STYLE IN MUSICAL AET 671 



chief. But deterioration soon set in when a facile style was adopted, 

 in which the details were merely conventional formulas; and the 

 southern school of organists came to worse than nothing. While the 

 northern organists, putting their whole souls into every part of 

 their work, rose higher and higher; and attained first to the luxury 

 of fancy and richness of appropriate detail which is shown in the 

 works of Buxtehude, and ultimately to the supreme ideal of the 

 highest possibilities of art in the organ style in the work of J. S. 

 Bach. The work carried out with real love and devotion has a 

 higher and more permanent interest than work done under a more 

 vague and uncritical impulse. The difference in such respects be- 

 tween the southern and the northern attitude is well illustrated in 

 the respective styles of Handel and Bach. Bach's style was evolved in 

 the intense devotion to personal ideals. Though he studied all schools 

 of art and absorbed from all quarters such principles as were available 

 for his peculiar artistic disposition, he always worked with the true 

 northern bias to present his thoughts with perfection of detail as 

 well as of general impression; and the subordinate features of his 

 work are therefore in the highest degree interesting and rich. While 

 Handel, following general public taste, which was mainly Italian, 

 aimed at greatness of general impression, at what have been de- 

 scribed as cosmic effects, and was often voluptuous in melody and 

 conventional in phraseology, and presents much less interest in the 

 details. Handel holds his own by sheer weight of greatness, but 

 the works of a great number of composers who work on the same 

 lines and in the same style have deservedly fallen into complete ob- 

 livion. 



Qualities of style are eminently illustrative of sincerity of intention. 

 The periods in which men wrote half-heartedly, with no genuine 

 personal intensity, prove in the end to be styleless. If the style is 

 not distinctive, the product generally proves to be intrinsically worth- 

 less. The truly great individual masters of style are such as we 

 know to have been passionately in earnest, and deeply absorbed in the 

 endeavor to attain an ideally perfect presentation of their thoughts. 

 Beethoven and Bach, who had the most consistent degree of per- 

 sonal style, attained to it by infinite labor in pruning, rewriting, 

 remodeling, and constant self-criticism. The composers who had 

 phenomenal facility are by no means those whose style is most indi- 

 vidual. Handel was individual in his greatness, but not in the man- 

 ner of his diction. Mozart was pre-eminent in his sense of beauty, 

 not in the originality of his manner. The most striking and persis- 

 tent qualities are such as belong to the adamantine natures, not to 

 those which are most easily malleable. The rugged manner of Car- 

 lyle cost himself and his friends untold misery; and the powerfully 

 distinctive style of Brabms must have cost him extraordinary con- 



