the intuitive and the reasoning powers in his nature, the depth of his self-reliance, the untiring severity of his self-criticism, and the glad, yet solemn religious fulness of his mental life. But already my due limits are overstepped, and I am still more desirous to speak at some length of Beethoven. I shall content myself with two or three passages, which not only indicate the peculiar scope of this musician, but are of universal application to whatever is good in art or literature.
Bombet mentions this anecdote of Jomelli.
“On arriving at Bologna, he went to see the celebrated Father Martini, without making himself known, and begged to be received into the number of his pupils. Martini gave him a subject for a fugue; and finding that he executed it in a superior manner, ‘Who are you?’ said he, ‘are you making game of me? It is I who need to learn of you’ ‘I am Jomelli, the professor, who is to write the opera to be performed here next autumn, and I am come to ask you to teach me the great art of never being embarrassed by my own ideas.’”
There seems to have been no time in Bach’s life when he needed to ask this question, the great one which Genius ever asks of Friendship. He did not need to flash out into clearness in another atmosphere than his own. Always he seems the master, possessing, not possessed by, his idea. These creations did not come upon him as on the ancient prophets, dazzling, unexpected, ever flowing from the centre of the universe. He was not possessed by the muse; he had not intervals of the second sight. The thought and the symbol were one with him, and like Shakspeare, he evolved from his own centre, rather than was drawn to the centre. He tells the universe by living a self-centred world.
As becomes the greatest, he is not hasty, never presumptuous. We admire it in the child Mozart, that he executed at once the musical tour de force prepared by the Emperor Francis. We admire still more Bach’s manly caution and sense of the impor-
