Chapter CLXXXI: 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.

It was his idea to go back to first principles; to study the bases of modern society, and show how its customs and institutions came to be, and interpret its art as a product of these. He would show what the modern artist was, and how he got his living, and how this moulded his work. He would take the previous art-periods of history and study them, showing by what stages the artist had evolved, and so gaining a stand-point from which to prophesy what he would come to be in the future. Only once had an attempt ever been made to apply to questions of art the methods of science--in Nordau’s “Degeneration”. But then Nordau’s had been pseudo-science--three-quarters impertinence and conceit. The world still waited to understand its art-products in the light of scientific Socialism.

Such was the task which Thyrsis was planning. It would mean years of study, and how he was to get the means to do it, he could not guess. But he had his mind made up to do it, though it might be the last of his labors, though everything else in his life might end in shipwreck. He went about all day, possessed with the idea; it would be a colossal work, an epoch-making work--it would be the culmination of his efforts and the vindication of his claims. It would save the men who came after him; and to save the men who came after him had now become the formula of his life.