recall the facts) his board and lodging, remembering
where he found the symphony and quartet and where
he left them, remembering, above all, that astonishing
leap, I find it hard to believe in barriers to his
upward path. It is in dignity and quality of
poetic content rather than in form that Haydn is lacking.
Had the horizon of his thought been widened in early
or even in middle life by the education of mixing
with men who knew more and were more advanced than
himself, had he been jostled in the crowd of a great
city and been made to feel deeply about the tragi-comedy
of human existence, his experiences might have resulted
in a deeper and more original note being sounded in
his music. But we must take him as he is, reflecting,
when the unbroken peacefulness of his music becomes
a little tiresome, that he belonged to the “old
time before us” and was never quickened by the
newer modes of thought that unconsciously affected
Mozart and consciously moulded Beethoven; and that,
after all, his very smoothness and absence of passion
give him an old-world charm, grateful in this hot
and dusty age. If he was not greatly original,
he was at least flawlessly consistent: there
is scarce a trait in his character that is not reflected
somewhere in his music, and hardly a characteristic
of his music that one does not find quaintly echoed
in some recorded saying or doing of the man.
His placid and even vivacity, his sprightliness, his
broad jocularity, his economy and shrewd business
perception of what could be done with the material
to hand, his fertility of device, even his commonplaceness,
may all be seen in the symphonies. At rare moments
he moves you strongly, very often he is trivial, but
he generally pleases; and if some of the strokes of
humour—quoted in text-books of orchestration—are
so broad as to be indescribable in any respectable
modern print, few of us understand what they really
mean, and no one is a penny the worse.
The “Creation” libretto was prepared for
Handel, but he did not attempt to set it; and this
perhaps was just as well, for the effort would certainly
have killed him. Of course the opening offers
some fine opportunities for fine music; but the later
parts with their nonsense—Milton’s
nonsense, I believe—about “In native
worth and honour clad, With beauty, courage, strength,
adorned, Erect with front serene he stands, A man,
the Lord and King of Nature all,” and the suburban
love-making of our first parents, and the lengthy references
to the habits of the worm and the leviathan, and so
on, are almost more than modern flesh and blood can
endure. It must be conceded that Haydn evaded
the difficulties of the subject with a degree of tact
that would be surprising in anyone else than Haydn.
In the first part, where Handel would have been sublime,
he is frequently nearly sublime, and this is our loss;
but in the later portion, where Handel would have
been solemn, earnest, and intolerably dull, he is light,
skittish, good-natured, and sometimes jocular, and