s, comes out of endless
wastes. And it is as though, piercing further into the bosom of the
eternal mother, Asia, his eye had rested finally upon a single spot, a
single nucleus; that it had watched that nucleus increase into a tribe;
had watched that tribe commence its westward march, wandering, spawning,
pushing ever westward, battling and groping, advancing slowly,
patiently, steadily into power and manhood, until it had come into
possession of the wildest and fairest land of eastern Europe, until it
had joined with other stocks and swelled into a vast nation, a gigantic
empire; and that then, in that moment of fulfilment, Borodin had turned
in prophetic ecstasy upon modern Russia and bade it ring its bells and
sound its chants, bade it push onward with its old faith and vigor,
since the Slavonic grandeur and glory were assured. For through the
savage trumpet-blasts and rude and lumbering rhythms, through the
cymbal-crashing Mongol marches and warm, uncouth peasant chants that are
his music, there surges that vision, that sense of immanent glory, that
fortifying asseveration.

It rises to us for the reason that although his music is an evocation of
past times, a conjuring up of the buried Muscovy, it is a glad and
exuberant one. It has the tone neither of those visions of departed days
inspired by yearnings for greener, happier ages, nor of those out of
which there speaks, as there speaks out of the "Salammbo" of Flaubert,
for instance, a horror of man's everlasting filth and ferocity. A fresh
and joyous and inspiriting wind blows from these pages. The music of
"Prince Igor," with its epical movement and counter-movement, its
shouting, wandering, savage hordes, its brandished spears and flashing
Slavic helms, its marvelous parade of warrior pride and woman's flesh,
its evocation of the times of the Tartar inundations, is full of a rude,
chivalric lustiness, a great barbaric zest and appetite, a childlike
laughter. The B-minor symphony makes us feel as though the very pagan
joy and vigor that had once informed the assemblies and jousts and
feasting of the boyartry of medieval Russia, and made the guzli and
bamboo flute to sound, had waked again in Borodin; and in this
magnificent and lumbering music, these crude and massive forms, lifted
its wassail and its gold and song once more. For the composer of such
works, such evocations, it is patent that the past was the wonderful
warrant of a wonderful future. For this man,