they are listening to a solemn discourse, they are hearing the gospel sung, they are attending divine service rather than a concert.  And really such music ought to be thus listened to.  They adore Bach, and believe in him, without supposing for a moment that his divinity could ever be called into question.  A heretic would horrify them, he is forbidden even to speak of him.  God is God and Bach is Bach.  Some days after the performance of Bach’s chef d’oeuvre, the Singing Academy announced Graun’s ‘Tod Jesu.’  This is another sacred work, a holy book; the worshipers of which are, however, mainly to be found in Berlin, whereas the religion of Bach is professed throughout the north of Germany.

MUSIC AS AN ARISTOCRATIC ART

From the Autobiography

Dramatic art in the time of Shakespeare was more appreciated by the masses than it is in our day by those nations which lay most claim to possess a feeling for it.  Music is essentially aristocratic; it is a daughter of noble race, such as princes only can dower nowadays; it must be able to live poor and unmated rather than form a mesalliance.

THE BEGINNING OF A “GRAND PASSION”

From the Autobiography

I have now come to the grand drama of my life; but I shall not relate all its painful details.  It is enough to say that an English company came over to perform Shakespeare’s plays, then entirely unknown in France, at the Odeon.  I was present at the first performance of ‘Hamlet,’ and there, in the part of Ophelia, I saw Miss Smithson, whom I married five years afterward.  I can only compare the effect produced by her wonderful talent, or rather her dramatic genius, on my imagination and heart, with the convulsion produced on my mind by the work of the great poet whom she interpreted.  It is impossible to say more.

This sudden and unexpected revelation of Shakespeare overwhelmed me.  The lightning-flash of his genius revealed the whole heaven of art to me, illuminating its remotest depths in a single flash.  I recognized the meaning of real grandeur, real beauty, and real dramatic truth; and I also realized the utter absurdity of the ideas circulated by Voltaire in France about Shakespeare, and the pitiful pettiness of our old poetic school, the offspring of pedagogues and freres ignorantins.

But the shock was too great, and it was a long while before I recovered from it.  I became possessed by an intense, overpowering sense of sadness, that in my then sickly, nervous state produced a mental condition adequately to describe which would take a great physiologist.  I could not sleep, I lost my spirits, my favorite studies became distasteful to me, and I spent my time wandering aimlessly about Paris and its environs.  During that long period of suffering, I can only recall four occasions on which I slept, and then it was the heavy, death-like