recapitulation; so that Haydn himself said the worst of the young men was that they could not stick long enough at anything to work it out, and no sooner began one thing than they wanted to be off to another. They were even worse off in their slow movements. Unlike Mozart, they never discovered that the continuous melody, the melos, was Haydn's grand secret; and if they had discovered it, they had not the genius and the simple deep sincerity to make use of the discovery. That natural sincerity of feeling kept Haydn on the right path through all the weary Esterhazy years, when he was surrounded by French influences and every influence that made for artificiality and falsity.

The clavier music, with the exception of a few bits, is of no great importance; still, I have played much of it with pleasure in Dr. Riemann's edition, and found many charming things. His genius, however, so far as anything less in scale than the symphony was concerned, was all for the string quartet. Some of his slow movements, in their sudden moments of unsuspected depths of feeling, prophesy of the coming of the great human Beethoven rather than the ethereal, divinely beautiful Mozart. Suavity, smoothness, piquancy, perfect balance between section and section, and each movement and the other movements—these characterize all the later quartets. They were intended for chamber use only—to play them in a large hall is criminal—and it almost goes without saying that, after the hot stuff of Beethoven and even Schubert, more than a couple of them in an evening palls on one's palate. Haydn was in many ways a great, a very great, composer; but no one can live with his work as one can live with Bach or Beethoven. We are all of the nineteenth or twentieth century; Haydn was of the eighteenth. Such contradictions of godlike greatness and mere simple childishness were surely never met together in one man, and we can worship the greatness without any compulsion to tolerate the childishness.

For the operas a few words will suffice. In style they are far more old-fashioned than Mozart's or Gluck's, and he had the dramatic—or, rather, theatrical—instinct much less strongly developed than either of these. He wrote strings of songs, duets, etc., for the theatre at Esterház—many of them for the Marionette Theatre—and was content if they pleased his patron. One or two were given elsewhere with some success; but, with regard to Armide, he wrote stating his view that his operatic works should not be given at all save in the conditions for which they were composed. Those conditions have now for ever passed away, and excepting as curiosities the operas will never be heard again.