Ah, when the ravisher of Peace, and the subjugator of his kind, has fulfilled his fierce ambition, and the rent land is desolate and a nation enslaved in tyrant-welded bonds, how fares his name within the hearts and on the lips of men? Does not its lettering pollute with blood the annals of his time? Not with the harsh rattle, not with the red horror of war, but rather with a sound of sweetest harmony comes the conquering musician, and the charmed world, his debtor, proclaims him lord of a realm more peaceful than once the great Augustus mildly ruled.
Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime,
are not wholly in accord with truth, for the domestic life of many a great man lends warrant to Mrs. Carlyle's warning against marrying a genius. And, surely, what is the brief domestic life of Byron if not a mystery of unhappiness? On the other hand, the lives of some of earth's greatest have proved sublime even in such testing ordeal. No «sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh» drowned their connubial harmony; no wranglings of the ill-mated made the house rather a hell than a home; no Coleridge-like shirking of family responsibilities demeaned them in the eyes of men; no divergence of aim kept husband and wife always at cross purpose.
The home of Bach was the modest German home whose like, throughout the Fatherland, had bred the bone and sinew and brain of a great and worthy nation. It was the shielding home into whose peaceful shelter the disquieting world intruded not; the home paternal, maternal, and fraternal, where blossomed daily those sweet domesticities which root themselves in mutual love. It was the simple home, source and conserver of the simple life; the fruitful home free from imputation of race suicide; the happy home forever young with voices of childhood and youth; the Christian home from whence ascended in prayer and thanksgiving the homage of reverent hearts! It was, in short, the ideal home approved by earth, by Heaven ordained and blessed; and he, the great Bach, was its patriarchal head.
The creative artist stands at noblest remove from that brute inheritance of ours, the desire to take by violence. In him is manifest the God-like characteristic of the highest type of man, namely, desire to give for the pure love of giving.