process of accomplishment. It was an event such as takes place when directly next a certain colour its complement is set. Such an harmonic opposition was created by the beautiful presentation in this place of the sublime works of Johann Sebastian Bach. For in the music of Bach there lies in one of its most powerful expressions the principle completely complementary to the principle of our civilization. No man, it seems, has been more replete with the giving virtue than was the cantor of the Thomas-schule. For Bach, there was no life of man outside the state in which men give to each other; and, in taking from one another, give each other the power to donate themselves ever more copiously. Man was a fallen thing outside that state he knew ; alone in that community which exists when two or more touch, does man achieve the stature of man.
That principle was not adapted from without. It was the manner of being of the man; the orientation of his spirit. It may even have been never more than half-conscious in him. Perhaps he reflected very little in the philosophic sense, and never formulated his religion. Certainly, it is known that when he wanted to state the theory of the fugue, he could do no more (nor less) than write the twenty-four preludes and fugues of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavicord; and other abstract thought was probably as difficult for him. But that such was his understanding of life, his work seems readily to prove. Such an attitude seems to condition the "form" of the St Matthew Passion. Here, there is but one actor, and it is man. It is not man alone at the time of the Crucifixion. It is man at all time, Adam and Bach and Charles M. Schwab. It is the corpus all men together form, and which lives and dies as they touch or as they separate. There is no fixed division between the presenters and the public; the public rises and joins in the chorales. In part this "form" was inherited by Bach from the Protestant service; but Bach was not the man to accept anything out of conventionality; when he, Evangelical of the dark days before Illumination wanted, he wrote Catholic Latin masses, and made the art of music, the art of Couperin as well as of Buxtehude, over to accord with his ideas. No, Bach had something to say about life. The assemblage of singers and auditors are together the crucified and the crucifiers. It is they yell the hateful words, and hear them as they fall on the ears of Jesus. It is they who suffer, and take the body
