for performance by gatherings of his friends, comic canons, in which the curious duality of his nature is strikingly illustrated. The words were colloquial, full of slang, and often coarse; the music, written in one of the most severe of contrapuntal forms, was always gracious and consummately wrought as only Mozart knew how to make it. His musical humor reaches its acme in the “Musikalische Spass,” or, as he himself called it, the “Peasants’ Symphony,” for string quartet and two horns. This is nothing less than a parody of the kind of work that Mozart was constantly producing in all seriousness--a Divertimento in regular form, but supposed to be written by a tyro and played by amateurs. The horns come in pompously with wrong notes; the first violin, ascending a long scale, goes half a tone too high; at the end, in the midst of a fanfare in F-major by the horns, the string instruments strike in each in a different key. “The attempt after thematic elaboration,” says Jahn, “is very ludicrous; it is as though the composer had heard of such a thing, and strove to imitate it in a few phrases, greatly to his own satisfaction. The art is most remarkable whereby the pretended ignorance never becomes wearisome, and the audience is kept in suspense throughout.” Thus at every turn are we impressed with that wondrous inspiration and skill as an artist which were so curiously combined in Mozart with lack of distinction as a man. Even Haydn, for all his normality and usualness of emotion, had a certain human quaintness and sweetness for which we miss any analogue in Mozart. Yet when we shift the point of view, and study the artists rather than the men, it is Mozart who stands out as the more interesting figure. As we saw in the last chapter, Haydn’s power as an artist depended chiefly on the trenchancy and practical grasp of his mind, by which he was enabled to crystallize into forms of salient unity the motifs, phrases, and sections of his music. System is the key-note of his work; he was an organizer, both by natural faculty, and in obedience to the needs of his time. And he had the defects of his merits, in a certain monotony, angularity, and cut-and-dried precision. Mozart, on the contrary, even in his earliest pieces, already cited, showed a more flexible artistic technique; and beginning where Haydn left off, he was able to carry the same sort of organization into a higher stage, combining with the unity of the whole a much greater diversity in the parts. Variety is as notable in Mozart’s work as unity in Haydn’s. His art is more subtle, and not a whit less solid.