This is true, but Tolstoy forgets one thing: the mediocrity and the lack of vitality in the majority of those who make or listen to music. Music cannot be dangerous to those who feel nothing. The spectacle of the Opera-house during a performance of Salomé is quite enough to assure us of the immunity of the public to the more perverse emotions evoked by the art of sounds. To be in danger one must be, like Tolstoy, abounding in life. The truth is that in spite of his injustice where Beethoven was concerned, Tolstoy felt his music more deeply than do the majority of those who now exalt him. He, at least, knew the frenzied passions, the savage violence, which mutter through the art of the "deaf old man," but of which the orchestras and the virtuosi of to-day are innocent. Beethoven would perhaps have preferred the hatred of Tolstoy to the enthusiasm of his admirers.
[1] To these years was attributed, in respect of the date of publication, and perhaps of completion, a work which was really written during the happy period of betrothal and the first years of marriage: the beautiful story of a horse, Kholstomier (1861-86). Tolstoy speaks of it in 1883 in a letter to Fet (Further Correspondence.) The art of the commencement, with its fine landscapes, its penetrating psychological sympathy, its humour, and its youth, has much in common with the art of Tolstoy's maturity (Family Happiness, War and Peace), The macabre quality of the end, and the last pages comparing the body of the old horse with that of his master, are full of a realistic brutality characteristic of the years after 1880.
[2] Le Temps, August 29, 1901.
[3] "As for style," his friend Droujinin told him in 1856, "You are extremely illiterate; sometimes like an innovator and a great poet; sometimes like an officer writing to a comrade. All that you write with real pleasure is admirable. The moment you become indifferent your style becomes involved and is horrible." (Vie et Oeuvre.)
[4] Vie et Oeuvre.—During the summer of 1879 Tolstoy lived on terms of great intimacy with the peasants.
[5] In the notes of his readings, between 1860 and 1870, Tolstoy wrote: "The bylines—very greatly impressed."
[6] The Two Old Men (1885).
[7] Where Love is, there God is also (1885).
[8] By what do Men live? (1881); The Three Old Men (1884); The Godchild (1886).