contradictions. Born a peasant, and remaining in thought and speech a
peasant all his days, he became the friend of princes, dukes, and,
generally speaking, very high society indeed--and this in days when
class distinctions had to be observed. He effected a revolution in
music, and revolutionists must have daring; and save in music he showed
no sign of unusual daring. His shaping and handling 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