There is nothing of the gorgeous architectural splendours of Bach,
nothing of Bach's depth nor high religious ecstasy. His passion, joy and
sorrow are all milder than Beethoven's. He has little of Beethoven's
grandeur nor feeling too deep for tears or words. As for Mozart's beauty
and sadness--that blend of deep pathos with a supernal beauty of
expression that transcends all human understanding--Haydn is only with
the others in having none of it. The spirit of Mozart dwelt in some
ethereal region not visited by any spirit before nor after him. And,
finally, in Haydn there is no touch of the romantic. Romanticism was a
revolt against eighteenth-century pseudo-classicism, and it had its day,
and did its work, and went out. Haydn did not want to revolt against
classicism, nor even pseudo-classicism.

In fact, in music Haydn stands for classicism, and this is no
contradiction of what I have written about his throwing away the
formulas of his predecessors. When we talk of classical music we mean
Haydn's. He created the thing, and it ended with him. He has sanity
lucidity, pointedness, sometimes epigrammatic piquancy, of expression,
dignity without pompousness or grandiloquence, feeling without
hysteria. His variety seems endless, his energy never flags, and often
he has more than a touch of the divine quality. He did not attempt to
compose tragedies of life, for his temperament forbade it; but in his
finest music he is never commonplace, because he had a strongly marked
temperament and was poetically inspired. By dint of a sincerity that was
perfect he made music which, though it is shaped in outline by the
classical spirit, will be for ever interesting. To listen to him
immediately after Tschaikowsky is hard, sometimes impossible, yet to me
it seems anything but impossible that our descendants will be listening
to him when students are turning to the biographical dictionaries to
find out who Tschaikowsky was. A century ago Haydn was as fresh and