wnward
through all times and ages, through all the days of humankind, down to
the very foundations of the globe itself. For it grows from the flesh of
the nameless, unnumbered multitudes of men condemned by life throughout
its course to misery. It has its roots where death and defeat have been.
It has its roots in all bruised and maimed and frustrated flesh, in all
flesh that might have borne a god and perished barren. It has its root
in every being who has been without sun, in every being who has suffered
cold and hunger and disease, and pierces down and touches every
voiceless woe, every defeat that man has ever known. And out of that sea
of mutilated flesh it rises like low, trembling speech, halting and
inarticulate and broken. It has no high, compelling accent, no
eloquence. And yet, it has but to lift its poor and quavering tones, and
the splendor of the world is blotted out, and the great, glowing
firmament is made a sorrowful gray, and, in a single instant, we have
knowledge of the stern and holy truth, know the terrible floor upon
which we tread, know what man has ever suffered, and what our own
existences can only prove to be.

For it is the cry of one possessed and consumed in every fiber of his
being by that single consciousness. It is as though Moussorgsky, the
great, chivalric Russian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame for
gorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and chants, had been all
his days the Prince in "Khovanchtchina" to whom the sorceress foretells:
"Disgrace and exile await thee. Honors and power and riches will be torn
from thee. Neither thy past glory nor thy wisdom can save thee. Thou
wilt know what it is to want, and to suffer, and to weep the tears of
the hopeless. And so, thou wilt know the truth of this world." It is as
though he had heard that cry incessantly from a million throats, as
though it had tolled in his ears like a bourdon until it informed him
quite, and suffused his youth and force and power of song. It is as
though his being had been opened entirely in orientation upon the vast,
sunless stretches of the world, and distended in the agony of taking up
into himself the knowledge of those myriad broken lives. For it is the
countless defeated millions that live again in his art. It is they who
speak with his voice. Better even than Walt Whitman, Moussorgsky might
have said:

"Through me, voices long dumb, many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable