Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/413

 "This music immediately, directly transfers me to the mental condition in which he was who wrote that music. I am merged in his soul, and am with him carried from one condition to another; but I do not know why this happens with me. He who wrote it, say the Kreutzer Sonata,—Beethoven,—he knew why he was in such a mood; this mood led him to do certain acts, and so this mood had some meaning for him, whereas for me it has none. Therefore music only irritates,—it does not end. Well, they play a military march, and the soldiers march under its strain, and the music comes to an end; they play dance music, and I finish dancing, and the music comes to an end; well, they sing a mass, I receive the Holy Sacrament, and the music comes to an end. But here there is only an irritation, but that which is to be done under this irritation is absent. It is for this reason that music is so terrible and often acts so dreadfully. In China music is a state matter. That is the way it ought to be. How can any one who wishes be allowed to hypnotize another, or many persons, and then do with them what he pleases? And especially how can they allow any kind of an immoral man to be the hypnotizer?

"Into whose hands has this terrible power fallen? Let us take for example the Kreutzer Sonata. How can one play the first presto in a drawing-room amidst ladies in décolleté garments? To play this presto, to applaud it, and then to eat ice-cream and talk about the last bit of gossip? These things should be played only under certain important, significant circumstances, and then when certain acts, corresponding to this music, are to be performed, and that is to be done which the music demands of you. But the provocation of energy and feeling which do not correspond to the time or place, and which find no expression, cannot help acting perniciously. Upon me, at least, it had a most terrible effect: it seemed to me as though entirely new feelings, new possibilities, of which