"'What an absurd existence ours is!' he thought. 'Unhappiness, money, hatred, honour—they are all nothing.... Here is the truth, the reality!... Natasha, my little dove!... Let us see if she is going to reach that B?... She has reached it, thank God!'
"And to emphasise the B he sung the third octave below it in accompaniment.
"'How splendid! I have sung it too,' he cried, and the vibration of that octave awoke in his soul all that was best and purest. Beside this superhuman sensation, what were his losses at play and his word of honour?... Follies! One could kill, steal, and yet be happy!"
Nikolas neither kills nor steals, and for him music is only a passing influence; but Natasha is on the point of losing her self-control. After an evening at the Opera, "in that strange world which is intoxicated and perverted by art, and a thousand leagues from the real world; a world in which good and evil, the extravagant and the reasonable, are mingled and confounded," she listened to a declaration from Anatol Kouraguin, who was madly in love with her, and she consented to elope with him.
The older Tolstoy grew, the more he feared music.[22] A man whose influence over him was considerable—Auerbach, whom in 1860 he had met in Dresden—had doubtless a hand in fortifying his prejudices. "He spoke of music as of a Pflichtloser Genuss (a profligate amusement). According to him, it was an incentive to depravity."[23]
Among so many musicians, some of whose music is at least amoral, why, asks M. Camille Bellaigue,[24] should Tolstoy have chosen Beethoven, the purest, the chastest of all?—Because he was the most powerful. Tolstoy had early loved his music, and he always loved it. His remotest memories of Childhood were connected with the Sonata Pathétique; and when Nekhludov in Resurrection heard the andante of the Symphony in C Minor, he could hardly restrain his tears: "he was filled with tenderness for himself and for those he loved." Yet we have seen with what animosity Tolstoy referred in his What is Art?[25] to the "unhealthy works of the deaf Beethoven"; and even in 1876 the fury with which "he delighted in demolishing Beethoven and in casting doubts upon his genius" had revolted Tchaikowsky and had diminished his admiration for Tolstoy. The Kreutzer Sonata enables us to plumb the depths of this passionate injustice. What does Tolstoy complain of in Beethoven? Of his power. He reminds us of Goethe; listening to the Symphony in C Minor, he is overwhelmed by it, and angrily turns upon the imperious master who subjects him against his will.[26]
"This music," says Tolstoy, "transports me immediately into the state of mind which was the composer's when he wrote it.... Music ought to be a State matter, as in China. We ought not to let Tom, Dick, and Harry wield so frightful a hypnotic power.... As for these things (the first Presto of the Sonata) one ought only to be allowed to play them under particular and important circumstances...."
Yet we see, after this revolt, how he surrenders to the power of Beethoven, and how this power is by his own admission a pure and ennobling force. On hearing the piece in question, Posdnicheff falls into an indefinable state of mind, which he cannot analyse, but of which the consciousness fills him with delight. "There is no longer room for jealousy." The wife is not less transfigured. She has, while she plays, "a majestic severity of expression"; and "a faint smile, compassionate and happy, after she has finished." What is there perverse in all this? This: that the spirit is enslaved: that the unknown power of sound can do with him what it wills; destroy him, if it please.