five; but just on that account it is all the more credible. One's
sympathies are with the frank Philistine who pooh-poohs the tales told
of baby composers, and hints that they must have been a trial to their
friends. Precocious they no doubt were; but precocity often evaporates
before it can become genius, leaving a sediment of disappointed hopes
and vain ambitions. In literature, as Mr Andrew Lang has well observed,
genius may show itself chiefly in acquisition, as in Sir Walter Scott,
who, as a boy, was packing all sorts of lore into a singularly capacious
mind, while doing next to nothing that was noticeable. In music it is
different. Various learning is not so important as a keenly sensitive
organism. The principal thing is emotion, duly ordered by the intellect,
not intellect touched by emotion. Haydn's precocity at any rate was of
this sort. It proclaimed itself in a quick impressionableness to sound,
a delicately-strung ear, and an acute perception of rhythm.

Informal Music-Making

We have seen how the father had his musical evenings with his harp and
the voices of wife and children. These informal rehearsals were
young Haydn's delight. We hear more particularly of his attempts at
music-making by sawing away upon a piece of stick at his father's side,
pretending to play the violin like the village schoolmaster under whom
he was now learning his rudiments. The parent was hugely pleased at
these manifestations of musical talent in his son. He had none of the
absurd, old-world ideas of Surgeon Handel as to the degrading character
of the divine art, but encouraged the youngster in every possible
way. Already he dreamt--what father of a clever boy has not done the
same?--that Joseph would in some way or other make the family name
famous; and although it is said that like his wife, he had notions of
the boy becoming a priest, he took the view that his progress towards
holy orders would be helped rather than hindered by the judicious
cultivation of his undoubted taste for music.

His First Teacher

While these thoughts were passing through his head, the chance visit of
a relation practically decided young Haydn's future. His grandmother,
being left a widow, had married a journeyman wheelwright, Matthias
Seefranz, and one of their children married a schoolmaster, Johann
Matthias Frankh. Frankh combined with the post of pedagogue that of
choir-regent at Hainburg, the ancestral home of the Haydns, some
four leagues fr