It was at this auspicious moment that Haydn, equipped, as we have seen, with an affectionate and sympathetic heart, beating in unison with that of common humanity, and with a lucid, practical, pedestrian mind, well-fitted to disentangle and arrange in order the factors of a complex problem, appeared in the arena. The adjustment between his nature and his circumstances was thus peculiarly complete. He found in the folk-music of his native place, to begin with, a type of emotional expression with which he was, both as regards qualities and limitations, in complete sympathy. “The Croatian melodies,” says Mr. W. H. Hadow, “are bright, sensitive, piquant, but they seldom rise to any high level of dignity or earnestness. They belong to a temper which is marked rather by feeling and imagination than by any sustained breadth of thought, and hence, while they enrich their own field of art with great beauty, there are certain frontiers which they rarely cross, and from which, if crossed, they soon return.” Could any better short description be devised of Haydn’s own characteristic vein of sentiment--“bright, sensitive, piquant, but seldom rising to any high level of dignity or earnestness”? His music is, in fact, from the point of view of expression, essentially an expansion, development, and idealization of the characteristic utterance of his race. On the other hand, he had the mental grasp necessary to organize all this crude, inchoate, fragmentary material into the finished and coherent forms of art. It is a long step from even the most eloquent expressions of single aspects of feeling, in short songs and dances, to an extended composition in which moods are coordinated and contrasted, proportions fitly ordered, and unity combined with broad scope--a step which only intelligence can make. The technical task which faced the musicians of the day was to find a scheme of musical form that should knit the accents of the popular speech, in themselves poignant and thrilling but disjointed, fragmentary, halting, into a fluent and rational utterance. Sir Hubert Parry explains the situation as follows: “What Haydn had to build upon, and what was most congenial to him through his origin and circumstances, was the native people’s songs and dances, which belong to the same order of art in point of structure as symphonies and sonatas; and what he wanted, and what all men who aimed in the same direction wanted, was to know how to make this kind of music on a grander scale. The older music of Handel and Bach leaned too much towards the style of the choral music and organ music of the church to serve him as a model. For the principle upon which their art was mainly built was the treatment of the separate parts. In the modern style the artistic principle upon which music is mainly based is the treatment of harmonies and keys, and the way in which those harmonies and keys are arranged. In national dances few