we know our business too
damned well. We have the mechanics of our crafts, the tricks of our
trades, so well in hand that we make our books and pictures and music say
what we please. We _use_ our art to gain our own vain ends instead of
being driven _by_ our art to find adequate expression for some great truth
that demands through us a hearing. You have said it all, my friend--you
have summed up the whole situation in the present-day world of creative
art--these people are satisfied. You have given them what they want,
prostituting your art to do it. That's what I have been doing all these
years--giving people what they want. For a price we cater to them--even as
their tailors, and milliners, and barbers. And never again will the world
have a truly great art or literature until men like us--in the divine
selfishness of their, calling--demand, first and last, that they,
_themselves_, be satisfied by the work of their hands."

Going to the easel, he rudely jerked aside the curtain. Involuntarily, the
painter went to stand by his side before the picture.

"Look at it!" cried the novelist. "Look at it in the light of your own
genius! Don't you see its power? Doesn't it tell you what you _could_ do,
if you would? If you couldn't paint a picture, or if you couldn't feel a
picture to be painted, it wouldn't matter. I'd let you ride to hell on
your own palette, and be damned to you. But this thing shows a power that
the world can ill afford to lose. It is so bad because it is so good. Come
here!" he drew his friend to the big window, and pointed to the mountains.
"There is an art like those mountains, my boy--lonely, apart from the
world; remotely above the squalid ambitions of men; Godlike in its calm
strength and peace--an art to which men may look for inspiration and
courage and hope. And there is an art that is like Fairlands--petty and
shallow and mean--with only the fictitious value that its devotees assume,
but never, actually, realize. Listen, Aaron, don't continue to misread
your mother's letters. Don't misunderstand her as thinking that the place
she coveted for you is a place within the power of these people to give.
Come with me into the mountains, yonder. Come, and let us see if, in those
hills of God, you cannot find yourself."

When Conrad Lagrange finished, the artist stood, for a little, without
reply--irresolute, before his picture--the check in his hand. At last,
still without speaking, he went back to the t