, and we possess much that is clever, all
produced by snatches of success, well mixed with disappointment and the
bitterness which much contact with the world is sure to evolve. Our age
that goes everywhere, knows everybody's business, and religiously reads
only "the last edition," produces a Bill Nye, a Sam Jones, a Teddy
Roosevelt, a DeWitt Talmage, a Hopkinson Smith, a Sam Walter Foss, a
Victor Herbert; but it is not at all likely to produce a Praxiteles, a
Michelangelo, a Rembrandt, an Immanuel Kant or a Johann Sebastian Bach.

* * * * *

What Shakespeare is to literature, Michelangelo to sculpture, and
Rembrandt to portrait-painting, Johann Sebastian Bach is to organ-music.
He was the greatest organist of his time, and his equal has not yet been
produced, though nearly three hundred years have passed since his death.
"The organ reached perfection at the hands of Bach," says Haweis. As a
composer for the organ, Bach stands secure--his position is at the head,
and is absolutely unassailable.

In point of temperament and disposition Bach bears a closer resemblance
to Michelangelo than to either of the others whose names I have
mentioned. He was stern, strong, self-contained, and so deeply religious
that he was not only a Christian but a good deal of a pagan as well. A
homely man was Bach--quiet, simple in tastes and blunt in speech.

The earnest way in which this plain, unpretentious man focused upon his
life-work and raised organ-music to the highest point of art must
command the sincere admiration of every lover of honest endeavor.

Bach was so great that he had no artistic jealousy, no whim, and when
harshly and unjustly criticized he did not concern himself enough with
the quibblers to reply. He made neither apologies nor explanations. The
man who thus allows his life to justify itself, and lets his work speak,
and who, when reviled, reviles not again, must be a very great and lofty
soul.

Bach was a villager and a rustic, and, like Jean Francois Millet, used
to hoe in his garden, trim the vines, play with his children, putting
them to bed at night, or in the day cease from his work to cut slices of
brown bread which he spread with honey for the heedless little
importuner, who had interrupted him in the making of a chorale that was
to charm the centuries. At times he would leave his composing to help
his wife with her household duties--to wash dishes, sweep the room or
care for