While Dargomijsky was working at his last opera, and gathering round his sick bed that group of young nationalists soon to be known by various sobriquets, such as "The Invincible Band," and "The Mighty Five,"[16] Anton Rubinstein was also working for the advancement of music in Russia; but it was the general aspect of musical education which occupied his attention, rather than the vindication of the art as an expression of national temperament. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century there had been but two musical elements in Russia, the creative and the auditory. In the latter we may include the critics, almost a negligible quantity in those days. At the close of the 'fifties a third element was added to the situation--the music schools. "The time had come," says Stassov, "when the necessity for schools, conservatoires, incorporated societies, certificates, and all kinds of musical castes and privileges, was being propagated among us. With these aims in view, the services were engaged of those who had been brought up to consider everything excellent which came from abroad, blind believers in all kinds of traditional prejudices. Since schools and conservatoires existed in Western Europe, we, in Russia, must have them too. Plenty of amateurs were found ready to take over the direction of our new conservatoires. Such enterprise was part of a genuine, but hasty, patriotism, and the business was rushed through. It was asserted that music in Russia was then at a very low ebb and that everything must be done to raise the standard of it. With the object of extending the tone and improving the knowledge of music, the Musical Society was founded in 1859, and its principal instrument, the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, in 1862.... Not long before the opening of this institution, Rubinstein wrote an article,[17] in which he deplored the musical condition of the country, and said that in Russia 'the art was practised only by amateurs' ... and this at a time when Balakirev, Moussorgsky and Cui had already composed several of their early works and had them performed in public. Were these men really only amateurs? The idea of raising and developing the standard of music was laudable, but was Russia truly in such sore need of that kind of development and elevation when an independent and profoundly national school was already germinating in our midst? In discussing Russian music, the first questions should have been: what have we new in our music; what is its character; what are its idiosyncrasies, and what is necessary for its growth and the preservation of its special qualities? But the people who thought to encourage the art in Russia did not, or would not, take this indigenous element into consideration, and from the lofty pinnacle of the Western Conservatoire they looked down on our land as a _tabula rasa_, a wild uncultivated soil which must be sown with good seed imported from abroad.... In reply to Rubinstein's article I wrote:[18] 'How many