Through all this, over all this, the stubborn song, not for a moment weakening or wavering, has climbed its way, with the figurative Bird, to its climax-point. His throat shall burst, but he will be heard! His last note Walther holds for four bars: "Das stolze Lie——bes Lied!"... Sung to an end it is, the lofty canticle of love. The singer jumps down from the chair. "A lasting farewell to you, my masters!" With a proud gesture, which rids him of them forever and consigns them to the dust-heap of their sordid narrowness and mediocrity, he stalks to the door. "Versungen und verthan! Versungen und verthan!" cry the masters, raising their hands according to custom in giving a vote; "Versungen und verthan!" He has failed in song, he is done with!
The song-trial is over. The apprentices in merry tumult take apart the Marker's closet, hurry off benches and seats, rapidly clearing the church of all signs of the meeting. The masters leave, except Sachs. He stands gazing abstractedly at the singing-chair, while a snatch of Walther's song sings itself over in his memory. His meditation is interrupted by the apprentices snatching up and carrying off the chair. With a half-melancholy smile and a gesture of delicate mockery at himself for the spell he has so completely fallen under, reluctantly the last master-singer turns to the door, and the curtain falls.
II
The second act shows the exterior of Pogner's house and of Sachs's, his neighbour across the street. It is the close of day; David, putting up the shutters, is thinking of the morrow and its pleasures so intently that he does not, for a moment, recognise Lene's voice calling him. He mistakes it for that of some teasing fellow-apprentice, until he turns around and beholds her, as so often! with a promising-looking basket on her arm. "I bring you something good. Yes, you may peep. That is for my precious treasure, but first, quick, tell me, what success had the Knight? Did you instruct him to some purpose? Was he made a master?"—"Ah, Mistress Lene, it's a bad case! He failed utterly and miserably!"—"He failed?..." "Ay,—why should you so particularly care?" She jerks away the basket from his outstretched hand: "Keep your hands to yourself! Here is nothing for you! God ha' mercy, our young lord defeated!" and hurries into the house, leaving him crest-fallen, an object of mockery to his companions, who have lost nothing of the interview. Goaded, he has finally plunged among them with punishing fist, when Sachs's arrival upon the scene stops the disorder. The boys nimbly scatter. David is ordered indoors. "Close the shop and make a light. Put the new shoes on the lasts!" Both go in.
The peacefulness of evening is upon the scene. Pogner, with his daughter on his arm, returning from a walk, comes down the lane which divides his house from Sachs's. He hesitates at Sachs's door. "Shall we see whether neighbour Sachs be at home? I should be glad of a talk with him. Shall I go in?..." But he decides against it. "Why should I, after all? Better not! When a man undertakes a course out of the usual, how should he accept advice?... Was it not he who considered that I went too far? Yet, in forsaking the beaten track, was I not doing even as he does? Or, was I actuated peradventure—by vanity?" Pogner is not easy in his mind, it is plain. He invites his silent and preoccupied daughter to sit beside him a little space on the stone seat under the linden in front of their house; he tries to fortify his faltering heart with the review of his plan for the morrow, held in the poetic light in which he first saw and found it alluring. "Deliciously mild is the evening. It presages a most beautiful day to shine upon you to-morrow. Oh, child, does no throb of the heart tell you what happiness awaits you to-morrow, when the whole of Nuremberg, with its burghers and plebeians, its guilds, its populace and high officials, is to gather in your presence to see you award the prize, the noble laurel-wreath, to the master of your choice and your chosen bridegroom?" But he speaks to the Evchen of day before yesterday. So recently as that his scheme no doubt attracted the daughter of his blood even as it did him; she saw it with kindred eyes. Her youthful pride rejoiced in the part she was to play of lovely lady of romance, to know that she should become from that day a heroine of legend, her name for long years recurring in the songs of song-loving Nuremberg. As for the practical side of the question, she felt safe. She believed she knew which of the master-singers was sure of election by the majority of the masters, and him she had it in her heart to crown with a right good-will—so recently as day before yesterday. But to-day, at her father's "the master of your choice" she wistfully inquires, "Dear father, must it be a master?"—"Understand me well, a master of your choice," the uneasy parent replies.
Magdalene is making signs from the doorway to Eva. The girl becomes absent-minded, drops the subject in question, and suggests to her father that he go in to supper. Vexed with himself and her, he rises from her side. "We are not expecting any guest, are we?" he asks, a shade querulously. "Why, surely, the Knight?"—"How is that?"—"Did you not see him to-day?"—"No desire have I to see him!" the troubled father mutters. Then, in a flash, two and two leap together and make four to his startled mind. "What's this?... Nay, thick-witted am I grown!"—"Dear little father, go in and change your coat!" urges the pretty daughter. "Humph!" he murmurs, now as absent-minded as she, "What is this buzzing in my head?" and goes indoors.
Magdalene reports to Eva David's news: the Knight has been refused admission to the guild. "God help me! What shall I do!" cries Eva, in a sea of troubles; "Ah, Lene, the anxiety!... Where to turn to find out something?"—"From Sachs, perhaps?"—"Ah, yes, he is fond of me. Certainly, I will go to him."—"Beware of arousing suspicion. Your father will notice if we stay out any longer at present. Wait until after supper. I shall have something further to communicate to you then, a message which a certain person charged me with privately."—"Who?.. The Knight?"—"No, Beckmesser."—"Something proper that must be!" the fair girl scoffs as they enter the house.
Sachs, in working-clothes, is seen moving within his shop. He orders David to place his table and stool beside the door, and go to bed. Reluctantly David goes off. He is troubled over Magdalene's unaccountable behaviour to him, and this sitting up late of his master's interferes with his slipping over to her for an explanation. Sachs takes his seat before the work-table, sets his materials aright, but having done it, instead of falling to work, leans back and lets the sweetness of the evening beguile him, dreams possess and waft him whither they will. That haunting strain from Walther's song, repeated slowly, as by one savouring it with pensive pleasure, again sings itself to his inward ear; it, indeed, is partly to blame for his mood of gentle unrest. The memory will not let him alone of that marvellous, that unprecedented experience of the afternoon. Unreservedly the grey-haired man's homage flies to the youngling who so easily outstrips them all, with their inveterate painstaking, their multitudinous canons. Not only without a shade of bitterness but with a tender elation, he lives over again the emotions created in him by that passionate song. To his true poet's heart it is a matter for exultation that just something beautiful should have been, and he there to witness and rejoice. He reconsiders it all with affectionate disquisition, fresh delight in every point. If just a shade of sadness belongs to the hour, it lies in the recognition that though the vision of beauty has by the contagion that is proper to it stimulated in him the impulse to be at once producing, he too, beautiful things, not by any longing could he, after a life of faithful effort in the service of Poesy, produce anything to compare with the unprepared effusion of that youth!
In the serenity of the lovely evening his thoughts breathe themselves forth upon the scented June air: "What fragrance—how mild, how sweet, how abundant,—exhaled from the elder-tree! Its soft spell loosens my fibres, solicits me to seek expression for my thoughts. To what purpose, any expression of mine? A poor, simple fellow am I! Little in the mood for work as I am, you had best, friend, let me alone! Far wiser I should attend to my leather and desist altogether from poetry!" Resolutely he falls to work. But Friend Elder-tree does not therefore cease to shed scent. It casts its spell over him again almost at once. "No, there is no use in trying to work!" Sachs leans back and listens again to the echo in his memory of Walther's song. "I feel it," he meditates, lending ear to the persistent voice in his brain, "and cannot understand it. I cannot retain it—nor yet can forget it! And if for a moment I grasp it, to measure it is beyond me. But how should I hope to grasp that which struck me as illimitable? No rule fitted it, and yet it had not one fault! It sounded so old, and was yet so new,—like the song of birds in the sweet May-time. One who should hear it, and, smitten with madness, try to sing in imitation of that Bird, would meet with scorn and derision.... The law of Spring,—exquisite compulsion!—according to that were the rules of song laid in his breast. And he sang even as he must! And as he must, the power to do it came to him, I marked that quite particularly.... The Bird who sang to-day, his beak is fashioned aright! Great as was the dismay created by him among the masters, he was much to Hans Sachs's mind!"
Evchen has come out of her house and softly approached. Sachs looks up, joyfully surprised, at her greeting: "Good-evening, master; still so diligent?" There follows as pretty an exhibition of youthful feminine arts as one could wish to see. The cajoling inflections of the music alone would inform one of what is in action. Eva has come to Sachs with an ulterior motive: to hear the details of the song-trial. She has no mind, of course, to avow her interest frankly. She must gain her end as she can, and, as a beginning, to flatter her man and challenge his fondness for her can never fall wholly wide of the mark. Sachs loves her dearly, that she knows, and she has, in the innocent presumption of her young beauty, not questioned that he would enter the song-tournament for her; and until yesterday she rested in placid contentment upon the intention of crowning this affection which never since her birth has failed her. Her narrow eighteen years have no conception of a devotion so generous and deep it would not dream, however fair the opportunity, of laying upon her youth the burden of his maturity, the oppression of his thoughtfulness. Sachs is unwilling, too, very likely, in his wisdom, to compromise the peace of his Indian summer by assuming the guardianship of an over-fair young wife. His neighbour's picturesque whim, the song-contest in prospect, has no doubt given Sachs sufficient uneasiness, but he finally, as we heard him declare to Pogner, rests satisfied with the maiden's privilege of refusal. Not one of the guild of master-singers seems to him worthy of this blooming young Eve. As for the father's "Never!" applied to her marriage if she shall not accept the master-singers' choice, Sachs knows his Pogner and his Eva, and is willing to entrust the matter to Time.