The Irrational Knot | Page 5

a
simple accompaniment at sight more congenially to a singer than most
amateurs. It is true that the musical side of London society, with its
streak of Bohemianism, and its necessary toleration of foreign ways

and professional manners, is far less typically English than the sporting
side or the political side or the Philistine side; so much so, indeed, that
people may and do pass their lives in it without ever discovering what
English plutocracy in the mass is really like: still, if you wander in it
nocturnally for a fitful year or so as I did, with empty pockets and an
utter impossibility of approaching it by daylight (owing to the
deplorable decay of the morning wardrobe), you have something more
actual to go on than the hallucinations of a peasant lad setting his foot
manfully on the lowest rung of the social ladder. I never climbed any
ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation; and I hereby
warn all peasant lads not to be duped by my pretended example into
regarding their present servitude as a practicable first step to a celebrity
so dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress his own bad novels.
Conceive me then at the writing of The Irrational Knot as a person
neither belonging to the world I describe nor wholly ignorant of it, and
on certain points quite incapable of conceiving it intuitively. A whole
world of art which did not exist for it lay open to me. I was familiar
with the greatest in that world: mighty poets, painters, and musicians
were my intimates. I found the world of artificial greatness founded on
convention and money so repugnant and contemptible by comparison
that I had no sympathetic understanding of it. People are fond of
blaming valets because no man is a hero to his valet. But it is equally
true that no man is a valet to his hero; and the hero, consequently, is apt
to blunder very ludicrously about valets, through judging them from an
irrelevant standard of heroism: heroism, remember, having its faults as
well as its qualities. I, always on the heroic plane imaginatively, had
two disgusting faults which I did not recognize as faults because I
could not help them. I was poor and (by day) shabby. I therefore
tolerated the gross error that poverty, though an inconvenience and a
trial, is not a sin and a disgrace; and I stood for my self-respect on the
things I had: probity, ability, knowledge of art, laboriousness, and
whatever else came cheaply to me. Because I could walk into Hampton
Court Palace and the National Gallery (on free days) and enjoy
Mantegna and Michael Angelo whilst millionaires were yawning
miserably over inept gluttonies; because I could suffer more by hearing
a movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony taken at a wrong tempo
than a duchess by losing a diamond necklace, I was indifferent to the

repulsive fact that if I had fallen in love with the duchess I did not
possess a morning suit in which I could reasonably have expected her
to touch me with the furthest protended pair of tongs; and I did not see
that to remedy this I should have been prepared to wade through seas of
other people's blood. Indeed it is this perception which constitutes an
aristocracy nowadays. It is the secret of all our governing classes,
which consist finally of people who, though perfectly prepared to be
generous, humane, cultured, philanthropic, public spirited and
personally charming in the second instance, are unalterably resolved, in
the first, to have money enough for a handsome and delicate life, and
will, in pursuit of that money, batter in the doors of their fellow men,
sell them up, sweat them in fetid dens, shoot, stab, hang, imprison, sink,
burn and destroy them in the name of law and order. And this shews
their fundamental sanity and rightmindedness; for a sufficient income
is indispensable to the practice of virtue; and the man who will let any
unselfish consideration stand between him and its attainment is a
weakling, a dupe and a predestined slave. If I could convince our
impecunious mobs of this, the world would be reformed before the end
of the week; for the sluggards who are content to be wealthy without
working and the dastards who are content to work without being
wealthy, together with all the pseudo-moralists and ethicists and
cowardice mongers generally, would be exterminated without shrift, to
the unutterable enlargement of life and ennoblement of humanity. We
might even make some beginnings of civilization under such happy
circumstances.
In the days of The Irrational Knot I had not learnt this lesson;
consequently I did not understand the British peerage, just as I did not
understand that glorious and beautiful phenomenon, the "heartless" rich
American