pression, versatility, taste-opinions vary to the extent of assigning to him, on the one hand, all these in a larger measure than to any other composer, and, on the other, of denying him the possession of a single one of them. Neither of these extreme views can be maintained. J. S. Bach was beyond all question a great and original genius; one of those men born but at rare intervals, and to be reared only in particular conditions of the world. Yet it is impossible to deny that his music is deficient in some element necessary to make it intelligible, and therefore acceptable, to the unlearned hearer. And, wanting this element, whatever it may be, ought any work of art to be regarded as completely great? Should we not at least distrust those works of which artists alone can see the merit? Doubtless to fathom the "deepest deeps" of a great mind requires a plummet that few can handle; but the beauties of form and colour which adorn its surface are not always the worst evidences of its profundity.

That the "Passions Musik" and other cognate works of Bach have hitherto had but a small congregation* in England, proves nothing. The place he might have claimed in our affections was already filled by Handel. But is Bach the Handel even of Germany? Does he enter into the musical life of his countrymen as Handel does into ours? Surely not. Handel's music is an oak which has struck its roots deep into English soil, and spread its "hundred arms so strong" to the sun and the storm of a hundred English summers and winters. Bach's is, so to speak, an exotic, even in Germany; blooming no doubt in the Conservatorium and the Akademie, but unfit, as yet at least, for open-air life. Whether many specimens of it will ever be acclimatized anywhere remains to be proved.

Be this as it may, some of the productions of this altogether exceptional master will probably outlive all existing music.

* It has largely increased among us since this was written-whether permanently time will show. So indeed has Handel's in Germany.

"Das wohl-temperirte Clavier."

137

His forty-eight Fugues which, with as many Preludes, constitute the work originally entitled "Das wohl-temperirte Clavier," are the best examples of their class; and their class is of all others the least susceptible to the influences of popular taste. Fugue is the concentrated essence of what we now call music. It derives nothing from any association with temporal things; it expresses no human emotion, still less does it describe or suggest the actual or even the possible in their relations to ourselves. It has its own aims, and it reaches them in its own way. One can conceive a time-and rejoice in not living in it-when the Preludes to these incomparable productions shall have ceased to have an interest for mankind. That the Fugues which follow them should know the same fortune is inconceivable. It is hard to picture them as having ever been new; harder as ever becoming old. They are Immortals, incognoscent alike of youth or age. We rarely think of a composer, of a poet-in the primary or secondary sense of the word-in connexion with them; never that any one of them, given its initiatory motif, could be other than what it is-the necessary deductions from a given premiss. They are not so much works of an individual, as things long pre-existent, with which we have somehow been made acquainted. One would as soon think of criticising these impersonal, passionless, inevitable entities as of criticising the earth, the air, or the sea. hesitates equally to apply to or withhold from them the epithets "sublime" or "beautiful;" and the single-minded old Cantor who "found" them would doubtless have wondered at anybody applying either. But they give to those who master sense of satisfaction which, viewing the limits of human power, works of different-possibly higher-aim never can give, save to students able to discern, through the obvious and imperfect accomplishment of the artist, his occult and possibly perfect intention.

them a

One

THE FOURTH PERIOD.

We have seen how, in the course of three centuries, music has, so to speak, made the tour of Europe; first Belgium and Northern France, then Italy, and then Germany becoming successively its head-quarters and its home.

It was in the early part of the last century only that Germany began to make for herself a distinct place among the musical nations of Europe; but from about the middle of that century, when the career of J. S. Bach ended, that place has been indisputably the first. In every department of the musical art but one, singing, the German School has equalled, if not surpassed, all others. Even in opera, wherein the element of nationality obtains so largely, Germany has been able to lend two composers, Gluck and Meyerbeer, to the most national of all nations, the French; while under her hands instrumental music has been so unprecedentedly developed, has taken forms so extensive and so various, that she may be fairly said to have opened up a new world to musical Europe.

It would be very much easier to exhibit the progress of music, or indeed the progress of anything, had its steps in all cases been taken at easily ascertained periods, or could they always be attributed to easily ascertained persons. In fact, narrative would be very much less troublesome if the materials for it lay in strata, like the formation of the earth's crust. But events are very indifferent to the convenience of those who have to narrate them; and they frequently compel us to dis

142

German Composers of the Second Period.

appoint our hearers, by carrying their thoughts back to times and to facts which have already received what might have been thought their full share of attention.

Thus, with this new world of German art all before us, we must pause for a moment to look back on the old one we are about to leave, and to consider what it has given to this new one we are about to enter.

A glance at the Chronological Table will remind you that from very early times there have been musicians in Germany. Of these the Table does not present anything like a complete catalogue; it does not do so in relation even to Belgium, so important in the Second Period. Long lists of German musicians who flourished in the early part of the sixteenth century appear in the works of native musical historians, who are obliged however to admit that their compositions never, like those of their Belgian contemporaries, found their way into Italy nor, strange to say, attained any success even in the great capitals and courts of Germany. Of these masters Senfl and Walther have been rescued from the catalogue of mere names by their connexion with Luther and the Reformation. Forkel's "Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik,"* among other contemporary native works, is a composition by Stephen Mahu which gives a high idea of the science and (what in his day was much more rare) even the taste of that master. It is written in five parts, in a grandiose and flowing style, and might be termed a motet, but that it is set to some words evidently intended to be humorous but of which the humour is not very obvious.

In

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, again, appear the names of other musicians whose works attained not much circulation even in Germany, and none elsewhere. Attention has lately been drawn to one of these, Gumpelzheimer, by a distinguished French critic, M. Fétis, who speaks of him as a *Vol. ii. p. 686.