Both circumstances and endowment fitted Mozart, in this case, for the rôle of hare. The son of a professional musician, who wisely directed his early studies, and opened to him in his impressionable years all the advantages of companionship with musicians and with people of general cultivation, he came by good fortune into immediate possession of all the favoring conditions that Haydn had to struggle up to through years of poverty, neglect, and hard labor. It would be hard to imagine more dissimilar lots in life. The contrast between the two men thus externally induced was accentuated by their opposite characters. Haydn, as we have seen, was an intensely human person, full of sympathy for the ordinary and yet always appealing emotions of common humanity, and looking at music largely as a means for their expression. Mozart, on the contrary, was an artist pure and simple. His genius was almost completely independent of his character, and it was by virtue of the former that he was great. His sensitiveness to the minutest distinctions and gradations in sound, his unerring instinct for perfection in form, in the smallest as in the largest instances, his wonderful power to shape a multitude of details into a breathing organism, his Greek serenity of temper and indifference to ranges of feeling that might perturb his art--all these things gave him an incalculable advantage over the plodding Haydn as a master of the purely artistic side of musical composition. They enabled him to assimilate instantaneously all that the older man had to teach him of design, and to become his teacher before he had done with learning from him. Haydn showed Mozart how to do things; and in return Mozart showed Haydn how to do them better.