When we compare the London symphonies to the earlier ones, we feel at once a stronger, more vehement spirit driving the music on.  They seem richer in themes than the others, partly because the themes are bigger, partly because they are more perfectly adapted to monodic, harmonic treatment, and out of every bar something is made.  A theme is pregnant, of course, according to what a composer sees in it and gets out of it.  Who would know this of old Clementi—­

[Illustration:  some bars of music]

—­if Mozart had not woven the Zauberfloete overture out of it?  And who save Beethoven saw the possibilities of this?—­

[Illustration:  some bars of music]

But Haydn had to find such themes and see their possibilities before Mozart or Beethoven, and it was only after Mozart’s death he was completely successful.  He still largely depended upon fanfares and key-relationships in leading from passage to passage, and getting variety while keeping unity.  There is still, compared with Beethoven, a huge amount of formalistic padding; but so far as he dared and could, he was loading his rifts with ore.  Such a subject as this—­

[Illustration:  some bars of music]

—­is far removed from his earlier folk-song themes, but it is further still from the old fugal type of subject.  It is suited to symphonic development, and to no other kind.

The theme quoted in my first chapter is one of a singing kind, and, as if Haydn had planned the whole symphony with a prophetic glance at these remarks, the subject of the last movement is either a peasant-dance or a good imitation: 

[Illustration:  some bars of music]

This movement is rich in invention, even for Haydn at his best; it is full of jollity far removed from vulgarity; the atmosphere is continuously fresh, almost fragrant, and there are endless touches of poetic seriousness.  The Adagio is as profound as anything he wrote.  Perhaps, on the whole—­and it may be wrong to indicate a choice at all—­the slow movement of the symphony in C is fullest of sustained loveliness.  That phrase beginning

[Illustration:  some bars of music]

is, in its sheer beauty, reminiscent of Mozart, though the way the balance of feeling is recovered at the end is pure Haydn; there is the deepest human feeling, but perfect sanity is never lost.  Towards the end the development is carried on in quite the Beethoven way, quite a long passage growing out of the simple phrase: 

[Illustration:  some bars of music]

Nearly all Haydn’s art, and a good deal of the art of Beethoven, may be found in the B flat symphony.  The theme is announced in a minor form, adagio: 

[Illustration:  some bars of music]

—­taken up at once in the major, allegro, and wrought into most beautiful and expressive strains, each one growing out of the last (if I may once again use Wordsworth’s magnificent word) “inevitably”; it could not be different.