“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.

“You poets and musicians are trying to compass the inane.  You are trying to duplicate your dreams, dreams without a hint of the sun.  The painter at least copies or interprets real life; while the composer dips his finger in the air, making endless sound-scrolls—­noises with long tails and whirligig decorations like foolish fireworks—­though I think the art of the future will be pyrotechnics.  Mad, mad, I tell you!  But whether mad or not matters little in our land of freedom, where all men are born unequal, where only the artists are sad.  They are useless beings, openly derided, and when one is caught napping, doing something that offends church or State or society, he is imprisoned.  Mad, you know!  No wonder anarchy is thriving, no wonder every true artist is an anarch, unavowed perhaps, yet an anarch, and an atheist.”