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 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—!!!]