The Irrational Knot | Page 4

and
professors, in the name of education, science, art and what not; so that
sensible people exhale relievedly when the pious millionaire dies, and
his heirs, demoralized by being brought up on his outrageous income,
begin the socially beneficent work of scattering his fortune through the
channels of the trades that flourish by riotous living.
This, as I have said, I did not then understand; for I knew money only
by the want of it. Ireland is a poor country; and my father was a poor
man in a poor country. By this I do not mean that he was hungry and
homeless, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. My friend Mr.
James Huneker, a man of gorgeous imagination and incorrigible
romanticism, has described me to the American public as a peasant lad
who has raised himself, as all American presidents are assumed to have
raised themselves, from the humblest departments of manual labor to
the loftiest eminence. James flatters me. Had I been born a peasant, I
should now be a tramp. My notion of my father's income is even vaguer
than his own was--and that is saying a good deal--but he always had an
income of at least three figures (four, if you count in dollars instead of
pounds); and what made him poor was that he conceived himself as
born to a social position which even in Ireland could have been
maintained in dignified comfort only on twice or thrice what he had.
And he married on that assumption. Fortunately for me, social
opportunity is not always to be measured by income. There is an
important economic factor, first analyzed by an American economist
(General Walker), and called rent of ability. Now this rent, when the
ability is of the artistic or political sort, is often paid in kind. For
example, a London possessor of such ability may, with barely enough
money to maintain a furnished bedroom and a single presentable suit of
clothes, see everything worth seeing that a millionaire can see, and
know everybody worth knowing that he can know. Long before I
reached this point myself, a very trifling accomplishment gave me
glimpses of the sort of fashionable life a peasant never sees. Thus I
remember one evening during the novel-writing period when nobody

would pay a farthing for a stroke of my pen, walking along Sloane
Street in that blessed shield of literary shabbiness, evening dress. A
man accosted me with an eloquent appeal for help, ending with the
assurance that he had not a penny in the world. I replied, with exact
truth, "Neither have I." He thanked me civilly, and went away,
apparently not in the least surprised, leaving me to ask myself why I
did not turn beggar too, since I felt sure that a man who did it as well as
he, must be in comfortable circumstances.
Another reminiscence. A little past midnight, in the same costume, I
was turning from Piccadilly into Bond Street, when a lady of the
pavement, out of luck that evening so far, confided to me that the last
bus for Brompton had passed, and that she should be grateful to any
gentleman who would give her a lift in a hansom. My old-fashioned
Irish gallantry had not then been worn off by age and England: besides,
as a novelist who could find no publisher, I was touched by the
similarity of our trades and predicaments. I excused myself very
politely on the ground that my wife (invented for the occasion) was
waiting for me at home, and that I felt sure so attractive a lady would
have no difficulty in finding another escort. Unfortunately this speech
made so favorable an impression on her that she immediately took my
arm and declared her willingness to go anywhere with me, on the
flattering ground that I was a perfect gentleman. In vain did I try to
persuade her that in coming up Bond Street and deserting Piccadilly,
she was throwing away her last chance of a hansom: she attached
herself so devotedly to me that I could not without actual violence
shake her off. At last I made a stand at the end of Old Bond Street. I
took out my purse; opened it; and held it upside down. Her
countenance fell, poor girl! She turned on her heel with a melancholy
flirt of her skirt, and vanished.
Now on both these occasions I had been in the company of people who
spent at least as much in a week as I did in a year. Why was I, a
penniless and unknown young man, admitted there? Simply because,
though I was an execrable pianist, and never improved until the happy
invention of the pianola made a Paderewski of me, I could play