Anna Karenina - Part 7

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

the merits 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."