In both his great tasks, the secularization of expression and the systematization of form, Haydn’s personal faculties were reinforced by the general musical conditions of his time. At the end of the eighteenth century the mystical type of expression in music had not only arrived at its acme in Palestrina’s work, after which it must inevitably decline, but it had ceased to be an adequate reflection of the general human attitude toward life. Men had turned away from contemplating the mysteries of divinity, to interest themselves more than ever before in the commonest feelings, the universal experiences, of ordinary human beings. They had discovered the miraculousness of the commonplace, and learned to respect themselves. And they had consequently begun to prize as genuine self-expressions those upwellings of naïve emotion, the songs and dances of the people, which had been so long contemptuously ignored by academic musicians. These folk-songs had none of the limitations of the more dignified, recognized art, which paid the price of its dignity in a sacrifice of fullness of expression. They voiced not only what was edifying, what was devout and mystical and other-worldly. They palpitated with simple human feeling, very much of this world; they were tender, animated, melancholy, languorous, excited, merry, amorous, even trivial, dull, or indecent at times, as human beings are. They were in fact the crude but genuine expression of that full, simple, unrestricted humanity to which idealism had begun to pin its faith. The musicians of the seventeenth century, instinctively aware that folk-music somehow succeeded in voicing a wider arc of the full circle of feeling than the conventional ecclesiastical art, applied themselves with enthusiasm to the endeavor to assimilate and idealize it, to turn the current of its pulsing blood into the torpid veins of academic music, at the same time refining its crudities and broadening its proportions. The result of their effort was the suite, or series of dances and songs, the most popular and prevalent authorized form of that century. The suite was, indeed, in its degree a successful embodiment of folk-types of expression in a form broad and dignified enough to satisfy æsthetic demands. But it was not capable of extended growth. The shortness of its movements, their over-obvious scheme of phrase-balance, their uniformity of key, rendered impossible any great increase in complexity of form. Composers therefore found themselves in a dilemma: they were compelled to write either in the old polyphonic style, which labored under insurmountable limitations of expression, or in the new harmonic style, which was as yet capable only of a rudimentary scheme of form, and therefore unsatisfactory to the sense of plastic interest and beauty.