the different branches of art, and of endeavouring to improve upon their achievements. Sometimes he actually rewrote the works of other composers, and oftentimes he deliberately imitated them both for style and design; and wherever he recognised an artistic principle of undoubted value and vitality, he as it were absorbed and amalgamated it as part of his own artistic procedure. He ranged far and wide, and studied the methods of Italians, Frenchmen, Netherlanders, and Germans-writers of choral music and of organ music, of violin music and of harpsichord music. And not only that, but he always sedulously criticised himself, and recast, remodelled, and rewrote everything which new experiences or a happier mood made him feel capable of improving. This would have been impossible in the busy public life of Handel, and was not in that composer's line. Bach's was a far more individual and personal position. He wanted to express what he himself personally felt and approved. Handel adapted himself to feel and approve what the public approved.

It naturally followed that Bach's style became far more individual and strongly marked, and that he went far beyond the standard of the musical intelligence of his time; and the inevitable consequence was that his most ideally great and genuine passages of human expression were merely regarded by his contemporaries as ingenious feats of pedantic ingenuity. A man could not well be more utterly alone or without sympathy than he was. Even his sons and pupils but half understood him. But we do not know that he suffered from it. We can only see plainly that it drove him inwards upon himself, and made him adopt that independent attitude which is capable of producing the very highest results in men who have grit enough to save them from extravagance and incoherence. He wrote because it interested him to write, and with the natural impulse of the perfectly sincere composer to bring out what was in him in the best form that he could give to it; and his musical constitution being the purest and noblest and most full of human feeling and emotion ever possessed by a composer, the art of music is more indebted to him than to any

other composer who ever lived, especially for the extension of the arts of expression.

The peculiar services he did in the branch of pure instrumental art must be discussed elsewhere. The services he did to choral art, especially in his Passions, the B minor mass and smaller masses, the great unaccompanied motets and the various cantatas, are equal to Handel's, though on such different lines. The effect of the isolation in which his work was produced was no doubt to make it in some respects experimental, but it ensured the highest development of the art of expression and of the technique which serves to the ends of expression. To the same end also served the Teutonic aspect of his labours. The oratorios of other nations were not part of religious exercises, nor the direct expression of devotional feeling. They had merely been versions of lives of famous scriptural heroes or events, set to music partly in narrative and partly in dramatic form. But the Germans had fastened with peculiar intensity of feeling on the story of the Passion, and set it again and again in a musical form, as though determined to give it the utmost significance that lay in their power. The plan was to break up the story into its most vivid situations and intersperse these with reflective choruses and solos, which helped the mind to dwell intently and lovingly upon each step in the tragedy. It was essentially a devotional function in which every one present took a personal share. Even the audience, apart from the performers, took part in the noble chorales—so characteristic of the Teutonic nature— which were interspersed throughout. Many poets and many composers tried their hands at this curious form of art, Bach himself several times; and the crown was put on the whole series finally by the famous Passion according to St. Matthew, which Bach wrote and rewrote towards the end of his career for performance at Leipzig.

It is not necessary to emphasise further the difference between Bach's treatment of great sacred choral works and Handel's. The oratorios of the latter were nearly all dramatic or epic, and the subjects were treated as nearly as possible histrionically. There are portions of Bach's Passions which

treat the situations with great dramatic force, but in the main they are the direct outcome of personal devotion, and in them the mystic emotionalism of the Teutonic nature found its purest expression. Thus in the works of the two great composers the types of musical utterance which represent epic and narrative treatment on the one hand, and inward immediate feeling on the other, were completely realised on the largest scale that the art of that day allowed. Handel's direct and practical way of enforcing the events and making his story vivid by great musical means has given great pleasure to an 'immense public, and as it were summed up the labours of his predecessors into a grand and impressive result. Bach, with higher ideals, produced work which was often experimental, and even at times unpractical; but he used the sum of his predecessors' work as his stepping-stone, and did much greater service to his art. He appeals to a much smaller public than Handel, and is totally unacceptable to shallow, worldly, or unpoetical temperaments; but he has given much higher pleasure to those whose mental and emotional organisation is sufficiently high to be in touch with him, and there are but few of the greatest composers of later times who have not felt him to be their most inspiring example.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CLIMAX OF EARLY INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

ALTHOUGH the principles of design upon which modern selfdependent instrumental music is based had hardly dawned upon the minds of men till the eighteenth century was nearly half spent, the latest instrumental music of the early period, written almost entirely upon the same general principles as choral music, is not only historically important, but has more genuine vitality than a very large proportion of the music which has come into existence since the cultivation of pure harmonic music has so greatly enlarged the resources of composers. The situation is parallel in many respects

to the earlier crisis of Palestrina and Marenzio. There is less of the sense of immaturity in their work than in the work of Lulli and Scarlatti of nearly a century later; and there is far less of immaturity in the instrumental works of Bach and Handel and their fellows than in the works of Galuppi or Paradisi, or even in the early works of Haydn. Maturity is a relative term altogether. If a man's ideas are worth expressing, and are capable of being expressed completely within the limits of his resources, his productions may be in a certain sense completely mature at almost any epoch in the progress of artistic development. If Palestrina had introduced discords more freely and treated them with less reserve, and had aimed generally at a stronger type of expres sion, the balance of his work would have been destroyed; he would have gone beyond the limits which were then inevitable for completely artistic work. Part of his greatness consisted in his feeling exactly where the limitations of his kind of art were, and achieving his aims within the field of which he was complete master. The position of the composers in Bach's

time was much the same; and part of his own particular greatness consisted in seeing within what particular range the technical resources of art, which preceding development had placed in his hands, were most fully available.

It is very necessary to keep in mind the fact that different types of artistic procedure representing different epochs frequently overlap. Just as in the arrangements of society a monarchy may be thriving successfully in one country, while its neighbour is trying experiments in democratic institutions; so in art it constantly happens that a new style has broken into vigorous activity before the old style has produced its greatest results. And there is a further parallel in the fact, that as the theories and practices of the republican country may filter into the country where the more conventional form of government still prevails, so the new ideas which are beginning to be realised in other departments of artistic energy often creep into the heart of an old but still active sytem, even before it has come to full maturity. Even the strictest representatives of an ancient and well-developed style try occasional experiments on revolutionary lines. The bounds of the old order were transgressed before Palestrina's time, and many men began to have clear ideas of harmonic form of the sonata order long before John Sebastian Bach put the crown on the old style of instrumental music. Bach himself tried experiments in this line, and did his utmost to master and gauge the value of the new style, by copying, rearranging, rewriting, and imitating the works of prominent representatives of the new school. But it is clear that he was not satisfied with the results, and that the style was not congenial to him. His peculiar gifts would not have found sufficient means for employment on the simple lines of harmonic form as then understood, and the necessity of submitting to uniform distribution of the various parts of his design would have hampered him in the experiments in modulation and harmonisation which are among his greatest glories.

So it came about finally that he attempted but little of a sonata order, but concentrated his powers on works of the old style the toccatas, canzonas, fantasias, fugues, suites,