The Irrational Knot | Page 3

will
probably find to his cost, the classical tradition which makes all the
persons in a novel, except the comically vernacular ones, or the
speakers of phonetically spelt dialect, utter themselves in the formal
phrases and studied syntax of eighteenth century rhetoric. In short, I
wrote in the style of Scott and Dickens; and as fashionable society then
spoke and behaved, as it still does, in no style at all, my transcriptions
of Oxford and Mayfair may nowadays suggest an unaccountable and
ludicrous ignorance of a very superficial and accessible code of
manners. I was not, however, so ignorant as might have been inferred at
that time from my somewhat desperate financial condition.
I had, to begin with, a sort of backstairs knowledge; for in my teens I
struggled for life in the office of an Irish gentleman who acted as land
agent and private banker for many persons of distinction. Now it is
possible for a London author to dine out in the highest circles for
twenty years without learning as much about the human frailties of his
hosts as the family solicitor or (in Ireland) the family land agent learns
in twenty days; and some of this knowledge inevitably reaches his
clerks, especially the clerk who keeps the cash, which was my
particular department. He learns, if capable of the lesson, that the
aristocratic profession has as few geniuses as any other profession; so
that if you want a peerage of more than, say, half a dozen members,
you must fill it up with many common persons, and even with some
deplorably mean ones. For "service is no inheritance" either in the
kitchen or the House of Lords; and the case presented by Mr. Barrie in

his play of The Admirable Crichton, where the butler is the man of
quality, and his master, the Earl, the man of rank, is no fantasy, but a
quite common occurrence, and indeed to some extent an inevitable one,
because the English are extremely particular in selecting their butlers,
whilst they do not select their barons at all, taking them as the accident
of birth sends them. The consequences include much ironic comedy.
For instance, we have in England a curious belief in first rate people,
meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the
undeniable secondrateness of the people we do know, besides saving
the credit of aristocracy as an institution. The unmet aristocrat is
devoutly believed in; but he is always round the corner, never at hand.
That the smart set exists; that there is above and beyond that smart set a
class so blue of blood and exquisite in nature that it looks down even
on the King with haughty condescension; that scepticism on these
points is one of the stigmata of plebeian baseness: all these imaginings
are so common here that they constitute the real popular sociology of
England as much as an unlimited credulity as to vaccination constitutes
the real popular science of England. It is, of course, a timid superstition.
A British peer or peeress who happens by chance to be genuinely noble
is just as isolated at court as Goethe would have been among all the
other grandsons of publicans, if they had formed a distinct class in
Frankfurt or Weimar. This I knew very well when I wrote my novels;
and if, as I suspect, I failed to create a convincingly verisimilar
atmosphere of aristocracy, it was not because I had any illusions or
ignorances as to the common humanity of the peerage, and not because
I gave literary style to its conversation, but because, as I had never had
any money, I was foolishly indifferent to it, and so, having blinded
myself to its enormous importance, necessarily missed the point of
view, and with it the whole moral basis, of the class which rightly
values money, and plenty of it, as the first condition of a bearable life.
Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound
and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for
its basis. Every teacher or twaddler who denies it or suppresses it, is an
enemy of life. Money controls morality; and what makes the United
States of America look so foolish even in foolish Europe is that they
are always in a state of flurried concern and violent interference with
morality, whereas they throw their money into the street to be

scrambled for, and presently find that their cash reserves are not in their
own hands, but in the pockets of a few millionaires who, bewildered by
their luck, and unspeakably incapable of making any truly economic
use of it, endeavor to "do good" with it by letting themselves be fleeced
by philanthropic committee men, building contractors, librarians