r it lay open to me. I was familiar
with the greatest in that world: mighty poets, painters, and musicians
were my intimates. I found the world of artificial greatness founded on
convention and money so repugnant and contemptible by comparison that I
had no sympathetic understanding of it. People are fond of blaming
valets because no man is a hero to his valet. But it is equally true
that no man is a valet to his hero; and the hero, consequently, is apt
to blunder very ludicrously about valets, through judging them from an
irrelevant standard of heroism: heroism, remember, having its faults as
well as its qualities. I, always on the heroic plane imaginatively, had
two disgusting faults which I did not recognize as faults because I
could not help them. I was poor and (by day) shabby. I therefore
tolerated the gross error that poverty, though an inconvenience and a
trial, is not a sin and a disgrace; and I stood for my self-respect on
the things I had: probity, ability, knowledge of art, laboriousness, and
whatever else came cheaply to me. Because I could walk into Hampton
Court Palace and the National Gallery (on free days) and enjoy Mantegna
and Michael Angelo whilst millionaires were yawning miserably over inept
gluttonies; because I could suffer more by hearing a movement of
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony taken at a wrong tempo than a duchess by
losing a diamond necklace, I was indifferent to the repulsive fact that
if I had fallen in love with the duchess I did not possess a morning
suit in which I could reasonably have expected her to touch me with the
furthest protended pair of tongs; and I did not see that to remedy this
I should have been prepared to wade through seas of other people's
blood. Indeed it is this perception which constitutes an aristocracy
nowadays. It is the secret of all our governing classes, which consist
finally of people who, though perfectly prepared to be generous, humane,
cultured, philanthropic, public spirited and personally charming in the
second instance, are unalterably resolved, in the first, to have money
enough for a handsome and delicate life, and will, in pursuit of that
money, batter in the doors of their fellow men, sell them up, sweat them
in fetid dens, shoot, stab, hang, imprison, sink, burn and destroy them
in the name of law and order. And this shews their fundamental sanity
and rightmindedness; for a sufficient income is indispensable to the
practice of virtue; and the man who w