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_ At the concert in the afternoon two very interesting things were
performed. One was a fantasia, King Lear; 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 Ring 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, enters into
conflict with fate. Isn't it?"
"You mean ...what has Cordelia 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'acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon
themerits and defects of music of the Wagner school. 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," 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-Raphaelites 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." _
Read next: Part Seven: Chapter 6
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