earnestness, dignity, and artistic courage that are at the root of all Bach's work. Earnestnessany study of Bach must set out from and return to that idea; it is the one test for stability in genius. MOZART'S REQUIEM The morning drum-call on my eager ear Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew Lies yet undried along my field of noon. But now I pause at whiles in what I do, And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear (My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon. THE things that a man says or does when he is waiting for the signal of death often borrow a vivid significance from the lurid light that beats upon them. Yet a little while, and the man is here, to mould and fashion his fluent affairs, to care for his work and attend to his business; again a little while, and he is gone; the metal in the mould runs cold on the instant, his little group of concerns crystallises, and the attitudes are perpetuated in which the moment of extinction found them. These circumstances, tragic or commonplace according to the mood in which we regard them, surrounded the composition of most of Mozart's Requiem Mass; he was writing, as we say, against time; and although the work bears no trace of those finishing touches with which upon mature reflection he loved to adorn his masterpieces, this Mass remains to us as one of the very greatest examples of his art. It is, in addition, a priceless complement to that biography of his mind which his music supplies, for it gives us a glimpse of his spiritual bearing in a great and solemn crisis. If we study the Requiems that composers of note have written when their own death was not an immediate probability, we find that in nearly every case the image suggested is that of a person to whom something tragic is happening; the man himself is the central object round whom revolve a number of circumstances more or less affecting; his emotions, and his attitude towards his approaching end are the things most clearly expressed. This treatment of the subject is natural enough to a man looking far forward towards a misty drama in which his future self is the chief actor; he is filled with pity for that unfortunate person; at once the note of grief is struck, and at once the chance of a truthful point of view is gone. Henceforward the tone is one of sorrow and anguish; the wells of the heart are plumbed to find expression for the terrible chant of Dies Ira; the living are forgotten, and the dead stands alone amid overwhelming mysteries. Small wonder, when an artist sets himself to consider such a scene, that he should either lose himself in the terrible picturesqueness of the thing, and so set his imagination to work upon it, or else, worse still, |