The Irrational Knot | Page 6

woman, who so thoroughly and admirably understands that
conscience is a luxury, and should be indulged in only when the vital
needs of life have been abundantly satisfied. The instinct which has led
the British peerage to fortify itself by American alliances is healthy and
well inspired. Thanks to it, we shall still have a few people to maintain
the tradition of a handsome, free, proud, costly life, whilst the craven
mass of us are keeping up our starveling pretence that it is more
important to be good than to be rich, and piously cheating, robbing, and
murdering one another by doing our duty as policemen, soldiers,

bailiffs, jurymen, turnkeys, hangmen, tradesmen, and curates, at the
command of those who know that the golden grapes are not sour. Why,
good heavens! we shall all pretend that this straightforward truth of
mine is mere Swiftian satire, because it would require a little courage to
take it seriously and either act on it or make me drink the hemlock for
uttering it.
There was the less excuse for my blindness because I was at that very
moment laying the foundations of my high fortune by the most ruthless
disregard of all the quack duties which lead the peasant lad of fiction to
the White House, and harness the real peasant boy to the plough until
he is finally swept, as rubbish, into the workhouse. I was an ablebodied
and ableminded young man in the strength of my youth; and my family,
then heavily embarrassed, needed my help urgently. That I should have
chosen to be a burden to them instead was, according to all the
conventions of peasant lad fiction, monstrous. Well, without a blush I
embraced the monstrosity. I did not throw myself into the struggle for
life: I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old age: I
hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live just long enough to
read a review of one of these silly novels written in an obscure journal
by a personal friend of my own (now eminent in literature as Mr. John
Mackinnon Robertson) prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable
author. I think, myself, that this was a handsome reward, far better
worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son struggling
slavishly for his parent's bread in some sordid trade. Handsome or not,
it was the only return he ever had for the little pension he contrived to
export from Ireland for his family. My mother reinforced it by drudging
in her elder years at the art of music which she had followed in her
prime freely for love. I only helped to spend it. People wondered at my
heartlessness: one young and romantic lady had the courage to
remonstrate openly and indignantly with me, "for the which" as Pepys
said of the shipwright's wife who refused his advances, "I did respect
her." Callous as Comus to moral babble, I steadily wrote my five pages
a day and made a man of myself (at my mother's expense) instead of a
slave. And I protest that I will not suffer James Huneker or any
romanticist to pass me off as a peasant boy qualifying for a chapter in
Smiles's Self Help, or a good son supporting a helpless mother, instead
of a stupendously selfish artist leaning with the full weight of his

hungry body on an energetic and capable woman. No, James: such lies
are not only unnecessary, but fearfully depressing and fundamentally
immoral, besides being hardly fair to the supposed peasant lad's parents.
My mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my
duty to work for hers: therefore take off your hat to her, and blush.[A]
It is now open to anyone who pleases to read The Irrational Knot. I do
not recommend him to; but it is possible that the same mysterious force
which drove me through the labor of writing it may have had some
purpose which will sustain others through the labor of reading it, and
even reward them with some ghastly enjoyment of it. For my own part
I cannot stand it. It is to me only one of the heaps of spoiled material
that all apprenticeship involves. I consent to its publication because I
remember that British colonel who called on Beethoven when the
elderly composer was working at his posthumous quartets, and offered
him a commission for a work in the style of his jejune septet.
Beethoven drove the Colonel out of the house with objurgation. I think
that was uncivil. There is a time for the septet, and a time for the
posthumous quartets. It is true that if a man called on me now and
asked me to write something like