novels.

Conceive me then at the writing of The Irrational Knot as a person
neither belonging to the world I describe nor wholly ignorant of it, and
on certain points quite incapable of conceiving it intuitively. A whole
world of art which did not exist for 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