so firm an intellectual
grasp of the common problem, nor was technically so well equipped to
solve it. None of them, for instance, had as wide an acquaintance with
the folk-song, the touchstone of their labors. For Rimsky-Korsakoff was
something of a philosophical authority on the music of the many peoples
of the Empire, made collections of chants, and could draw on this fund
for his work. Nor did any of the others possess his technical facility.
Moussorgsky, for instance, had to discover the art of music painfully
with each step of composition, and orchestrated faultily all his life,
while Rimsky-Korsakoff had a natural sense of the orchestra, wrote
treatises on the science of instrumentation and on the science of
harmony, and developed into something of a doctor of music. Indeed, when
finally there devolved upon him, as general legatee of the nationalist
school, the task of correcting and editing the works of Borodin and
Dargomijsky and Moussorgsky, he brought to his labor an eruditeness that
bordered dangerously on pedantry. Nor was his learning only musical. He
had a great knowledge of the art and customs that had existed in Russia
before the influences of western Europe repressed them, of the dances
and rites and sun worship that survived, despite Christianity, as
popular and rustic games. And he could press them into service in his
search for a national expression. Like the Sultana in his symphonic
poem, he "drew on the poets for their verses, on the folk-songs for
their words, and intermingled tales and adventures one with another."

Yet there is no score of Rimsky-Korsakoff's, no one of his fifteen
operas and dozen symphonic works, which has, in all its mass, the living
virtue that informs a single page of "Boris Godounow," the virtue of a
thing that satisfies the very needs of life and brings to a race release
and formulation of its speech. There is no score of his, for all the
tang and luxuriousness of his orchestration, for all the incrustation of
bright, strange stones on the matter of his operas, that has the deep,
glowing color of certain passages of Borodin's work, with their magical
evocations of terrestrial Asia and feudal Muscovy, their

"Timbres d'or des mongoles orfevreries
Et vieil or des vieilles nations."

For he was in no sense as nobly human of stature, as deeply aware of the
life about him, as Moussorgsky. Nor did he feel within himself Borodin's
rich and vivid sense of the pas