Such protests, however, were few, while the body of public enthusiasm was great; and Russian enthusiasm, it may be observed, too often takes the externals into higher account than the essentials. Rubinstein found a powerful patroness in the person of the Grand Duchess Helena Pavlovna; the Imperial Russian Musical Society was founded under the highest social auspices; and two years later all officialdom presided at the birth of its offshoot, the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Most of the evils prophesied by Stassov actually happened, and prevailed, at least for a time. But foreign influences, snobbery, official tyranny and parsimony, the over-crowding of a privileged profession, and mistakes due to the well-intentioned interference of amateurs in high places--these things are but the inevitable stains on the history of most human organisations. What Cheshikin describes as "alienomania," the craze for everything foreign, always one of the weaknesses of Russian society, was undoubtedly fostered to some extent under the early cosmopolitan _régime_ of the conservatoire; but even if it temporarily held back the rising tide of national feeling in music, it was powerless in the end to limit its splendid energy. The thing most feared by the courageous old patriot, Stassov, did not come to pass. The intense fervour of the group known as "The Mighty Band" carried all things before it. Russian music, above all Russian opera, triumphs to-day, both at home and abroad, in proportion to its _amor patriæ_. It is not the diluted cosmopolitan music of the schools, with its familiar echoes of Italy, France and Germany, but the folk-song operas in their simple, forceful and sincere expression of national character that have carried Paris, Milan and London by storm. The two most prominent representatives of the cosmopolitan and academic tendencies in Russia were Anton Rubinstein and Alexander Serov. Both were senior to any member of the nationalist circle, and their work being in many respects very dissimilar in character to that of the younger composers, I propose to give some account of it in this and the following chapter, before passing on to that later group of workers who made the expression of Russian sentiment the chief feature of their operas.