Day after day he pondered this idea--eating with it and walking with it and sleeping with it; until at last, of a sudden, the vision came to him. It came late at night, while he was undressing; and he sat for five or ten minutes, with his shirt half off, as if in a trance. Then he put the shirt on again, and went out to wander about the woods, laughing and talking to himself.
“Genius surrounded by Commercialism”--that was his theme; and it would have to be a play. Its hero would be a young musician, a mere boy, a master of the demon-voices of the violin; he would be rapt in his vision, and around him a group of people who would be embodiments of the world and all its forces of evil. One by one they came trooping before Thyrsis’ fancy, with all their trappings of pomp and power, their greatness and their greed--sinister and cruel figures, but also humorous, very creatures of the spirit of comedy! Yes, he had a comedy this time--a real comedy!
Section 2. In this hour, of course, Thyrsis forgot all about the “plot” he had outlined to Mr. Ardsley, and about his promises to be “practical.” Something arose within him, imperious and majestic, and swept all this out of the way with one gesture of the hand. He dropped everything else and plunged into the play. Never yet in his life had anything taken hold of him to such an extent; it drove him so that he forgot to eat, he forgot to sleep. He would work over some part of it until he was exhausted--and then, without warning, some other part would open out in a vista before him, and he would spring up in pursuit of that. Characters and episodes and dialogue, wild humor, scalding satire, grim tragedy--they thronged and jostled and crowded one another in his imagination.
“The Genius” was the title of the play. Its protagonist had come home after completing his education in Vienna; and there was the family gathered to greet him. Mr. Hartman, the father, was a wholesale grocer--a business large enough to have brought wealth, but painfully tainted with “commonness”. Then there was Mrs. Hartman, stout and tightly-laced, who had studied the science of elegance while her husband studied sugar. There was the elder son, who under his mother’s guidance had married well; and Miss Violet Hartman, who was looking up to the perilous heights of a foreign alliance.