till it was time for the 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