Bach played very quietly. In his time technique began to change its principles. The hand was no longer to be held out flat, but curved, so as to provide a series of hammers rather than levers. The passing of the fingers over each other, as practised by Mattheson, a player of distinction almost equal to Bach and Handel, gave way to a systematic _under_-passing; and the thumb, which Bach had seen applied by former generations only to wide stretches, began its important part as the “linking” finger. The remains of Bach’s finger-exercises, and the directions which stand in the lesson-book of his son Philip Emanuel, have been usefully compared[89] by Spitta, who has drawn a picture of the technique of John Sebastian, which in its grandeur well fits with his work. “It was a system of under-moving fingers, worked out by unparalleled practice and talent, applying not merely to the thumb but to the middle fingers, and usually so arranged that only a longer finger can pass over a shorter.[90] This produced a technique which, like Bach’s work, united past and future in one classic method. Our thumb-technique, which in essentials goes back to Philip Emanuel, is a mere fragment of Bach’s method, just as the whole succeeding art was, compared with Bach, but a fragment on a large scale.” But it is hard to be clear on these matters. Before the time of “schools” technique was a matter of personality; and reconstruction to us of a later age is utterly out of the question.