"Ah, if we could only arrange our dreams in chapters—as in a novel. Sometimes Nature does it for us. There is really a beginning, a development, a dénouement. But, for the most of us, life is a crooked road with weeds so high that we can't see the turn of the path. Now, my case—I'm telling you my story after all—my case is a typical one of the artistic sort. I wrote prose, verse, and dissipated with true poetic regularity. It was after reading Nietzsche that I decided to quit my stupid, sinful ways. Yes, you may smile! It was Nietzsche who converted me. I left the old crowd, the old life in Paris, went to Brittany, studied new rhythms, new forms, studied the moon; and then people began to touch their foreheads knowingly. I was suspected simply because I did not want to turn out sweet sonnets about the pretty stars. Why, man, I have a star in my stomach! Every poet has. We are of the same stuff as the stars. It was Marlowe who said, 'A sound magician is a mighty god.' He was wrong. Only the mentally unsound are really wise. This the ancients knew. Even if Gerard de Nerval did walk the boulevards trolling a lobster by a blue ribbon—that is no reason for judging him crazy. As he truly said, 'Lobsters neither bark nor bite; and they know the secrets of the sea!' His dreams simply overflowed into his daily existence. He had the courage of his dreams. Do you remember his declaring that the sun never appears in dreams? How true! But the moon does, 'sexton of the planets,' as the crazy poet Lenau called it—the moon which is the patron sky-saint of men with brains. Ah, brains! What unhappiness they cause in this brainless world, a world rotten with hypocrisy. A poet polishes words until they glitter with beauty, charging them with fulminating meaning—straightway he is called mad by men who sweat and toil on the stock exchange. Have you ever, my dear Quell, watched those little, grotesque brokers on a busy day? No? Well, you will say that no lunatic grimacing beneath the horns of the moon ever made such ludicrous, such useless, gestures. And for what? Money! Money to spend as idiotically as it is garnered. The world is crazy, I tell you, crazy, to toil as it does. How much cleverer are the apes who won't talk, because, if they did, they would be forced to abandon their lovely free life, put on ugly garments, and work for a living. These animals, for which we have such contempt, are freer than men; they are the Supermen of Nietzsche—Nietzsche whose brain mirrored both a Prometheus and a Napoleon." Quell listened to this speech with indifference. Arved continued:—
"Nor was Nietzsche insane when he went to the asylum. His sanity was blinding in its brilliancy; he voluntarily renounced the world of foolish faces and had himself locked away where he would not hear its foolish clacking. O Silence! gift of the gods, deified by Carlyle in many volumes and praised by me in many silly words! My good fellow, society, which is always hypocritical, has to build lunatic asylums in self-defence. These polite jails keep the world in countenance; they give it a standard. If you are behind the bars—"
"Speak for yourself," growled Quell.
"Then the world knows that you are crazy and that it is not. There is no other way of telling the difference. So a conspiracy of fools, lawyers, and doctors is formed. If you do not live the life of the stupid: cheat, lie, steal, smirk, eat, dance, and drink—then you are crazy! That fact agreed upon, the hypocrites, who are quite mad, but cunning enough to dissemble, lock behind bolted doors those free souls, the poets, painters, musicians—artistic folk in general. They brand our gifts with fancy scientific names, such as Megalomania, Paranoia, Folie des grandeurs. Show me a genius and I'll show you a madman—according to the world's notion."
"There you go again," cried Quell, arising to his knees. "Genius, I believe, is a disease of the nerves; and I don't mind telling you that I consider poets and musicians quite crazy."
Arved's eyes were blazing blue signals.
"But, my dear Quell, are not all men mad at some time or another? Madly in love, religiously mad, patriotically insane, and idiotic on the subject of clothes, blood, social precedence, handsome persons, money? And is it not a sign of insanity when one man claims sanity for his own particular art? Painting, I admit, is—"
"What the devil do you know about painting?" Quell roughly interposed; "you are a poet and, pretending to love all creation,—altruism, I think your sentimental philosophers call it,—have the conceit to believe you bear a star in your stomach when it is only a craving for rum. I've been through the game."
He began to pace the sward, chewing a blade of grass. He spoke in hurried, staccato phrases:—
"Why was I put away? Listen: I tried to paint the sun,—for I hate your moon and its misty madness. To put this glorious furnace on canvas is, as you will acknowledge, the task of a god. It never came to me in my dreams, so I wooed it by day. Above all, I wished to express truth; the sun is black. Think of an ebon sun fringed with its dazzling photosphere! I tried to paint sun-rhythms, the rhythms of the quivering sky, which is never still even when it seems most immobile; I tried to paint the rhythms of the atmosphere, shivering as it is with chords of sunlight and chromatic scales as yet unpainted. Like Oswald Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts, my last cry will be for 'the sun.' How did my friends act? What did the critics say? A black sun was too much for the world, though astronomers have proven my theory correct. The doctors swore I drank too much absinthe; the critics said a species of optical madness had set in; that I saw only the peripheral tints—I was yellow and blue crazy. Perhaps I was, perhaps I am. So is the fellow crazy who invented wireless telegraphy; so is the man off his base who invents a folding bird cage. We are all crazy, and the craziest gang are our doctors at the Hermitage." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Arved rolled his handsome head acquiescingly.