If Rimsky-Korsakoff was not absolutely sterile, it was because his intellectual quality itself was vivacious and brilliant. Though he remained ever a stranger to Russia and his fellows, as he did to himself, he became the most observant of travelers. Though as the foreigner he perceived only the superficial and picturesque elements of the life of the land--its Orientalism, its barbaric coloring--and found his happiest expression in a fantasy after the "Thousand Nights and a Night," he noted his impressions skilfully and vividly, with an almost virtuosic sense of his material. If he could not paint the spring in music, he could at least embroider the score of "Sniegourochka" delightfully with birdcalls and all manner of vernal fancies. If he could not recreate the spirit of peasant art, he could at least, as in "Le Coq d'or," imitate it so tastefully that, listening to the music, we seem to have before us one of the pictures beloved by the Russian folk--a picture with bright and joyous dabs of color, with clumsy but gleeful depictions of battles and cavalcades and festivities and banqueting tables loaded with fruits, meats and flagons. It is indeed curious, and not a little pathetic, to observe how keen Rimsky-Korsakoff's intelligence ever was. The satirization of the demoniacal women of "Parsifal" and "Salome" in the figure and motifs of the Princess of Samarcand is deliciously light and witty. Indeed, not only "Le Coq d'or," but most of his work reveals his dry, real sense of humor. And how often does he not point the direction in which Russian music has subsequently advanced! His latter style, with its mottled chromatic and Oriental modes, its curious and bewildering intervals, is the veritable link between the music of the older Russian group to which he, roughly, belongs and that of the younger, newer men, of Strawinsky in particular. Indeed, the works of Strawinsky reveal incessantly how much the master taught the pupil.