Yet there is no score of Rimsky-Korsakoff's, no one of his fifteen operas and dozen symphonic works, which has, in all its mass, the living virtue that informs a single page of "Boris Godounow," the virtue of a thing that satisfies the very needs of life and brings to a race release and formulation of its speech. There is no score of his, for all the tang and luxuriousness of his orchestration, for all the incrustation of bright, strange stones on the matter of his operas, that has the deep, glowing color of certain passages of Borodin's work, with their magical evocations of terrestrial Asia and feudal Muscovy, their "Timbres d'or des mongoles orfevreries Et vieil or des vieilles nations." For he was in no sense as nobly human of stature, as deeply aware of the life about him, as Moussorgsky. Nor did he feel within himself Borodin's rich and vivid sense of the past. Cui was right when he accused Rimsky of wanting "nerve and passionate impulse." He was, after all, temperamentally chilly. "The people are the creators," Glinka had told the young nationalist composers, "you are but the arrangers." It was precisely the vital and direct contact with the source of all creative work that Rimsky-Korsakoff lacked. There is a fault of instinct in men like him, who can feel their race and their environment only through the conscious mind. Just what in Rimsky's education produced his intellectualism, we do not know. Certainly it was nothing extraordinary, for society produces innumerable artists like him, who are fundamentally incapable of becoming the instrument every creative being is, and of discovering through themselves the consciousness of their fellows. Whatever its cause, there is in such men a fear of the unsealing of the unconscious mind, the depository of all actual and vital sensations, which no effort of their own can overcome. It is for that reason that they have so gigantic and unshakable a confidence in all purely conscious processes of creation, particularly in the incorporation of _a priori_ theories. So it was with Rimsky. There is patent in all his work a vast love of erudition and a vast faith in its efficacy. He is always attempting to incarnate in the flesh of his music law abstracted from classical works. Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of an intellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect," in a characteristically servile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky composed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter "worshiped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricks and all the signs of a sterile pedantry." It was not that Rimsky was pedantic from choice, out of a wilful perversity. His obsession with intellectual formulas was after all the result of a fear of opening the dark sluices through which surge the rhythms of life.