Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/230

218 is it that his name finds so little space in Burney's notes and in his picture of Germany?

We have here a fine example of the diversity of the judgments pronounced upon a genius by his contemporaries and by posterity! At a distance of two centuries it seems to us impossible that he should not have held a predominant position in the musical world of his period. We may at a pinch admit that a great man may remain absolutely unknown if the circumstances of his life are such that he is isolated and can neither publish his works nor force the public to give him a hearing. But we find it difficult to believe that he could be known and not recognised; that people should have had an indifferent and merely benevolent opinion of him; that they should have been unable to distinguish between him and the artists of the second rank by whom he was surrounded. Yet such things are constantly happening.

Shakespeare was never completely ignored or unrecognised. M. Jusserand has shown that Louis XIV. had his plays in his library and that they were read in France in the seventeenth century. The public of his own time appreciated him, but not more than it appreciated many other dramatists and less than it appreciated some. Addison, who was acquainted with his works, forgot, in 1694, to mention him in his Account of the Best English Poets.

It was almost the same with Johann Sebastian Bach. He had a respectable reputation among the musicians of his time, but this celebrity never extended beyond a restricted circle. His life in Leipzig was difficult, straitened, almost poverty-stricken, and he was a victim of the persecutions of