Goethe would have been among all the other grandsons of
publicans, if they had formed a distinct class in Frankfurt or Weimar.
This I knew very well when I wrote my novels; and if, as I suspect, I
failed to create a convincingly verisimilar atmosphere of aristocracy,
it was not because I had any illusions or ignorances as to the common
humanity of the peerage, and not because I gave literary style to its
conversation, but because, as I had never had any money, I was foolishly
indifferent to it, and so, having blinded myself to its enormous
importance, necessarily missed the point of view, and with it the whole
moral basis, of the class which rightly values money, and plenty of it,
as the first condition of a bearable life.

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and
successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its
basis. Every teacher or twaddler who denies it or suppresses it, is an
enemy of life. Money controls morality; and what makes the United States
of America look so foolish even in foolish Europe is that they are
always in a state of flurried concern and violent interference with
morality, whereas they throw their money into the street to be scrambled
for, and presently find that their cash reserves are not in their own
hands, but in the pockets of a few millionaires who, bewildered by their
luck, and unspeakably incapable of making any truly economic use of it,
endeavor to "do good" with it by letting themselves be fleeced by
philanthropic committee men, building contractors, librarians and
professors, in the name of education, science, art and what not; so that
sensible people exhale relievedly when the pious millionaire dies, and
his heirs, demoralized by being brought up on his outrageous income,
begin the socially beneficent work of scattering his fortune through the
channels of the trades that flourish by riotous living.

This, as I have said, I did not then understand; for I knew money only
by the want of it. Ireland is a poor country; and my father was a poor
man in a poor country. By this I do not mean that he was hungry and
homeless, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. My friend Mr. James
Huneker, a man of gorgeous imagination and incorrigible romanticism, has
described me to the American public as a peasant lad who has raised
himself, as all American presidents are assumed to have raised
themselves, from the humblest departments of manual labor