n
conduct which from moment to moment appeared strangely contradictory.
There were mutterings of popular discontent, which, under threats, gave
way to jubilant acclamation in the first great scenes in the beginning
of the opera. There were alternate mockeries and adulations in the next
scene in which the people figured; and running through other scenes
from invisible singers came ecclesiastical chants, against which were
projected, not operatic song in the old conception, but long passages
of heightened speech, half declamatory, half musical. A multitude
cringed before upraised knouts and fell on its knees before the
approach of a man whose agents swung the knotted cords; anon they
acclaimed the man who sought to usurp a throne and overwhelmed with
ridicule a village imbecile, who was yet supposed because of his mental
weakness to be possessed of miraculous prescience, and therefore to
have a prevision of what was to follow the usurpation. They saw the
incidents of the drama moving past their eyes within a framework of
barbaric splendor typical of a wonderful political past, an amazing
political present, and possibly prophetic of a still more amazing
political future.

These happily ingenuous spectators saw an historical personage racked
by conscience, nerve-torn by spectres, obsessed by superstitions,
strong in position achieved, yet pathetically sweet and moving in his
exhibition of paternal love, and going to destruction through remorse
for crime committed. They were troubled by no curious questionings as
to the accuracy of the historical representation. The Boris Godounoff
before them was a remorse-stricken regicide, whose good works, if he
did any, had to be summed up for their imagination in the fact that he
loved his son. In all this, and also in some of its music, the new
opera was of the opera operatic. But to the unhappily disingenuous (or
perhaps it would be better to say, to the instructed) there was much
more in the new opera; and it was this more which so often gave
judgment pause, even while it stimulated interest and irritated
curiosity. It was a pity that a recent extraordinary outburst of
enthusiasm about a composer and an opera should have had the effect of
distorting their vision and disturbing their judgment.

There was a reason to be suspicious touching this enthusiasm, because
of its origin. It came from France and not from the home land of the
author of the play or the composer of the music. Mo