's Church. It was the custom of the members of the guild to compose poems to fit these melodies. In the second scene of his opera Wagner mentions a great many of the singular titles by which these melodies or modes were designated. He got them from Wagenseil. Besides these books, there are two immense manuscript volumes, in which some industrious old lover of the poetical art transcribed songs which he evidently thought admirable. They are each almost as large as Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, and must represent months, if not years, of labor. One is devoted wholly to German paraphrases of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," set to a great variety of melodies. The author is M. Ambrosius Metzger, who was one of the few members of the guild who were scholars. He wrote the poems in 1625. The other volume containssongs by a great number of master-singers, though Hans Sachs is the principal contributor. The plan of the volume indicates that it was a collection of admired poems. It begins with paraphrases from the Pentateuch. Some early pages are missing, the first poem preserved dealing with the sixth chapter of Genesis. Chronological order is maintained up to chapter twenty-eight of the same book. Then follow songs dealing with the Gospels and Epistles. The Book of Job is not forgotten. Finally, there are a number of secular poems, many recounting Æsop's fables and anecdotes drawn from old writers. Songs of this character were composed by the master-singers for diversion at their informal gatherings. At the meetings in the Church of St. Catherine only sacred subjects were allowed. It is for this reason that Wagner's Kothner asks Walther in the opera whether he had chosen sacred matter (ein heil'gen Stoff) for his trial song, which provokes the reply from the ardent young knight that he would sing of love, a subject sacred to him. Whether sacred or secular, however, the form and style of the songs are alike. Nothing could more completely illustrate the absurdity of the fundamental theory of the foolish old pedants that poetry might be written by rule of thumb than the publication of a few of the songs in this old book. The nature of the poetical frenzy which fills them can, perhaps, be guessed if I record the fact that the majority of them, I think, begin with a citation ofchapter and verse, or some statement equally matter of fact, as thus:
"The twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis records," or "Diogenes, the wise master," or "Strabo writes of the customs," or "Moses, the eleventh, reports," or "The Lesser Book of Truth doth tell," etc.
The last of these lines is the beginning of a master-song which has a twofold interest. In the first place, it is a secular poem by Hans Sachs which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been printed or written about. In the second place, it is set to a melody by the veritable Pogner who, in Wagner's comedy, offers his daughter and his fortune to the winner in the singing contest which makes up Wagner's last act. The poem is so amusing that I would like to give it entire in English, but its irregularity of accent and peculiarities of rhyme do not lend themselves willingly to translation. Of musical accent the master-singers, who followed the rhyming rules of those marvellously ingenious rhymesters theMinnesinger, had not the slightest idea. Wagner knew that. Sachs' first critical tap on his lapstone in Beckmesser's serenade is evoked by a blunder in accent which the veritable Sachs would have passed unnoticed, though, being a real poet, his sins in this respect were not as numerous as those of his colleagues and predecessors. I content myself, therefore, with the firstStollen, or stanza, and itsAbgesang, or burden, which the curious student will find to be composed in strict accordance with the rules which, in the opera,Kothner reads from the blackboard. TheseLeges Tabulaturæ, by-the-way, are almost a literal transcription from the original laws preserved in Wagenseil's book. The matter of the song is this: A boor falls ill. Finding that his appetite is wholly gone, he calls in a physician, who informs him (in a drastic fashion) that the trouble is caused by an accumulation of slime in the stomach. He administers a purgative, but without result. The sickness increases, and the boor upbraids the doctor, who retorts that his patient will be a dead man within an hour unless he consent to having his stomach taken out and scoured with chalk. The boor consents, the physician performs the operation, cutting the man open with a pair of shears, brushes out the offending organ with a wisp, and hangs it on the fence to dry. What the farmer does meanwhile is not recorded; but before the physician could replace his stomach a raven carried it off to the woods and ate it. In this dilemma the physician disclosed himself as a worthy progenitor of the modern race of surgeons. He was terribly frightened, but didn't let any one see it. By stealth he procured a sow's stomach, introduced it into the farmer's body, and quickly sewed up the aperture. The farmer got well, and paid eight florins for the job. But heavens, what an appetite was that which he developed! To satisfy him now was utterly impossible, for which reason, concludes the moralist, an insatiable eater is nowadays said to be a hog (literally "to have asow's stomach"), who devours more than he produces, as many women lament:
"Darum spricht man noch von ein Man,Den man gar nicht erfuellen kan,Wie er hab einen Sawmagen;Verthut mehr denn er gewinnen kan,Hoert man vil Frawen klagen."
"Darum spricht man noch von ein Man,Den man gar nicht erfuellen kan,Wie er hab einen Sawmagen;Verthut mehr denn er gewinnen kan,Hoert man vil Frawen klagen."
"Darum spricht man noch von ein Man,
Den man gar nicht erfuellen kan,
Wie er hab einen Sawmagen;
Verthut mehr denn er gewinnen kan,
Hoert man vil Frawen klagen."