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With the patience and impatience of genius Bach strikes in twain the last fetter of conventionality. He has realized his quest. The boy who, far away in future thought, studied the art-forms of his great predecessors and contemporaries in the lowly chamber or by the light of the silent moon, has found his beloved, the Tonal Muse.
Drama, at its best, is clumsy, arbitrary, unsatisfying, by comparison. But what makes a law-suit the most fascinating, to me, of all art-forms, is that not merely its material, but the chief means of its expression, is life itself. Here, cited before us, are the actual figures in the actual story that has been told to us.
Both that which is true of the race for all time, and that which is true of the race for all time applied to this particular time, he has caught up and pressed into his art-forms. He has caught the dominant note of the Anglo-Saxon and pressed it into wonderful rhythms which cannot be sung out in a day and which will not be sung out in a day.
If Music be, among the arts, 'Heaven's youngest-teemed star', the latest of the art-forms she herself has brought forth is unquestionably Opera. Three hundred years does not at first seem a very short time, but it is not long when it covers the whole period of the inception, development, and what certainly looks like the decadence, of an important branch of man's artistic industry.
His specialty as a composer was in the domain of descriptive music, his genius was for the picturesque. His vivid imagination, full of poetic phantasy, and saturated with the heroic traditions and fairy-lore of a race singularly rich in this inheritance from an earlier age, instinctively flowered into art-forms designed to embody this legendary wealth.
The boy extracted them from their resting-place, and we see the young tone-prophet striving to master the art-forms of Reinken, Buxtehude, Frescobaldi, Kerl, Froberger, and Pachelbel, endeavoring to wrest from them their style and inmost meaning by the light of the moon's pale rays, which led, alas! in after-years to blindness. What revelations came to the soul of the young musician we know not.
With him styles of architecture and schools were a minor consideration, to be left to the academicians and the critics. He believed that sculpture, like all other art-forms, was chiefly valuable and interesting as human expression. Less successful on the whole than the blending of sculpture and architecture were the individual figures designed to be placed against the walls.
Another art, however, was to become the most popular of all. That was music. Most of the old art-forms demanded a great deal of technical skill. It takes years and years of practice before our clumsy hand is able to follow the commands of the brain and reproduce our vision upon canvas or in marble. It takes a life-time to learn how to act or how to write a good novel.
The spectacle of a summer traveller from London sketching mediaeval details in these neo-Pagan days, when a lull has come over the study of English Gothic architecture, through a re-awakening to the art-forms of times that more nearly neighbour our own, is accounted for by the fact that George Somerset, son of the Academician of that name, was a man of independent tastes and excursive instincts, who unconsciously, and perhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in floating in lonely currents of thought than with the general tide of opinion.
It meant the rediscovery and the joyous recognition of the relation of the past to the present and the meaning of the relation for mankind. It led to a new kind of self-emancipation and individualism. It created art-forms that have stamped themselves on the work all over these grounds. In a sense it was a declaration of artistic independence."
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