The old inherited love of race was strongly characteristic of Johann Sebastian. We owe to him a manuscript genealogy of the Bach family, which is now preserved in the royal library at Berlin. The first number is from the hand of Sebastian himself, while the remainder of the work was performed by his son, Philipp Emanuel. The philanthropic and self-sacrificing spirit manifested by Bach towards his pupils was still more fully exemplified in the circle of his family. In the year 1707 he bestowed upon a cousin in needy circumstances a part of his slender salary. While in Weimar, he took into his house a son of his eldest brother, thus requiting the kindness which he had received from the latter as a boy. In Cöthen he devoted himself energetically and with true filial affection to the fulfilment of an honored relative's testamentary bequests, against his own interests and in opposition to the grasping demands of her next of kin. All that we know of Bach's life presents him to us in the light of a strong and noble nature and confirms us in the belief that the truly great artist must as a man always be profoundly worthy of our veneration.
[Illustration: Fac-simile of the manuscript of the first page of the first Prelude from Bach's "Well-tempered Clavichord."]
That in Bach we behold the highest degree of development attained by a race of musicians who flourished through many generations, is due to his wonderful and manifold musical gifts, rather than to his having followed directly in the footsteps of any of the more important composers among his ancestors. He was endowed with a talent for composition of the very first order, has not been excelled as a performer upon the organ and the clavier up to the present day, and was a violin player of the profoundest intelligence, exhibiting complete mastery over the technique of his instrument. At the same time he had a thorough knowledge of organ-building and also distinguished himself by the invention of a new stringed instrument, called the "viola pomposa", and a keyed instrument which was an ingenious combination of the lute and the cembalo. He devised the first perfectly satisfactory method of tuning a clavier according to the tempered system, and introduced the style of fingering, which, with a few modifications, is now in use. But the particular musical form in which his uncle Johann Christoph Bach, of Eisenach, became so great a master--the motet--while cultivated to some extent by Sebastian Bach, was developed differently by him, and his immediate predecessors in the art which made him especially great were not found among the men of his own race.