human beings, the players, actors and singers, who watched the show go
on? The great ones were in their element: at Esterhaz or elsewhere
_their_ world and mode of life were the same--but the poor artists?...
The single cafe was a poor compensation for a rollicking life of change.
The exile from Paris--the _avocat_, or _notaire_, or _docteur_ in the
provinces--how he hankers after the electrically lit boulevards, and
wonders whether he dare run up for a day or two, and what will happen,
there and here, if he does. And Haydn--we can fancy him, after brilliant
evenings at Esterhaz standing, looking Viennawards on still nights, the
starry immensity above him and the quiet black woods and waters around
him--the gay lights of Vienna must have danced before his inner vision,
and his soul must have risen in revolt, full of angry desire to be once
again in the midst of the happy chattering tide of life in the great
town. No other great composer could have stuck to his task as he did.
Mozart would have forgotten his duties; Beethoven would purposely have
neglected them. But Haydn's Prince willed the thing to be done, and
Haydn acquiesced. The patient blood of generations of industrious,
persevering, plodding peasant labourers was in him; and perhaps his
early training under Frankh and Reutter counted for something. He went
on unflinchingly, outwardly calm--calm even in the eyes of languid
eighteenth-century people--inwardly living strenuously as he battled
with and conquered his art-problems.

CHAPTER V

MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE PERIOD

This must have occurred to every one whilst reading the biographies of
great artists: After all, is it the function of high genius to discover
means of expression only that they may be used afterwards by numberless
mediocrities who have nothing whatever to express? It is gravely set
down about Haydn, for instance, that he "stereotyped" the symphony form,
and "handed it on" to future generations. Now, I have observed that the
men who do this kind of work are always the second-rate men: first come
the inventors, the pioneers, and then the perfecters; it is always at
the close of a school that the tip-top men arise. They claw in their
material from everywhere around, and use it up so thoroughly as to leave
nothing for the later comers to do with it that was not done before, and
done better, done when the stuff was fresh and the impulse full of its
first vigour. Haydn did a lot of spade-work f