Page 1477 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

woman, das ewig Weibliche, enters into conflict with fate.
Isn’t it?’
‘You mean...what has Cordelia to do with it?’ Levin
asked timidly, forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to

represent King Lear.
‘Cordelia comes in...see here!’ said Pestsov, tapping his
finger on the satiny surface of the program he held in his
hand and passing it to Levin.
Only then Levin recollected the title of the fantasia, and
made haste to read in the Russian translation the lines
from Shakespeare that were printed on the back of the
program.
‘You can’t follow it without that,’ said Pestsov,
addressing Levin, as the person he had been speaking to
had gone away, and he had no one to talk to.
In the entr’acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument
upon the merits and defects of music of the Wagner
school. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and
all his followers lay in their trying to take music into the
sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it
tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and
as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who
carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round
the figure of the poet on the pedestal. ‘These phantoms

1476 of 1759