There is no loftier example in history of artistic genius devoted to the service of religion than we find in Johann Sebastian Bach. He always felt that his life was consecrated to God, to the honor of the Church and the well-being of men. Next to this fact we are impressed in studying him with his vigorous intellectuality, by which I mean his accurate estimate of the nature and extent of his own powers and his easy self-adjustment to his environment. He was never the sport of his genius but always its master, never carried away like so many others, even the greatest, into extravagancies or rash experiments. Mozart and Beethoven failed in oratorio, Schubert in opera; the Italian operas of Gluck and Händel have perished. Even in the successful work of these men there is a strange inequality. But upon all that Bach attempted—and the amount of his work is no less a marvel than its quality—he affixed the stamp of final and inimitable perfection. We know from testimony that this perfection was the result of thought and unflagging toil. The file was not the least serviceable tool in his workshop. This intellectual restraint, operating upon a highly intellectualized form of art, often gives Bach’s music an air of severity, a scholastic hardness, which repels sympathy and makes difficult the path to the treasures it contains. The musical culture of our age has been so long based on a different school that no little discipline is needed to adjust the mind to Bach’s manner of presenting his profound ideas. The difficulty is analogous to that experienced in acquiring an appreciation of Gothic sculpture and the Florentine painting of the fourteenth century. We are compelled to learn a new musical language, for it is only in a qualified sense that the language of music is universal. We must put ourselves into another century, face another order of ideas than those of our own age. We must learn the temper of the German mind in the Reformation period and after, its proud self-assertion, led to an aggressive positiveness of religious belief, which, after all, was but the hard shell which enclosed a rare sweetness of piety.
All through Bach we feel the well-known German mysticism which seeks the truth in the instinctive convictions of the soul, the idealism which takes the mind as the measure of existence, the romanticism which colors the outer world with the hues of personal temperament. Bach’s historic position required that this spirit, in many ways so modern, should take shape in forms to which still clung the technical methods of an earlier time. His all-encompassing organ style was Gothic—if we may use such a term for illustration’s sake—not Renaissance. His style is Teutonic in the widest as well as the most literal sense. It is based on forms identified with the practice of the people in church and home. He recognized not the priestly or the aristocratic element, but the popular. His significance in the history of German Evangelical Christianity is great. Protestantism, like Catholicism, has had its supreme poet. As Dante embodied in an immortal epic the philosophic conceptions, the hopes and fears of mediaeval Catholicism, so Bach, less obviously but no less truly, in his cantatas, Passions, and choral preludes, lent the illuminating power of his art to the ideas which brought forth the Reformation. It is the central demand of Protestantism, the immediate personal access of man to God, which, constituting a new motive in German national music, gave shape and direction to Bach’s creative genius.