Whatever its cause, there is in such men a fear of the unsealing of the
unconscious mind, the depository of all actual and vital sensations,
which no effort of their own can overcome. It is for that reason that
they have so gigantic and unshakable a confidence in all purely
conscious processes of creation, particularly in the incorporation of _a
priori_ theories. So it was with Rimsky. There is patent in all his work
a vast love of erudition and a vast faith in its efficacy. He is always
attempting to incarnate in the flesh of his music law abstracted from
classical works. Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of an
intellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect," in a characteristically
servile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky
composed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter
"worshiped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricks
and all the signs of a sterile pedantry." It was not that Rimsky was
pedantic from choice, out of a wilful perversity. His obsession with
intellectual formulas was after all the result of a fear of opening the
dark sluices through which surge the rhythms of life.
If Rimsky-Korsakoff was not absolutely sterile, it was because his
intellectual quality itself was vivacious and brilliant.
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