Reginald Lane-Poole

“ All power is of the lord God: . . . the power of the prince is therefore in such wise of God that it is still his, though it be exercised through the hand of a deputy.
We might think John of Salisbury to be the most fervent of imperialists; yet in fact his exaltation of the nobility of kingship is but a means towards the erection of a higher dignity still for the spiritual power. For the king's authority is only mediately derived from God. The sword, the symbol of worldly power, the prince receives from the hand of the church. ”

“ The impression of this country of soft hills and warm wooded valleys became a part of Sebastian’s nature and still lives in his music. The least attentive listener cannot mistake the inclination to a pastoral treatment which is continually appearing not in the professed Pastorales, as in the Christmas Oratorio, merely, but throughout the compass of Bach’s works; still more striking is his vein of idyllic melody, peculiarly obvious in the fine gold into which he transmuted the baser metal of the Italian aria, to illuminate his church cantatas. ”

“ Faith therefore alone sufficeth not for life, except a man love his neighbour even as himself, and not only not do unto him the evil which he would not unto himself, but also do unto him the good which he would have another do unto him; and so fulfil the universal law, namely, to abstain from evil and to do good.
With these thoughts in his heart, and longing to impress them upon his generation, Claudius passed to his diocese of Turin. His fiery and uncompromising temper met opposition and peril as inducements rather than obstacles to action. ”

“ If, however, one is asked the dominant characteristics of it, there is but one reply,—manliness and melody, the one never too vigorous to overpower the melody, the other restrained by it from any approach to effeminacy.
It is these qualities that adjudge Bach the same place among musicians as Milton holds among our own poets; and the thought has a touching suggestion in the lack of recognition of his later years, and in his blindness. But the likeness goes deeper into their work. Each is in his craft the most learned of artists; each is ruled by an absorbing religious sense. ”

“ In the second place, when a man makes use of conventional language and also of expressions entirely opposed to it and strikingly original, we cannot hesitate as to which is the genuine utterance of his own opinion: and the declaration that eternal torment is totally incompatible with the truth that the whole world is set free by the incarnation of the divine Word, is made in distinct terms and closely interwoven with the fabric of John Scotus s reasoning. An eternity of suffering and evil is irreconcilable with an eternity of goodness and life and blessedness. ”

“ An age of eclecticism, too eager in its enjoyment of the new-found treasure to care to bind itself, as its predecessors had done, to any single authority, was then followed by an age in which the interests of theological controversy drove out every other interest, until at length in the comparative calm after the tempest of the Reformation, philosophy entered a new phase, and the medieval or traditional method was finally rejected in favour of one common in this respect to both modern and ancient speculation, that it rested upon independent thought, and regarded no authority as beyond appeal. ”

“ While Catholic writers have treated the Mass music as the gorgeous accompaniment of a mighty pomp, in which the outward, dramatic, impressiveness stands in the foreground, Bach passes back to the verities of which the sacred office is the symbol. Thus his Kyrie is not the mere opening of a stately pageant. From four bars of majestic chorus, the orchestra go on at once to Pg 100announce a theme unsurpassed in the entire range of Bach’s music; each of the five voices of the choir take it up in turn and weave together their passionate, yet restrained cry for mercy. ”

“ In the interval between the decline of the Carolingian house and the reformation of the eleventh century, Christendom sank into a grosser view of religion, into an abasement of morals that pervaded the clergy equally with the laity, into an ignorance all but universal. In this Dark Age, as it is well described, it is a thankless task to seek for the elements of enlightenment of which the vestiges are so scanty. Their existence, however, is proved by the life they manifested as soon as the spirit of religion was reäwakened. ”

“ A chorus of believers, with wondering question, first interrupts their lament, finally takes up their burthen and unites in the common sorrow. Meantime the listening ear detects a third choir, of a single voice, singing as from afar, and again strangely breaking off, the chorale, O Lamb of God. The art of the work is stupendous; but more wonderful still is the truthfulness with which it figures forth the immensity of the drama to which it is the prologue.
Nevertheless it was far remote from Bach’s mind to present the Passion in the guise of a drama ”

“ Genera and species, the categories and predicables, he refused indeed to endow with essence as things; they had no actual existence apart from the individual: nor was the universal, as William of Champeaux held, contained in its entirety within the particular. The process was the other way; it was from the particular that we arrived at the general by an effort of thought. On the other hand if the universals, if abstractions of all sorts, were the creations of the intellect, they were also its necessary creations; they were therefore so far real that the human mind could not do without them. ”

“ Nor can I describe the infinite fertility of the design, the happy frequency with which in the arie a single Pg 102instrument, violin, flute, hautboy, or horn, is made to enhance the delicacy of the human voice, or the splendour of the grouping of the orchestra, equally noble in sonorous magnificence and in chastened softness. Whether in its art or in its religion the High Mass stands among the creations of Bach’s master-spirit, first and alone, but for its sole equal, the Passion according to Saint Matthew. ”

“ With these various weapons, drawn from the armoury of reason, of experience, of religion, Agobard made war upon the superstitions of his age. He took his stand upon the unassailable ground of Christian verity, but he had his own opinions even in matters like the inspiration of the Bible. Thoughtful men over whose minds the authority of the Bible is supreme have always endeavoured to temper its severity by one of two modes of viewing it. ”

“ In this age of continued misery the foundations of German society seemed to be gradually undermined. A struggle, which added to the confusion of civil war the passion of religious hatred, threatened to dissolve the natural bonds of the family and of the race. Men sank into a blind and listless state, abandoning themselves to any vice or excess that seemed to deaden the thought of the morrow. It was therefore amid every circumstance of adversity that the Bach family grew to its full stature ”

“ A man of his receptive nature was sure to exercise a personal attraction over those around him, and the power which Bruno possessed he used with a single purpose of leading them through learning to a wisdom that should raise them into another world than that gross and corrupt society in which they lived. His own example, much like king Alfred's, was a model of the union of a scholar and a statesman. Him self continually occupied with every sort of official business he always reserved his early morning hours for study. ”

“ His short stay at Muehlhausen had been pleasant and useful to him. He entered upon his work, which was purely that of organist, with ardour, and—in contrast with his lax performance of his duties at Arnstadt—even took a share in the training of the choir, although there was a cantor as well. The only drawback was that the pastor of his church was a strenuous pietist, one of those puritans who found, not a spiritual gain, but a worldly intrusion upon the sacredness of divine worship, in those church cantatas which it was Bach’s work to create anew. ”

“ The age of the church schools is about to be succeeded by the age of the universities. The nature of the discussion indeed takes it out of the sphere of any but a professed history of philosophy, not merely because of its extremely technical form, which it is difficult to render into modern language, but also because the apparent minuteness and triviality of its distinctions, unless subjected to a long and searching examination, tend rather to conceal than to disclose the ferment of thought from which it sprang. ”

“ Spitta’s “Johann Sebastian Bach,” published at Leipzig in two volumes in 1873 and 1880, represents the many years’ study of a professed musician. For all the facts of Bach’s life, and all the obtainable data relative to his works, it is a final and exhaustive treasure-house. Nothing can be more scientific and workmanlike than the method with which he has exhumed and collected every detail from every source that might possibly bear upon his subject, and nothing more admirable than the warm enthusiasm which lights up his work. ”

“ The human passion of the Kyrie eleison has its counterpart in the tender, almost personal feeling of the Christe eleison, which is set as a duet to an exquisitely melodious accompaniment of the violin, and in the closing Kyrie chorus, which, instead of being conceived in the usual way as a petition to the Holy Spirit, resumes the tone of the first and sums up the total supplication in a spirit now suggestive of the broad treatment of the Catholic writers but soon betraying the hand of Bach in its conciseness, its more nervous motion and acuter harmonies. ”

“ Theology is no doubt the mode of medieval thought : the history of the middle ages is the history of the Latin church. The over mastering strength of theology, of a clergy which as a rule absorbed all the functions of a literary class, gave its shape to every thing with which it came into contact. Society was treated as though it were actually a theocracy : politics, philosophy, education, were brought under its control and adjusted to a technical theological terminology. ”

“ It is not the form but the character of the constitution that makes it good or bad. As monarchy is the most perfect form, so on the other hand its opposite, tyranny, is the most corrupt and abominable. Aquinas distinguishes, as minutely as John of Salisbury, between the king and the tyrant; like John, he postulates for the former an absolute devotion to the duties of his office, and thus exalts him to so ideal a dignity that he is empowered to speak of him as [16] holding the same position in his own domain as God holds over the universe ”

“ SEBASTIAN BACH.
CHAPTER I.
It is never without interest to seek out the beginnings of genius in a great man’s forefathers. The mere tracking of pedigrees has an attraction for more than will willingly confess to what is reputed mainly an innocent weakness of old age. The pursuit, however, gains in dignity when it is not only the kinship but also the intellectual growth of the family, not only the blood but also the soul, with which we have to do. ”

“ If the clergy were free from civil control, society on the other hand had little or no protection against their license. To make the high ecclesiastical officers proudly independent of the sovereign was to introduce the influence of the Roman see into every court, and to put canonical obedience in danger of becoming a matter of common politics. If ecclesiastical property was released from civil obligation, the church was as much as before subject to the cares and the temptations of wealth. The spiritual basis of the hierarchical pretensions in fact at once broke down on trial. ”

“ The attendance of the scholars fell off, in the lower classes to less than half their former number; and, worse than this, their quality deteriorated in equal stages: the best pupils drifted away to Lueneburg, and the Leipzig school threatened to sink into a mere training-place for people who were to make their livelihood by singing at funerals. Yet every attempt to reform it was thwarted by the timid obstinacy of its rector; and it was not until his death, when Bach had been under him for six years, that any effectual measures for its revival were possible. ”

“ Gilbert thus hardly escaped the paradox of tritheism : and yet it is impossible to doubt that the heresy was one of expression, not of fact. The contradictions that make his study so con idea of a supreme Unity surpassing human thought or speech, a Unity which forbade the coexistence of multiplicity. He could only apply the analogy of his own realistic philosophy and infer, or lead his readers to infer, that as humanity was a single essence by participation in which individual men were said to exist, so did the three Persons subsist, as individuals, by participation in the one absolute God. ”

“ On the contrary, we have the distinct statement of a friend, himself a teacher of rhetoric at Leipzig, that Bach’s mastery over the qualities and the excellencies which music has in common with rhetoric is such as not only to add unfailing pleasure to his discourses upon the likeness and correspondency between them, but also to move our admiration at the skilful use of his principles in his works. ”

“ If the test is worthy of confidence, how came Jerusalem into the hands of the Saracens, Rome to be pillaged by the Goths, Italy by the Lombards? The martyrs of the church, the witnesses of truth, waxed strong by dying: the upholders of iniquity by killing perished. ”