ppers rapidly increased. In 1850, a century after
his death, a society was started for the correct publication of all Bach's
remaining works. Robert Franz, the great song-writer, did good service in
arranging some of Bach's finest works for modern performance, until the
experience of a purer scholarship could prove not only the possibility but
the incomparably greater beauty of a strict adherence to Bach's own
scoring. The Porson of Bach-scholarship, however, is Wilhelm Rust (grandson
of the interesting composer of that name who wrote polyphonic suites and
fantasias early in the 19th century). During the fourteen years of his
editorship of the _Bach-Gesellschaft_ he displayed a steadily increasing
insight into Bach's style which has never since been rivalled. In more than
one case he has restored harmonies of priceless value from incomplete
texts, by means of research and reasoning which he sums up in a modest
footnote that reads as something self-evident. His prefaces to the
_Bach-Gesellschaft_ volumes are perhaps the most valuable contributions to
the criticism of 18th-century music ever written, Spitta's great biography
not excepted.

[v.03 p.0126] Bach's importance in the history of music cannot be
exaggerated. His art, neglected as old-fashioned and crabbed by his younger
contemporaries, survived only in certain limited aspects as the subject of
a desultory and unintelligent academic study, until its re-discovery by
Mendelssohn. And yet, whatever disguise may have been foisted on it by
corrupt traditions and ignorance of its idioms, whenever any fragment of it
gained the inner ear of a true composer the effect on the history of music
was immediate and profound. Indeed his influence is by no means chiefly
manifested in the time when his work became known in its larger aspects,
though the Bach-revival is very obviously connected with certain tendencies
in the "Romantic" movement in music. But, however clear we may consider
Bach's claim to the title of "the first of Romanticists," the full
influence of his whole work has hardly yet begun to show itself. Schumann
died before even such enthusiasts as the editors of the _Bach-Gesellschaft_
began to find more beauty than extravagance in Bach's ordinary musical
language (see, for example, Hauptmann's letters _passim_, _The Letters of a
Leipzig Cantor_, trans. by A. D. Coleridge, London, Novello, Ewer, 1892),
or, indeed, to grasp the main features of his designs.[3] The labou