s" was inevitable. Moussorgsky's generation had arrived. The men
who felt as he, who recognized the truth of his spare, metallic style,
his sober edifices, had attained majority. A world was able to perceive
in the music of the dead man its symbol.

But it is by no means alone the timeliness of Moussorgsky that has
advanced him to his present position. It is the marvelous originality of
his art. He is one of the most completely and nobly original among
composers, one of the great inventors of form. The music of Moussorgsky
is almost completely treasure-trove. It is not the development of any
one thing, the continuation of a line, the logical outcome of the labors
of others, as the works of so many even of the greatest musicians are.
It is a thing that seems to have fallen to earth out of the arcana of
forms like some meteorite. At the very moment of Wagner's triumph and of
the full maturity of Liszt and Brahms, Moussorgsky composed as though he
had been born into a world in which there was no musical tradition, a
world where, indeed, no fine musical literature, and only a few
folk-songs and orthodox liturgical chants and Greek-Catholic scales
existed. Toward musical theory he seems to have been completely
indifferent. Only one rule he recognized, and that was, "Art is a means
of speech between man and man, and not an end." He was self-taught, and
actually invented an art of music with each step of composition. And
what he produced, though it was not great in bulk, was novel with a
newness that is one of the miracles of music. Scarcely a phrase in his
operas and songs moves in a conventional or unoriginal curve. The songs
of Moussorgsky are things that can be recognized in each of their
moments, so deeply and completely distinctive they are. There is not a
bar of the collection called "Sans soleil" that is not richly and
powerfully new. The harmonies sound new, the melodies are free and
strange and expressive, the forms are solid and weighty as bronze and
iron. They are like lumps dug up out of the earth. The uttermost
simplicity obtains. And every stroke is decisive and meaningful.
Moussorgsky seems to have crept closer to life than most artists, to
have seized emotions in their nakedness and sharpness, to have felt with
the innocence of a child. One of his collections is entitled "La Chambre
d'Enfants." And that surprise and wonder at all the common facts of
life, the sharpness with which the knowledge of death comes,