t--is that by which unity is combined
with variety in modern music, though we have long since got rid of the
"legitimate" series of keys.

The grouping of the movements need not detain us long. Many groupings
had been tried; but it seems natural to open with an allegro--preceded
or not preceded by a few bars of slow introduction--to follow this with
a slow movement of some sort; then to insert or not to insert a movement
of medium rapidity as a change from the bustle of the first and the
quiet of the second; and finally to end with a merry dancing movement.
This, again, is in the merest outline the plan adopted by Haydn.
Whether he used three or four movements, the principle was the same--a
quick beginning, a slow middle, and a quick ending; afterwards, each
movement grew longer, but the way in which he lengthened them can better
be treated later when we come to his bigger works.

From the first he used counterpoint, canon, imitation, and all the
devices of the contrapuntal style. But the difference between his newer
style and that of Wagenseil and the rest is that he neither uses
counterpoint of any sort nor chord figures to make up the true substance
of the music, but merely as devices to help him in maintaining a
continuous flow of melody. That melody, as has already been said, might
be in the top or bottom part, or one of the middle parts; but though it
may, and, indeed, always did pause at times, as the melody of a song
pauses at the end of each line, it is unbroken from beginning to end.
The first part of a movement might be compared to the first line of a
song: there is a pause, but we expect and get the second line; there is
another pause, and we get a line which is analogous to the "working-out"
section, and the last line, ending in the original key if not on the
same note, corresponds to the final section of the movement, after which
we expect nothing more, the ear being quite satisfied.

Werner, his musical chief in his next station, had the sense to see
that this continuous melody was the thing aimed at, and because Haydn
placed counterpoint in a subsidiary condition he called him a
"charlatan." Poor man, had his sense pierced a little deeper! For Haydn
was--after Bach and Handel and Mozart--one of the finest masters of
counterpoint who have lived. When the time came to write fugues he could
write them with a certain degree of power. But his aim was not writing
fugues any more than an architect's aim is pa