The Irrational Knot | Page 7

The Irrational Knot I should have to
exercise great self-control. But there are people who read Man and
Superman, and then tell me (actually to my face) that I have never done
anything so good as Cashel Byron's Profession. After this, there may be
a public for even The Irrational Knot; so let it go.
LONDON, May 26, 1905.
[Footnote A: James, having read the above in proof, now protests he
never called me a peasant lad: that being a decoration by the sub-editor.
The expression he used was "a poor lad." This is what James calls tact.
After all, there is something pastoral, elemental, well aerated, about a
peasant lad. But a mere poor lad! really, James, _really_--!!!]
P.S.--Since writing the above I have looked through the proof-sheets of
this book, and found, with some access of respect for my youth, that it
is a fiction of the first order. By this I do not mean that it is a
masterpiece in that order, or even a pleasant example of it, but simply
that, such as it is, it is one of those fictions in which the morality is
original and not readymade. Now this quality is the true diagnostic of
the first order in literature, and indeed in all the arts, including the art of
life. It is, for example, the distinction that sets Shakespear's Hamlet

above his other plays, and that sets Ibsen's work as a whole above
Shakespear's work as a whole. Shakespear's morality is a mere
reach-me-down; and because Hamlet does not feel comfortable in it,
and struggles against the misfit, he suggests something better, futile as
his struggle is, and incompetent as Shakespear shews himself in his
effort to think out the revolt of his feeling against readymade morality.
Ibsen's morality is original all through: he knows well that the men in
the street have no use for principles, because they can neither
understand nor apply them; and that what they can understand and
apply are arbitrary rules of conduct, often frightfully destructive and
inhuman, but at least definite rules enabling the common stupid man to
know where he stands and what he may do and not do without getting
into trouble. Now to all writers of the first order, these rules, and the
need for them produced by the moral and intellectual incompetence of
the ordinary human animal, are no more invariably beneficial and
respectable than the sunlight which ripens the wheat in Sussex and
leaves the desert deadly in Sahara, making the cheeks of the
ploughman's child rosy in the morning and striking the ploughman
brainsick or dead in the afternoon; no more inspired (and no less) than
the religion of the Andaman islanders; as much in need of frequent
throwing away and replacement as the community's boots. By writers
of the second order the readymade morality is accepted as the basis of
all moral judgment and criticism of the characters they portray, even
when their genius forces them to represent their most attractive heroes
and heroines as violating the readymade code in all directions. Far be it
from me to pretend that the first order is more readable than the second!
Shakespear, Scott, Dickens, Dumas _père_ are not, to say the least, less
readable than Euripides and Ibsen. Nor is the first order always more
constructive; for Byron, Oscar Wilde, and Larochefoucauld did not get
further in positive philosophy than Ruskin and Carlyle, though they
could snuff Ruskin's Seven Lamps with their fingers without flinching.
Still, the first order remains the first order and the second the second
for all that: no man who shuts his eyes and opens his mouth when
religion and morality are offered to him on a long spoon can share the
same Parnassian bench with those who make an original contribution to
religion and morality, were it only a criticism.
Therefore on coming back to this Irrational Knot as a stranger after 25

years, I am proud to find that its morality is not readymade. The
drunken prima donna of a bygone type of musical burlesque is not
depicted as an immoral person, but as a person with a morality of her
own, no worse in its way than the morality of her highly respectable
wine merchant in its way. The sociology of the successful inventor is
his own sociology too; and it is by his originality in this respect that he
passes irresistibly through all the readymade prejudices that are set up
to bar his promotion. And the heroine, nice, amiable, benevolent, and
anxious to please and behave well, but hopelessly secondhand in her
morals and nicenesses, and consequently without any real moral force
now that the threat of hell has lost its terrors for her, is left destitute
among the failures which are so puzzling to