are not wholly in accord with truth, for the domestic life of many a great man lends warrant to Mrs. Carlyle's warning against marrying a genius. And, surely, what is the brief domestic life of Byron if not a mystery of unhappiness? On the other hand, the lives of some of earth's greatest have proved sublime even in such testing ordeal. No «sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh» drowned their connubial harmony; no wranglings of the ill-mated made the house rather a hell than a home; no Coleridge-like shirking of family responsibilities demeaned them in the eyes of men; no divergence of aim kept husband and wife always at cross purpose.
The home of Bach was the modest German home whose like, throughout the Fatherland, had bred the bone and sinew and brain of a great and worthy nation. It was the shielding home into whose peaceful shelter the disquieting world intruded not; the home paternal, maternal, and fraternal, where blossomed daily those sweet domesticities which root themselves in mutual love. It was the simple home, source and conserver of the simple life; the fruitful home free from imputation of race suicide; the happy home forever young with voices of childhood and youth; the Christian home from whence ascended in prayer and thanksgiving the homage of reverent hearts! It was, in short, the ideal home approved by earth, by Heaven ordained and blessed; and he, the great Bach, was its patriarchal head.
The creative artist stands at noblest remove from that brute inheritance of ours, the desire to take by violence. In him is manifest the God-like characteristic of the highest type of man, namely, desire to give for the pure love of giving.
Therefore, on such lives as that of Bach, the welfare of the world depends; they call it back from that insanity of selfishness toward which the age is tending. Such lives attest the claims of the ideal; they prove them to be of practical value. Such lives are, indeed, barriers against an on-rushing Materialism which otherwise might engulf us all.
Of the modern composer it must often be said that the world is too much with him; and to this misfortune are largely attributable the inequalities abounding in his music. Because of his co-partnership with that which tends to warp and deaden his artistic sensibility, he must needs force his inspiration; the result proving that the serenity of the high vision is not in him, but rather the delirium-nightmare of the world-fever. Nor can it be otherwise unless he benefits by the example of Bach and his kind. Like him, he should achieve a full and final consecration necessary as that of the priest and the prophet. Apart from the world wherewith he mingles; self-centered amidst the babbling multitude; deaf to the babel of their tongues; he should listen to the great song of life, the heavenly melody filling the shut sanctuary of his soul whereinto the world cannot enter. If he so do, it shall not be said of him that he lived in vain, or that his works but swelled the rubbish heap of Time.
The staid, methodical life of Bach the man, wherein nothing erratic is discoverable, was counterparted by the life of Bach the creative genius. The orderly and exhaustive development of a characteristic theme was to him the chief artistic end obtainable. In the school of which he was the great exponent, the imaginings of the composer must be moulded to the requirements of an exacting and time-approved model; but, despite the severity of the strict polyphonic style, whose restrictions led to its modification by the Classicists, and its final abandonment by the Romanticists, Bach moving in this, his congenial element, was no more hampered than is the freest illustrator of modern methods.
Although German Protestantism found in Bach its musical expression, in him—the towering genius—was inevitably paramount that broad and lofty religion of pure art which, above credal differences, outpours its prayer and thanksgiving in the creation of the beautiful, and therefore the good and the true. Would anyone suppose the author of the Mass in B minor to be a dissenter from the Roman Catholic communion? As a noble vehicle of religious feeling, the Mass inspired Bach to a work surpassing all similar efforts of Roman Catholic composers; a work which, to every heart in tune with the sublime, is a revelation of the essence of undogmatic religion.
Whilst grave dignity well becomes a king, and whilst the voice and look of authority are rightfully his, we love to see him doff at times the insignia of his station, and eschew the pomp and ceremony of royal surroundings to enact a part identifying him with the human in the great common life of the world.
Even so we see the sovereign of the Fugue, the Mass, the Cantata and the «Passion,» unbending affably toward such lesser things as the Suite, the Partita and the a capella Motet. But, though condescending, Bach is nevertheless the king; hence these all acquire from his magnetic, uplifting presence, a consequence before unknown to any of their kind.
Bearing in mind the lives of such men as Sir Henry Irving, one hardly realizes that the play-actor of the Elizabethan Era had no more social status than the veriest mountebank. The German musical genius of Bach's day, and for long thereafter, was usually a mere retainer to some consequential petty prince, and, socially, only a degree higher than his master's lackey. But habit, sprung from a necessity which itself may have originated in a refinement and delicacy of organization inclining the musician rather to submit than to combat the coarse and selfish, had so accustomed the court composer to the rôle of servile dependent upon royal patronage, that he seldom realized to what degradation his anciently esteemed calling, that of the bard, had fallen.