Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/25

 Rh ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity."

He insists again and again on the value and prevalence of art, and when speaking of those primitive Christians and others who have wished to repudiate art, he says, "Evidently such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied—one of the indispensable means of communication without which mankind could not exist."

Tolstoy knew very well that a performance must be excellent in its form and method of expression in order to be a work of art. In the illustration he gives of the performance of music, for instance, he says that for musical execution to be artistic and to transmit feeling, many conditions are necessary, of which the three chief are the pitch, the time, and the strength of the sound, and he adds: "Musical execution is only then art, only then infects, when the sound is neither higher nor lower than it should be—that is, when exactly the infinitely small centre of the required note is taken, when that note is continued exactly as long as needed, and when the strength of the sound is neither more nor less than is required. The slightest deviation of pitch in either direction, the slightest increase or decrease in time, or the