“For the works in my second category it is necessary to _get into the mood_. To do so we are often obliged to fight with indolence and disinclination. Besides this, there are many other fortuitous circumstances. Sometimes the victory is easily gained. At other times inspiration eludes us, and cannot be recaptured. I consider it, however, the _duty_ of an artist not to be conquered by circumstances. He must not wait. Inspiration is a guest who does not care to visit those who are indolent. The reproaches heaped upon the Russian nation because of its deficiency in original works of art are not without foundation, for the Russians are lazy. A Russian is always glad to procrastinate: he is gifted by nature, but at the same time nature has withheld from him the power of will. A man must learn to conquer himself, lest he should degenerate into _dilettantism_, from which even so colossal a talent as Glinka’s was not free. This man, endowed with an extraordinary and special creative talent, achieved astonishingly little, although he attained a fairly ripe age. Read his _Memoirs_. You will see that he worked like a _dilettante_--on and off, when he was in the mood. However proud we may be of Glinka, we must acknowledge that he did not entirely fulfil his task, if we take into consideration the magnitude of his gifts. Both his operas, in spite of their astonishing and original beauty, suffer from glaring inequalities of style. Side by side with touches of genius and passages of imperishable beauty we find childish and weak numbers. What might not Glinka have accomplished had he lived amid different surroundings, had he worked like an artist who, fully alive to his power and his duty, develops his gifts to the ultimate limit of perfection, rather than as an amateur who makes music his pastime! “I have explained that I compose either from an inward impulse, winged by a lofty and undefinable inspiration, or I simply _work_, invoking all my powers, which sometimes answer and sometimes remain deaf to my invocation. In the latter case the work created will always remain the mere product of labour, without any glow of genuine musical feeling.