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, sound out of his music because the Russian folk has always known the great mystery and reality and good of suffering, has known that only the humble, only those who have borne defeat and pain and misfortune can see the face of life, that sorrow and agony can hallow human existence, and that while in the days of his triumph and well-being man is a cruel and evil being, adversity often makes to appear in him divine and lovely traits. Dostoievsky was never more the Russian prophet than when he wrote "The Idiot," and uttered in it his humble thanksgiving that through the curse of nature, through the utter uselessness of his physical machine, through sickness and foolishness and poverty, he had been saved from doing the world's evil and adding to its death. And Moussorgsky is the counterpart of the great romancer. Like the other, he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like the other, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god of the low, broad forehead and peasant garb, that his people bears within it. Both prose and music are manifestations of the Russian Christ. To Europe in its late hour he came as emissary of the one religious modern folk, and called on men to recognize the truth and reform their lives in accordance with it. He came to wrest man from the slavery of the new gigantic body he had begotten, to wean him from lust of power, to pacify and humble him. Once more he came to fulfil the Old Testamentary prophets. The evangel of Tolstoy, the novels of Dostoievsky, the music of Moussorgsky are the new gospels. In Moussorgsky, music has given the new world its priest. Liszt