Preface

PREFACE

TO THE AMERICAN EDITION OF 1905

This novel was written in the year 1880, only a few years after I had
exported myself from Dublin to London in a condition of extreme rawness
and inexperience concerning the specifically English side of the life
with which the book pretends to deal. Everybody wrote novels then. It
was my second attempt; and it shared the fate of my first. That is to
say, nobody would publish it, though I tried all the London publishers
and some American ones. And I should not greatly blame them if I could
feel sure that it was the book's faults and not its qualities that
repelled them.

I have narrated elsewhere how in the course of time the rejected MS.
became Mrs. Annie Besant's excuse for lending me her ever helping hand
by publishing it as a serial in a little propagandist magazine of hers.
That was how it got loose beyond all possibility of recapture. It is out
of my power now to stand between it and the American public: all I can
do is to rescue it from unauthorized mutilations and make the best of a
jejune job.

At present, of course, I am not the author of The Irrational Knot.
Physiologists inform us that the substance of our bodies (and
consequently of our souls) is shed and renewed at such a rate that no
part of us lasts longer than eight years: I am therefore not now in any
atom of me the person who wrote The Irrational Knot in 1880. The last
of that author perished in 1888; and two of his successors have since
joined the majority. Fourth of his line, I cannot be expected to take
any very lively interest in the novels of my literary great-grandfather.
Even my personal recollections of him are becoming vague and overlaid
with those most misleading of all traditions, the traditions founded on
the lies a man tells, and at last comes to believe, about himself _to_
himself. Certain things, however, I remember very well. For instance, I
am significantly clear as to the price of the paper on which I wrote The
Irrational Knot. It was cheap--a white demy of unpretentious quality--so
that sixpennorth lasted a long time. My daily allowance of composition
was five pages of this demy in quarto; and I held my natural laziness
sternly to that task day in, day out, to the end. I remember also that
Bizet's Carmen being then new in London, I used it as a safety-valve for
my romantic impulses. When I was tired of the sordid realism of
Whatshisname (I have sent my only copy of The Irrational Knot to the
printers, and cannot remember the name of my hero) I went to the piano
and forgot him in the glamorous society of Carmen and her crimson
toreador and yellow dragoon. Not that Bizet's music could infatuate me
as it infatuated Nietzsche. Nursed on greater masters, I thought