t. Cui was right when he accused Rimsky
of wanting "nerve and passionate impulse." He was, after all,
temperamentally chilly. "The people are the creators," Glinka had told
the young nationalist composers, "you are but the arrangers." It was
precisely the vital and direct contact with the source of all creative
work that Rimsky-Korsakoff lacked. There is a fault of instinct in men
like him, who can feel their race and their environment only through the
conscious mind. Just what in Rimsky's education produced his
intellectualism, we do not know. Certainly it was nothing extraordinary,
for society produces innumerable artists like him, who are fundamentally
incapable of becoming the instrument every creative being is, and of
discovering through themselves the consciousness of their fellows.
Whatever its cause, there is in such men a fear of the unsealing of the
unconscious mind, the depository of all actual and vital sensations,
which no effort of their own can overcome. It is for that reason that
they have so gigantic and unshakable a confidence in all purely
conscious processes of creation, particularly in the incorporation of _a
priori_ theories. So it was with Rimsky. There is patent in all his work
a vast love of erudition and a vast faith in its efficacy. He is always
attempting to incarnate in the flesh of his music law abstracted from
classical works. Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of an
intellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect," in a characteristically
servile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky
composed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter
"worshiped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricks
and all the signs of a sterile pedantry." It was not that Rimsky was
pedantic from choice, out of a wilful perversity. His obsession with
intellectual formulas was after all the result of a fear of opening the
dark sluices through which surge the rhythms of life.

If Rimsky-Korsakoff was not absolutely sterile, it was because his
intellectual quality itself was vivacious and brilliant. Though he
remained ever a stranger to Russia and his fellows, as he did to
himself, he became the most observant of travelers. Though as the
foreigner he perceived only the superficial and picturesque elements of
the life of the land--its Orientalism, its barbaric coloring--and found
his happiest expression in a fantasy after the "Thousand Nights and a
Night," he not