He himself confessed that it was the sense of another's
inarticulate anguish, sympathy with a half-idiotic peasant-boy
stammering out his hopeless love, that first stirred the poet within
him and led him to compose. The music of defeat, the insistent cry of
the world's pain, sound out of his music because the Russian folk has
always known the great mystery and reality and good of suffering, has
known that only the humble, only those who have borne defeat and pain
and misfortune can see the face of life, that sorrow and agony can
hallow human existence, and that while in the days of his triumph and
well-being man is a cruel and evil being, adversity often makes to
appear in him divine and lovely traits. Dostoievsky was never more the
Russian prophet than when he wrote "The Idiot," and uttered in it his
humble thanksgiving that through the curse of nature, through the utter
uselessness of his physical machine, through sickness and foolishness
and poverty, he had been saved from doing the world's evil and adding to
its death. And Moussorgsky is the counterpart of the great romancer.
Like the other, he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like the
other, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god of the low, broad
forehead and peasant garb, that his people bears within it.
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