ut a blush I
embraced the monstrosity. I did not throw myself into the struggle for
life: I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old
age: I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live just long
enough to read a review of one of these silly novels written in an
obscure journal by a personal friend of my own (now eminent in
literature as Mr. 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 e