t the Russian is a
cosmopolitan man; he is more French than the Parisian, and a willing
dweller in the depths of German thought. The most artistic of Russia's
novelists, Turgenieff, was cosmopolitan; and it was a frequent
reproach made during his lifetime that the music of Tschaikovsky was
too European, not sufficiently national. Naturally, Anton Rubinstein
suffered the same criticism; too German for the Russians, too Russian
for the Germans. It was altogether different in the case of Modeste
Moussorgsky.

To enter into sympathy with Russian music we must remember one thing:
that the national spirit pervades its masterpieces. Even the so-called
"cosmopolitanism" of Peter Ilitch Tschaikovsky is superficial. To be
sure, he leaned on Liszt and the French, but booming melancholy and
orgiastic frenzy may be found in some of his symphonies. According to
the judgment of the Rubinsteins he was too much the Kalmuck; Nicolas
Rubinstein severely criticised him for this trait. But of all the
little group that gathered about Mila Balakirev fifty years ago there
was no one so Russian as a certain young officer named Modeste
Petrovitch Moussorgsky (born 1839, died 1881). Not Rimsky-Korsakof,
Borodine, Cesar Cui were so deeply saturated with love of the Russian
soil and folk-lore as this pleasant young man. He played the piano
skilfully, but as amateur, not virtuoso. He came of good family,
"little nobles," and received an excellent but conventional education.
A bit of a dandy, he was the last person from whom to expect a
revolution, but in Russia anything may happen. Moussorgsky was like
other well-nurtured youths who went to Siberia for a mere gesture of
dissent. With Emerson he might have agreed that "whoso would be a man
must be a non-conformist." With him rebellion against law and order
revealed itself in an abhorrence of text-books, harmony, and
scholastic training. He wished to achieve originality without the
monotonous climb to the peak of Parnassus, and this was his
misfortune. Two anarchs of music, Richard Strauss and Arnold
Schoenberg, reached their goals after marching successfully through
the established forms: and the prose versicles of Walt Whitman were
achieved only after he had practised the ordinary rules of prosody.
Not so with Moussorgsky, and while few youthful composers have been so
carefully counselled, he either could not, or would not, take the
trouble of mastering the rudiments of his art.

The result almos