Kashkine, gazing at him thoughtfully, felt a sudden chill of doubt creep into his heart. The time for his biography was drawing near.
In mid-December, "Prince" Gregoriev, (the title being the finest of advertisements,) escorted by Monsieur Avélallement, and attended by a stately retinue of servants, arrived in Hamburg, where his tour began. His amazement at the ovations constantly given him, was naïve; for it seemed that Ivan was never to realize the extent of his reputation. But fanatical adulation, following in the streets, constant cranings of the neck from the populace every time he appeared in public, presently began to make him miserable. He was finding fame rather an unwieldy burden. Indeed, he had begun seriously to regret his contract, when he learned that, on a certain evening, both Edvard Grieg and Johannes Brahms, who had travelled from their respective Norway and Austria to meet him, were to sup with him and his host after occupying a box at the last of his Hamburg concerts.
That supper-party gave a bad quarter of an hour to Madame Avélallement, the hostess: a woman of supreme tact, but whom three great artists bade fair to overwhelm. As they seated themselves at table Brahms, who had been in a brown study, suddenly proffered the company an extemporaneous criticism of Ivan's music, which he tore into miscroscopic bits, and flung upon the winds of sarcasm; after which he perorated elaborately upon his own power and the perfect academic accuracy of his style.
When he had reached his final period, the silence was awe-inspiring. Avélallement, his wife, even Grieg, who was an enthusiastic admirer of Ivan's work, sat dumb with apprehension, quite oblivious of the fact that Ivan, appreciating the solemnity of the occasion, was silent only because he was struggling with hardly repressible laughter. He had diminished this to a smile, however, before he helped himself bountifully to wiener-schnitzel, and remarked, with an air of anxious deference:
"It is a privilege to have heard your views, Herr Professor. In my youth I, too, was a worshipper of the mathematical cult. I should doubtless have compressed myself into that mould had it been possible. But alas! My stubborn inner self would not permit.—After all, each to his own. To me, imagination: the great, melancholy harmonies of the infinite Steppes. To you, your counterpoint, your fugue, the infallible, unquestionable sequence of one-two-three. Let us not quarrel, then, over the inevitable."
Brahms frowned. But alas! for the moment, his mouth was full. And Madame Avélallement, breathing a prayer of thanks and relief to Ivan, had seized her instant and turned the conversation to safer paths. Some hours later the two masters parted, in perfect amicability. But it is to be noted that they never met again.
The dour criticism of the rigid classicist was almost the only adverse word spoken of Ivan throughout his triumphal tour. To be sure, it was frequently said that his conducting was by no means equal to his composing: but that was a truth which could have hurt only had it been turned round. Ivan laughed many a time over his unconquerable terror of daïs and baton; and had not the orchestras he conducted been perfectly drilled in his programs before his coming, he might more than once have come to grief. But it was noticeable that wherever Ivan came into personal contact with the journalists, no praise was afterwards too high for him. For the magnetism of his personality had increased with the years; and, added to the absence of any conceit in his manner, it made him an object of adulation that drove him into frequent fits of contrary taciturnity.
However, the long years of loneliness and unremitting labor proved an excellent foundation for this little period of relaxation. Also, as his tour continued, he was kept in a constant state of surprise at the number of celebrated musicians who came from flattering distances to hear his concerts and shake his hand. Grieg and Brahms were the vanguard of a distinguished throng: men representing every school, and of every type of ability; from the veteran Carl Goldmark, idol of his following, to a very young man, by name Richard Strauss, concerning whose immature but highly individual compositions, Herr Brahms had already worked himself into many a classical fury in the pages of his favorite musical journal; though more than one great artist—among them Ivan,—believed that wondrous messages were to come from the pen of this youth who already dallied, in such magnificent unconcern, with certain awe-inspiring transgressions of classical laws, augmented and diminished to a breathless degree!
It was nearing March, and the German tour was verging on its close, when Kashkine came from Petersburg, at Ivan's earnest request, to make one of the party invited, by Frau Cosima, to spend a week at the home of Wagner in Bayreuth. It was with a little reluctance that Gregoriev entered this sanctum of the great magician's world. None who knew intimately Ivan's work and that of the creator of the music-drama, could easily comprehend the lack of sympathy between these two men whose music was of so much the same type. Perhaps the similarity rose from very different sources. Certainly the effects produced, however much alike in power and in distinction, had originated in minds bearing so little resemblance to each other, that neither could see himself reflected in his contemporary. Indeed, as Wagner adored, and yearned to imitate, Beethoven, his diametrical opposite, so Ivan, tempestuous iconoclast, pored, year after year, over Mozart, deeply deploring his inability to imitate the simple, wearisome, weakly-flowing syrup of obviousness, which constitutes the secret of that master's popularity. So the two great men, each of whom must be reverenced by all the members of the other's following, found in each other, through the insistence of human nature, ficklest of contrary jades, none of the greatness but all of the faults.