We find, then, that nothing essentially new in “form” has been used by later artists, of which the germ did not already exist in Bach. Nay, even in programme-music (supposed by many to be an invention of modern times) for the clavier, which Kuhnau so quaintly worked out in his Biblical Stories,[85] Bach has entered the field in a youthful composition. He is singing the departure of his brother. The first adagio movement in anapæstic rhythms represents the flattery of the friends, who are trying to dissuade the traveller from his journey. It is time for the fugue, and this is the picture of various misfortunes which may befall him in foreign parts. A mournful arioso passage on a ground bass,[86] chromatic in character, is a universal lament of his friends. In a full-chorded Intermezzo they come and bid him good-bye, seeing that it cannot be otherwise. Now the postillion sings his air, broken with octave passages, representing the smacks of his whip; and since a fugue is the end of all good things, we hear one in four parts raise itself above the post-horn, with whip episodes to increase the realism. The young Bach did not go as far as Frohberger, who represented the assaults of robbers, crossings of the Rhine, and even forcible ejectments with violence, on the clavier; or as Kuhnau, who had given the cheating of Laban in “deceptive” cadences,[87] and Hezekiah’s doubtings in the rehearsal of a choral; yet this kind of programme-music declined in the eighteenth century precisely as it has grown up again in the nineteenth. If we believe Spitta, Bach also left behind him one of those anagram-pieces which were so in the taste of his time--the fugue on the letters B A C H. But the composition seems too leathern and insipid for us to be able to express a decided opinion. There is in literary criticism a well-known false method--the wish utterly to deny insipidity to the great. But since Bach’s authorship of the “B A C H” fugue is not vouched for, and since he never elsewhere put together so many dull pages, we are not compelled to load his memory with its weight. [Illustration: John Mattheson, at the age of 37.]