dling of new forms called
for high intellect, and he displayed no intellect whatever in any other
way--nothing beyond a canny, cunning shrewdness. Until he was sixty his
life was a plodding one of dull regularity and routine; only his later
adventures in England are in themselves of interest. The bare facts of
his existence might be given in a few pages. Look at him from any point
of view, and we see nothing but his simplicity; yet it is hard to
believe that a man who achieved such great things was in reality simple.
If only we had his inner spiritual biography! And even then one wonders
whether we would have much. If Haydn actually knew his own secret--which
I take leave to doubt--he certainly kept it. "The daemon of music," said
Wagner, "revealing itself through the mind of a child"--which tells us
nothing. In reading his Life we must perpetually bear in mind the mighty
changes he wrought in and for music, else we shall not read far.
Wherefore, first roughly to outline his achievement is the reason why I
open with a peroration of a sort.

Haydn found music in the eighteenth-century stage, and carried it on to
the nineteenth-century stage--in some respects a very advanced
nineteenth-century stage. The problem he had to solve was as easy as
that set by Columbus to the wiseacres, when once it was worked. It was
how to combine organic unity of form and continuity with dramatic
variety and the expressiveness of simple heartfelt song. From the date
of the invention of music written and sung in parts, a similar problem
had been set successive generations of musicians, and solved by each
according to its needs and lights. At first words were indispensable;
they were, if not the backbone of the music, at least the string on
which the pearls might be strung. The first veritable composers--in
setting, for instance, the words of the Mass--took for a beginning a
fragment of Church melody, or, to the great scandal of the
ecclesiastics, secular melody. Call this bit A, and say it was sung by
Voice I.; Voice II. took it up in a different key, Voice I. continuing
with something fresh; then Voice III. took it in turn, Voices I. and II.
continuing either with entirely fresh matter, or Voice II. following in
the steps of Voice I. And so on, either until the whole piece was
complete or a section ended; but the end of one section was the
jumping-off place for the commencement of another, which was spun out in
exactly the same way. This met