“But it’s too late to go to the Adirondacks, Thyrsis!”
“I know that,” he said. “But there are other places.”
He had heard of one in Virginia—in that very Wilderness of which he had written so eloquently, but had never seen. “Isn’t there some one who could come and stay with you?” he pleaded.
“I don’t know,” replied Corydon. But the next day, as fate would have it, there came a letter from Delia Gordon, saying that she had finished a certain stage of her study-course, and was tired out and in fear of break-down. So an invitation was sent and accepted, and Thyrsis secured the respite which he craved.
And so behold him as a hermit once more, settled in a deserted cabin not far from the battle-field of Spotsylvania. He had got rid of the vermin in the cabin by burning sulphur, and had stocked his establishment with a canvas-cot and a camp-stool and a lamp and an oil-can, and the usual supply of beans and bacon and rice and corn-meal and prunes. Also he had built himself a rustic table, and unpacked a trunkful of blankets and dishes and writing-pads and books. So once more his life was his own, and a thing of delight to him.
He had promised himself to live off the country, as he had before; but the principal game here was the wild turkey, and the wild turkey proved itself a shy and elusive bird. It was not occupied with meditations concerning literary masterpieces; and so it had a great advantage over Thyrsis, who would forget that he had a gun with him after the first half-hour of a “hunt”.
Section 2. It had now become clear to Thyrsis that he had nothing more to expect from his novel; it had sold less than two thousand copies, which meant that it had not earned the money which had already been advanced to him. But all that was now ancient history—the entrenchments and graveyards of the Wilderness battlefield were not more forgotten and overgrown with new life than was the war-book in Thyrsis’ mind. He had had enough of being a national chronicler which the nation did not want; he had come down to the realities of the hour, to the blazing protest of the new Revolution.
For ten years now Thyrsis had been playing at the game of professional authorship; he had studied the literary world both high and low, and had seen enough to convince him that it was an impossible thing to produce art in such a society. The modern world did not know what art was, it was incapable of forming such a concept. That which it called “art” was fraud and parasitism—its very heart was diseased.
For the essence of art was unselfishness; it was an emotion which overflowed, and which sought to communicate itself to others from an impulse of pure joy. It was of necessity a social thing; the supreme art-products of the race had been, like the Greek tragedy and the Gothic cathedral, a result of the labor of a whole community. And what could the modern man, a solitary and predatory wolf in the wilderness of laissez faire—what could he conceive of such a state of soul? What would happen to a man who gave himself up to such a state of soul, in a community where the wolf-law and the wolf-customs prevailed?
A grim purpose had been forming itself in Thyrsis’ mind. He would suppress the artist in himself for the present—he would do it, cost whatever agony it might. He would turn propagandist for a while; instead of scattering his precious seed in barren soil, he would set to work to make the soil ready. There was seething in his mind a work of revolutionary criticism, which would sweep into the rubbish-heap the idols of the leisure-class world.