eatricality, the
avoidance of all that is purely effective, the dignity of expression,
the salt and irony, the round, full ring of every detail are good and
fortifying after the scoriac inundations of Wagner's genius. The gaunt
gray piles, the metallic surfaces, the homelinesses of Moussorgsky, are
more virile, stronger, more resisting than Wagner's music. Only folk
aristocratically sure of themselves can be as gay and light at will. If
there is anything in modern music to be compared with the sheer, blunt,
powerful volumes of primitive art it is the work of Moussorgsky. And as
the years pass, the man's stature and mind become more immense, more
prodigious. One has but to hearken to the accent of the greater part of
modern music to gauge in whose shadow we are all living, how far the
impulse coming from him has carried. The whole living musical world,
from Debussy to Bloch, from Strawinsky to Bartok, has been vivified by
him. And, certainly, if any modern music seems to have the resisting
power that beats back the centuries and the eons, it is his pieces of
bronze and ironware and granite. What the world lost when Modest
Moussorgsky died in his forty-second year we shall never know.

But, chiefest of all, his music has the grandeur of an essentially
religious act. It is the utterance of the profoundest spiritual
knowledge of a people. Moussorgsky was buoyed by the great force of the
Russian charity, the Russian humility, the Russian pity. It was that
great religious feeling that possessed the man who had been a foppish
guardsman content to amuse ladies by strumming them snatches of "Il
Trovatore" and "La Traviata" on the piano, and gave him his profound
sense of reality, his knowledge of how simple and sad a thing human life
is after all, and made him vibrate so exquisitely with the suffering
inherent in the constitution of the world. It gave his art its color,
its character, its tendency. It filled him with the unsentimental, warm,
animal love that made him represent man faithfully and catch the very
breath of his fellows as it left their bodies. Certainly, it was from
his race's dim, powerful sense of the sacrament of pain that his music
flows. He himself confessed that it was the sense of another's
inarticulate anguish, sympathy with a half-idiotic peasant-boy
stammering out his hopeless love, that first stirred the poet within
him and led him to compose. The music of defeat, the insistent cry of
the world's pain, so