The Genius

by Margaret Horton Potter

The issue of the Moscow Journal for March 26, 1887, announced the return of Prince Ivan Gregoriev to Russia after a thirty-month absence abroad; adding that he was in Moscow for a few days only, before proceeding to his country-place of Maidonovo, near Klin. As a matter of fact, Ivan, after a railway journey of sixty hours, arrived in Moscow on the evening of one day, and remained at the Slaviansky Bazaar until the afternoon of the next. During this brief period, he was besieged by visitors of every description, from the barest acquaintances, to men like Balakirev and Ostrovsky; and, to the general chagrin, all were alike refused. Ivan was in his blackest mood. When, three hours before the departure of the Klin train, Piotr, taking his life in his hands, did admit Kashkine, it was half an hour before that rarest of diplomatists could bring the gleam of one faint smile across his old friend's face. In his memoirs the admirable Constantine has left a picture of Gregoriev as he was at this period—in his forty-eighth year:

"A figure lean, not very tall, giving the dual impression of wiry fortitude, and a delicacy that was rather spiritual than physical, Gregoriev's body formed a marked contrast to his face—at sight of which, on the day of his return, I confess to having been shocked, so changed had it become since my last view of it. From black, with a slight silvering only at the temples, his hair and beard were now almost pure white. The lines of care in his face had deepened incredibly. The skin had something of that parchment look that I had supposed to be the special mark of the recluse; but Ivan told me he had been a good deal out-of-doors in the last months. Without asking, I perceived at once that he was under his special morbid scourge; and when I learned that he intended retiring to Klin for a period of complete isolation, I was less astonished than dismayed. I think I had even a momentary presentiment that from this retirement he was destined never to emerge; though I knew that he was still some years removed from his fiftieth birthday. However, with Ivan Mikhailovitch, time was never a thing to be considered. He was a man of eternity."

Into their two hours together on that last Moscow day, the friends crowded much important conversation. Ivan unfolded his plans for the future; and discussed those manuscripts he had brought back, and which he afterwards intrusted to Kashkine to be delivered to his publishers. Immediately upon the first printing, they were to be sent to the Musical Society, to be passed or rejected for the next season's concert series. This business finished, Ivan plunged into an impulsive account of the bizarre history of his last months in Florence. But when he had reached a half-way point, he as suddenly halted; and, Piotr a moment later announcing that the carriage waited to drive him to his train, Ivan bade his friend a hurried farewell. Kashkine only learned the end of the tale that interested him so deeply, some fourteen months later.

Once more, as on the first day of his possession, Ivan reached his hermitage in the late afternoon of a spring day. But this home-coming was not like the first; for, among the little throng of servants gathered in the hall to meet their Prince, one face was missing. After hasty greetings, Ivan, with a sudden sense of the truth, asked haltingly for the old servitor whom he had sent back to Russia, nine months before, from Naples. The reply, anticipated by but one moment, was a great shock to him. Old Sósha had been buried yesterday; his last words being a greeting to the master he had so longed to see again.—And Ivan might have been present at the funeral of this dearly-loved old man!—But he made no rebuke; for he knew that the humility of these poor creatures would never have permitted them to disturb his pleasure for one of themselves.

It was, perhaps, only morbidness that Ivan should have allowed the death of Sósha, a man of eighty-four, to affect him as it did. Yet the following weeks taught him that all his recent gloomy meditations and self-analyses had had in them an element of affectation incompatible with real grief. Was it not real grief, then, that he was suffering now? For weeks he lived in the blackness that was horrible to those who watched him. And finally Piotr, who dared anything for his master, sent, secretly, for Kashkine—whom he believed endowed with miraculous powers wherever his Prince was concerned. But for once Kashkine's presence seemed powerless to rouse the composer from his lassitude: a feat which was eventually accomplished by one who knew him more intimately than any man.

It was now many years since his cousin and true companion first began to make her deeply affectionate study of Ivan's moods. In May, according to a former custom, Nathalie came down to Maidonovo, unaccompanied by her daughters. And Kashkine, after watching her during one day and night, retreated, gallantly leaving the field to her. It was one of the few times on which she came alone to Ivan's home; and her excuse for the act was one newly characteristic of her:

"My dear Ivan, I am forty-four years old: a safe age, if ever woman is to attain to one. I now, therefore, insist upon the comfort of personal freedom. It is the one compensation permitted for the loss of the youth which can make freedom dangerous."

Ivan's reply to the theory was a smile. For neither by him nor by herself could the graceful, beautifully groomed, chic little woman possibly have been regarded as she chose to describe herself. At the same time, it would have been a person utterly beyond the pale who would have admitted the possibility of impropriety in the behavior of the Princess Féodoreff, one of the greatest ladies of Petersburg. She had long since recovered any ground lost during the few months of her separation from her dissolute Prince. And within the last eighteen months rather a signal honor had been offered her in the intimate friendship of the Grand-Duchess Catharine:—most irreproachable, unapproachable, and, at the same time, most popular, of the imperial women of Russia. Perhaps her friendship with this Princess was the more genuine and the more truly sympathetic in that, as she was well aware, her own history and that of her Imperial Highness bore many points of resemblance. For the great-granddaughter of Constantine the Abdicator was the wife of one of the most dissolute of the Grand-Dukes, whose abuses of manhood no ingenuity of his proud wife was able to conceal. Hence Nathalie, herself so intimately acquainted with this poignant form of suffering, was just now very full of her friendship with the beautiful Princess; and she poured into Ivan's half-listening ears all that she knew of this exquisite woman, married at seventeen, left alone in her cold and unapproachable state, to learn all the dire details of a state marriage: and now mother of a son who, in very boyhood, was already believed to be gazing with interest down the path his father had trod. Even Nathalie herself could not guess the anguish with which this secret dread had already filled the mother's heart; nor the struggle she was prepared to make before her motherhood should be dishonored as her wifehood had always been.

In time the story of this Princess, told, day by day, in semi-accidental snatches, laid hold of Ivan's imagination. By degrees he began to enter into the life that was being laid bare before him with all the intimate understanding that is part of the Creator's gift. For many weeks after the departure of his cousin, indeed, Ivan mused upon the subject of the royal lady, dowered, apparently, with every enviable possession of wealth and power, and yet one of the most truly unfortunate of humankind. The immediate result of this was the writing of the "Three Studies," unnamed, so long left in manuscript, and so persistently misunderstood. It is only, indeed, within the last five years that they have been discovered to bear a direct relationship to the last three movements of his greatest symphony. To-day they form the treasure of that small but expanding cult who have been so mocked at for their serious study of the connection between various harmonies and the mental emotions, from which has grown the dream of establishing a perfect musical law.

It was the spring of 1889 before Ivan at last began to work seriously upon his "Sixth Symphony": that which had been growing in his mind for more than ten years; and which, while it forms, perhaps, his greatest claim to immortality, was the first to open the eyes of Philistia to the splendors of his powers. Like all of those few artistic masterpieces that approach perfection, the "Tosca Symphony" is popular alike with the many and with the few; because it contains something of the essence of all humanity: strikes a chord that must find some echo in the breast of every man and woman that has known the meaning of pain. But, superb as was the height attained in this work, Ivan paid dearly for its accomplishment. For, from the nervous breakdown that marked its conclusion, he never fully recovered.