As an organ player and composer it would seem that Bach stands at the summit of human achievement. His whole art as a player is to be found in his fugues, preludes, fantasies, toccatas, sonatas, and choral variations. In his fugues he shows perhaps most convincingly that supreme mastery of design and splendor of invention and fancy which have given him the place he holds by universal consent among the greatest artists of all time. In these compositions there is a variety and individuality which, without such examples, one could hardly suppose that this arbitrary form of construction would admit. With Bach the fugue is no dry intellectual exercise. So far as the absolutism of its laws permits, Bach’s imagination moved as freely in the fugue as Beethoven’s in the sonata or Schubert’s in the lied. Its peculiar idiom was as native to him as his rugged Teuton speech. A German student’s musical education in that day began with counterpoint, as at the present time it begins with figured bass harmony; the ability to write every species of polyphony with ease was a matter of course with every musical apprentice. But with Bach, the master, the fugue was not merely the sign of technical facility; it was a means of expression, a supreme manifestation of style. By the telling force of his subjects, the amazing dexterity and rich fancy displayed in their treatment, the ability to cover the widest range of emotional suggestion, his fugues appeal to a far deeper sense than wonder at technical cleverness. Considering that it lies in the very essence of the contrapuntal style that it should be governed by certain very rigid laws of design and procedure, we may apply to Bach’s organ works in general a term that has been given to architecture, and say that they are “construction beautified.” By this is meant that every feature, however beautiful in itself, finds its final charm and justification only as a necessary component in the comprehensive plan. Each detail helps to push onward the systematic unfolding of the design, it falls into its place by virtue of the laws of fitness and proportion; logical and organic, but at the same time decorative and satisfactory to the aesthetic sense. There is indeed something almost architectonic in these masterpieces of the great Sebastian. In their superb rolling harmonies, their dense involutions, their subtle and inevitable unfoldings, their long-drawn cadences, and their thrilling climaxes, they seem to possess a fit relation to the vaulted, reverberating ceilings, the massive pillars, and the half-lighted recesses of the sombre old buildings in which they had their birth. In both the architecture and the music we seem to apprehend a religious earnestness which drew its nourishment from the most hidden depths of the soul, and which, even in its moments of exultation, would not appear to disregard those stern convictions in which it believed that it found the essentials of its faith.