In many of Bach's works we encounter these ascending and descending scales, but they are of varying significance. We find them again in a piece closely allied to the foregoing: a Fantasia,[63] also in G major, where the diatonic scale serves as the foundation of harmonies, whose interest, cleverly held in check, is augmented by the uninterrupted progression of five real parts. [Footnote 63: P. iv, 11.] These works are no longer mere plagiarisms; a glimmer of individuality discloses itself. For example, let us look at the prelude and fugue in E minor.[64] If Buxtehude is here brought in mind, it is because of that quality of his which is most neutral, and no longer through his peculiar originality, his personal resources; in trying to avoid which a mere imitator must always come to grief. Many a detail in construction is derived from the Lübeck organist; for instance, those detached chords, which so successfully set off that plaintive syncopated progression, the sobbing of whose notes is thereby rendered always more intense; the last sections repeating the first, now broken into two still more earnest entreaties. [Footnote 64: P. iii, 10. _Bach-Gesellschaft-Ausgabe_ (W. Rust), year XV, p. 100.] And of this fugal theme, beginning in two separate fragments upon the dominant, we have seen examples in Buxtehude; but there this repetition of the subject expressed in its intensity a joyous declaration.[65] [Footnote 65: For example, this theme: [Music]] It is here a tremulous, hesitating interrogation, which seems to dread its answer; the prelude is full of lonely sadness, as deep as it is despairing; in the fugue it converses in dialogue with itself, one might say in accents which proclaim a public misfortune. But if one may not seek "in a musical work the expression of any condition of the soul, or the narration of any story of the heart,"[66] one can hardly deny that music expresses "the being, even the personal will"[67] of psychological phenomena, at least in the sense that the interest of certain works of art, aside from every æsthetic consideration, is correlative to the mental condition in which one receives them. This may explain the position occupied among the works of Bach by this piece, whose many weaknesses are revealed to us by a technical analysis. [Footnote 66: Hanslick: _Vom Musikalisch-Schönen_.] [Footnote 67: Schopenhauer: _Lichtstrahlen aus seinen Werken_ (J. Frauenstädt, Leipzig, 1874, p. 128).]