e leap--a leap
almost unparalleled in the history of art--had been possible twenty
years sooner, Haydn might have won a place by the side of Mozart and
Handel and Bach, instead of being the lowest of their great company.
On the other hand, one cannot think of the man--lively, genial,
kind-hearted, garrulous, broadly humorous, actively observant of
details, careful in small money matters--and assert with one's hand on
one's heart that he was cast in gigantic or heroic mould. That he had
a wonderful facility in expressing himself is obvious in every bar he
wrote: but it is less obvious that he had a great deal to express. He
had deep, but not the deepest, human feeling; he could think, but not
profoundly; he had a sense of beauty, delicate and acute out of all
comparison with yours or mine, reader, but far less keen than Mozart's
or Bach's. Hence his music is rarely comparable with theirs: his
matter is less weighty, his form never quite so enchantingly lovely;
and, whatever one may think of the possibilities of the man in his
most inspired moments, his average output drives one to the reluctant
conclusion that on the whole his life must have been favourable to him
and enabled him to do the best that was in him. Yet I hesitate as I
write the words. Remembering that he began as an untaught peasant, and
until the end of his long life was a mere bandmaster with a small
yearly salary, a uniform, and possibly (for I cannot recall the facts)
his board and lodging, remembering where he found the symphony and
quartet and where he left them, remembering, above all, that
astonishing leap, I find it hard to believe in barriers to his upward
path. It is in dignity and quality of poetic content rather than in
form that Haydn is lacking. Had the horizon of his thought been
widened in early or even in middle life by the education of mixing
with men who knew more and were more advanced than himself, had he
been jostled in the crowd of a great city and been made to feel
deeply about the tragi-comedy of human existence, his experiences
might have resulted in a deeper and more original note being sounded
in his music. But we must take him as he is, reflecting, when the
unbroken peacefulness of his music becomes a little tiresome, that he
belonged to the "old time before us" and was never quickened by the
newer modes of thought that unconsciously affected Mozart and
consciously moulded Beethoven; and that, after all, his very
smoothness and