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 for Mozart and Beethoven, especially Mozart; but that was early, more than twenty years before his death, and it is significant that the portion of his life-work which most influenced and directed Mozart and Beethoven is chiefly second-rate music.  When he was writing the music that forces us to place him near the noblest composers, he obeyed the invariable rule, and was in turn being influenced by Mozart.  The case is remarkable, but it is only what anyone with a seeing eye might have predicted, and to us to-day it is quite plain.

It is the constructive part of his work—­the work of his middle period—­we must now briefly examine.  In the list of his principal compositions for the period 1761-1790 are included nearly one hundred symphonies and other orchestral works, innumerable trios, quartets, operas, songs, and clavier or piano pieces, one oratorio, The Seven Words, and other sacred pieces.  How many of them are heard to-day?  How many could be heard with pleasure?  Very, very few.  If anyone who happened to be familiar with the Salomon symphonies—­belonging to his last period, after he had known Mozart—­and The Creation heard some of this older stuff for the first time, he would hardly believe that the man who in his age wrote so much fresh, vital music, charged with colour and energy, could in the prime of physical life have written music that is now so old-fashioned and stale.  To this general verdict exceptions must be made in the cases of some of the quartets, the clavier pieces, and The Seven Words, the last especially being, as I have already said, in his most splendid manner.  Haydn did not stereotype the symphony, because it never was at any time stereotyped; but he made endless experiments in the search for a general profound principle which underlies all music composed since his time.  Mozart helped to make his own meaning clear to him, divined what he was groping after, and himself seized it and made glorious use of it, and Haydn profited, so that we have his master-works.  But the experiments possess for us little more than the interest of experiments.  Yet they were new and inspiring at the time.  Had he continued to write in the pre-1761 manner, he would never have by 1790 won his world-wide fame, and made London seek him and so draw from him his finest work.