Chapter XCII: 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.

Only of late had the family come to realize what an asset to their career this “Genius” might be. They had humored him in his strange whim to devote his life to fiddling; money had been spent on him freely--he brought home with him a famous Cremona instrument for which three thousand dollars had been paid. But now it was dawning upon them that this was an “ugly duckling”; he was to make his _début_ in the metropolis, where an overwhelming triumph was expected; and then he would return to the home city in the middle West, and would play at _musicales_, which even the most exclusive of the “_élite_” must attend.

There was also the great Prof. Reminitsky, the teacher who had made Lloyd, and had come to New York with him; and there was the Herr Prof. von Arne, of the University of Berlin, a world-renowned psychiatrist, author of “The Neurosis of Inspiration”. The Herr Professor had come to America to make some studies for his forthcoming masterpiece on the religious mania; and he was glad to see his old friend Reminitsky, whose seventeen-year-old musical prodigy was most interesting material for study.

Prof. Reminitsky was the world’s greatest authority in the art of tearing the human soul to pieces by means of horse-hair rubbed with resin and scraped over the intestines of a pig. There were no tricks of finger-gymnastics and of tone-production that he had not mastered. As for the emotions produced thereby, he felt them, but in a purely professional way; that is, the convictions he had concerning them related to their effects upon audiences, and more especially upon the score or two of critical experts whose psychology had been his life-study. But having studied also the psychology of youth, he knew that his _protégé_ must needs have other convictions concerning his performances. This was his supreme greatness--that he understood the paranoia of enthusiasm, and used this understanding to tempt his pupils to new heights of achievement.

In all of which, of course, his friend von Arne was a great help to him. Von Arne had dug through a score of great libraries, and had travelled all the world over, frequenting cafes and salons, monasteries and prayer-cells, prisons and hospitals and asylums--wherever one might get new glimpses of the extraordinarily intricate phenomena of the aberration called “Genius”. He had several thousand cases of it at his finger-tips--he had measured its reaction-times and calculated its cephalic index, and analyzed its secretions and tested it for indecan. He knew trance and clairvoyance, auto-suggestion and telepathic hallucination, epilepsy and hysteria and ecstasy; and over the head of any disputatious person he would swing the steam-shovel of his erudition, and bury the unfortunate beneath a wagon-load of Latin and Greek derivatives.

Also, there was Moses Rosen, the business-manager. Moses was short, and wore a large diamond ring, and he also was a specialist in the phenomena of “Genius”. He studied them from the point of view of the box-office, and his tests were quite as definite as those of the psychological laboratory. There came to Moses an endless stream of prodigies, all of them having long hair and picturesque aspects, and talking rapidly and rolling their eyes; the problem was to determine which of them had the faculty of true Genius, which not only talked rapidly and rolled its eyes, but also had the power of causing money to flow in through a box-office window.

In this case Moses felt that the prospects were good; the only trouble being that the prodigy intended to render a _concerto_ by a strange composer--a stormy and unconventional thing which would annoy the critics. Moses suggested something that was “classic”; and agreed with Mrs. Hartman that there ought to be something corresponding to “good form” in music.