“Ideals can exist outside of little glass bottles, my dear Sylvester,” he resumed. “Perhaps you may be surprised at hearing I am approaching the attainment of one of the ideals of my maturing years. It's a great scheme for the purification of art and the ennoblement of life. It is my own conception. Have you been to the Royal Academy yet?”
“No,” said Sylvester. “I haven't had the time.”
“Happy man! You have been spared a soul-rending spectacle of England's utter degradation. In all our art—drama, music, painting, poetry, architecture—it is the same. The vulgarity of commercialism, the banality of meretricious prettiness, the hand and brain working mechanically while the soul is far away wallowing in pounds, shillings and pence, or following a golf ball, or philandering in my Lady's boudoir. The true artist is suffocated. But we 're going to change all that.”
“How are you going to manage it?” asked Sylvester, with polite indifference.
“Ah, that's my secret. A great and glorious scheme just on the point of ripening. We are going to catch our artists young, painters, musicians, poets, the whole celestial brood, and keep them out of contamination,—give them free elemental surroundings for their art to develop. They will become the teachers and the guides of the race. To carry this dream through to a reality is something to live for,—to make one feel twenty again, with all one's glittering illusions.”
“You are going to carry it through?” said Sylvester.
“My boy, I should just think I am,” replied Roderick, taking his arm confidentially. “Funds have been slow in coming in, but people are promising support, now that they see the magnificence of the concern. I'll send you our prospectus and other publications. You can judge for yourself. Perhaps your father would like to further the work.”
“You'd better ask him,”, said Sylvester, drily. “But where does the money go to?”
“To the Colony. Didn't I tell you it was to be a colony? The Walden Art Colony. After a time it will be self-supporting; the produce will sell in the European and American markets, and the Colony will wax rich. It will become the world's great Palace of Art.”
“How will this fit in with Thoreau and uncontaminated nature?”