Chapter V
At the concert in the afternoon two very
interesting things were performed. One was a fantasia, King
Lear,1 the
other was a quartette dedicated to the memory of Bach. Both were
new and in the new style, and Levin was eager to form an opinion of
them. After escorting his sister-in-law to her stall, he stood
against a column and tried to listen as attentively and
conscientiously as possible. He tried not to let his attention be
distracted, and not to spoil his impression by looking at the
conductor in a white tie, waving his arms, which always disturbed
his enjoyment of music so much, or the ladies in bonnets, with
strings carefully tied over their ears, and all these people either
thinking of nothing at all or thinking of all sorts of things
except the music. He tried to avoid meeting musical connoisseurs or
talkative acquaintances, and stood looking at the floor straight
before him, listening.
But the more he listened to the fantasia of King
Lear the further he felt from forming any definite opinion of it.
There was, as it were, a continual beginning, a preparation of the
musical expression of some feeling, but it fell to pieces again
directly, breaking into new musical motives, or simply nothing but
the whims of the composer, exceedingly complex but disconnected
sounds. And these fragmentary musical expressions, though sometimes
beautiful, were disagreeable, because they were utterly unexpected
and not led up to by anything. Gaiety and grief and despair and
tenderness and triumph followed one another without any connection,
like the emotions of a madman. And those emotions, like a madman’s,
sprang up quite unexpectedly.
During the whole of the performance Levin felt like
a deaf man watching people dancing, and was in a state of complete
bewilderment when the fantasia was over, and felt a great weariness
from the fruitless strain on his attention. Loud applause resounded
on all sides. Every one got up, moved about, and began talking.
Anxious to throw some light on his own perplexity from the
impressions of others, Levin began to walk about, looking for
connoisseurs, and was glad to see a well-known musical amateur in
conversation with Pestsov, whom he knew.
“Marvelous!” Pestsov was saying in his mellow bass.
“How are you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque
and plastic, so to say, and richly colored is that passage where
you feel Cordelia’s approach, where woman, das ewig
Weibliche,2 enters
into conflict with fate. Isn’t it?”
“You mean ... what has Cordelia3 to
do with it?” Levin asked timidly, forgetting that the fantasia was
supposed to represent King Lear.
“Cordelia comes in ... see here!” said Pestsov,
tapping his finger on the satiny surface of the program he held in
his hand and passing it to Levin.
Only then Levin recollected the title of the
fantasia, and made haste to read in the Russian translation the
lines from Shakespeare that were printed on the back of the
program.
“You can’t follow it without that,” said Pestsov,
addressing Levin, as the person he had been speaking to had gone
away, and he had no one to talk to.
In the entr’acteea
Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the merits and defects
of music of the Wagner school.4 Levin
maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in
their trying to take music into the sphere of another art, just as
poetry goes wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of
painting ought to do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited
the sculptor who carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting
round the figure of the poet on the pedestal. “These phantoms were
so far from being phantoms that they were positively clinging on
the ladder,”5 said
Levin. The comparison pleased him, but he could not remember
whether he had not used the same phrase before, and to Pestsov,
too, and as he said it he felt confused.
Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can
attain its highest manifestations only by conjunction with all
kinds of art.
The second piece that was performed Levin could not
hear. Pestsov, who was standing beside him, was talking to him
almost all the time, condemning the music for its excessive
affected assumption of simplicity, and comparing it with the
simplicity of the Pre-Raphaelites6 in
painting. As he went out Levin met many more acquaintances, with
whom he talked of politics, of music, and of common acquaintances.
Among others he met Count Bol, whom he had utterly forgotten to
call upon.
“Well, go at once then,” Madame Lvova said, when he
told her; “perhaps they’ll not be at home, and then you can come to
the meeting to fetch me. You’ll find me still there.”