neglected them. But Haydn's Prince willed the thing to be done, and Haydn acquiesced. The patient blood of generations of industrious, persevering, plodding peasant labourers was in him; and perhaps his early training under Frankh and Reutter counted for something. He went on unflinchingly, outwardly calm--calm even in the eyes of languid eighteenth-century people--inwardly living strenuously as he battled with and conquered his art-problems. CHAPTER V MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE PERIOD This must have occurred to every one whilst reading the biographies of great artists: After all, is it the function of high genius to discover means of expression only that they may be used afterwards by numberless mediocrities who have nothing whatever to express? It is gravely set down about Haydn, for instance, that he "stereotyped" the symphony form, and "handed it on" to future generations. Now, I have observed that the men who do this kind of work are always the second-rate men: first come the inventors, the pioneers, and then the perfecters; it is always at the close of a school that the tip-top men arise. They claw in their material from everywhere around, and use it up so thoroughly as to leave nothing for the later comers to do with it that was not done before, and done better, done when the stuff was fresh and the impulse full of its first vigour. Haydn did a lot of spade-work for Mozart and Beethoven, especially Mozart; but that was early, more than twenty years before his death, and it is significant that the portion of his life-work which most influenced and directed Mozart and Beethoven is chiefly second-rate music. When he was writing the music that forces us to place him near the noblest composers, he obeyed the invariable rule, and was in turn being influenced by Mozart. The case is remarkable, but it is only what anyone with a seeing eye might have predicted, and to us to-day it is quite plain.