“Now, sinful man....” The interesting state of the game prevented him from finishing his sentence.
Later he said:
“I feel that Glinka was coarse, a sensual man. One always feels the man himself in his music. The young Mozart—bright and direct; the simple Haydn; the stern, conceited Beethoven—are all heard in their music.”
Tolstoi is writing an article which is called “The Beginning of the End.”
There was a newspaper correspondent to whom Tolstoi expressed a few of the ideas which made the basis of his article.
“The present movement in Russia is a world movement, the importance of which is still little understood. This movement, like the French Revolution formerly, will perhaps give, by means of its ideas, an impetus for hundreds of years to come. The Russian people has in the highest degree the capacity for organization and self-government. They gave up their power to the Government and waited, as they formerly did for the liberation of the serfs, for the liberation of the land. They have not been given the land, and they themselves will carry out that great reform. Our revolutionaries are perfectly ignorant of the people and do not understand this movement. They might help it, but they only hamper it. In the Russian people, it seems to me, and I think I am not biased, there is more of the Christian spirit than in other peoples. Probably the reason is that the Russian people got to know the New Testament about five centuries before the people of Europe, who until the Reformation hardly knew it.”
Tolstoi criticized the complexity and artificiality of modern art in general, and of music in particular. He said:
“Certainly, if I love art, I can’t love no art, but I must love that which exists. Still I have always before me the ideal of the highest art: to be clear, simple, and accessible to all.”
I was saying how long and systematically one must teach piano-playing in order to be able to play well. Tolstoi found that “system” dangerous.