. Once he offended his princely master by learning to play
the baryton, an instrument on which the prince was a performer
greatly esteemed by his retainers. Such teacup storms soon passed:
Prince Esterhazy doubtless forgave him; the Society was soon
forgotten; and Haydn worked on placidly. Every morning he rose with or
before the lark, dressed himself with a degree of neatness that
astonished even that neat dressing age, and sat down to compose music.
Later in each day he is reported to have eaten, to have rehearsed his
band or conducted concerts, and so to bed to prepare himself by
refreshing slumber for the next day's labours. At certain periods of
the year Prince Esterhazy and his court adjourned to Esterhaz, and at
certain periods they came back to Eisenstadt: thus they were saved by
due variety from utter petrifaction. Haydn seems to have liked the
life, and to have thought moreover that it was good for him and his
art. By being thrown so much back upon himself, he said, he had been
forced to become original. Whether it made him original or not, he
never thought of changing it until his prince died, and for a time his
services were not wanted at Esterhaz or Eisenstadt. Then he came to
England, and by his success here made a European reputation (for it
was then as it is now--an artist was only accepted on the musical
Continent after he had been stamped with the hall-mark of unmusical
England). Finally he settled in Vienna, was for a time the teacher of
Beethoven, declared his belief that the first chorus of the
"Creation" came direct from heaven, and died a world-famous man.

To the nineteenth century mind it seems rather an odd life for an
artist: at least it strikes one as a life, despite Haydn's own
opinion, not particularly conducive to originality. To use extreme
language, it might almost be called a monotonous and soporific mode of
existence. Probably its chief advantage was the opportunity it
afforded, or perhaps the necessity it enforced, of ceaseless industry.
Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn's steady increase of
inventive power as he went on composing. But he only took the
prodigious leap from the second to the first rank of composers after
he had been free for a time from his long slavery, and had been in
England and been aroused and stimulated by new scenes, unfamiliar
modes of life, and by contact with many and widely differing types of
mind. Some of his later music makes one think that if th