Which every reader of this book is requested to read before beginning
the story.
This is a Hill-top Novel. I dedicate it to all who have heart enough,
brain enough, and soul enough to understand it.
What do I mean by a Hill-top Novel? Well, of late we have been flooded
with stories of evil tendencies: a Hill-top Novel is one which raises a
protest in favour of purity.
Why have not novelists raised the protest earlier? For this reason.
Hitherto, owing to the stern necessity laid upon the modern seer for
earning his bread, and, incidentally, for finding a publisher to assist
him in promulgating his prophetic opinions, it has seldom happened that
writers of exceptional aims have been able to proclaim to the world at
large the things which they conceived to be best worth their telling
it. Especially has this been the case in the province of fiction. Let
me explain the situation. Most novels nowadays have to run as serials
through magazines or newspapers; and the editors of these periodicals
are timid to a degree which outsiders would hardly believe with regard
to the fiction they admit into their pages. Endless spells surround
them. This story or episode would annoy their Catholic readers; that one
would repel their Wesleyan Methodist subscribers; such an incident is
unfit for the perusal of the young person; such another would drive away
the offended British matron. I do not myself believe there is any real
ground for this excessive and, to be quite frank, somewhat ridiculous
timidity. Incredible as it may seem to the ordinary editor, I am of
opinion that it would be possible to tell the truth, and yet preserve
the circulation. A first-class journal does not really suffer because
two or three formalists or two or three bigots among its thousands of
subscribers give it up for six weeks in a pet of ill-temper--and then
take it on again. Still, the effect remains: it is almost impossible
to get a novel printed in an English journal unless it is warranted to
contain nothing at all to which anybody, however narrow, could possibly
object, on any grounds whatever, religious, political, social, moral,
or aesthetic. The romance that appeals to the average editor must say or
hint at nothing at all that is not universally believed and received by
everybody everywhere in this realm of Britain. But literature, as Thomas
Hardy says with truth, is mainly the expression of souls in revolt.
Hence the antagonism between literature and journalism.
Why, then, publish one's novels serially at all? Why not appeal at once
to the outside public, which has few such prejudices? Why not deliver
one's message direct to those who are ready to consider it or at least
to hear it? Because, unfortunately, the serial rights of a novel at the
present day are three times as valuable, in money worth, as the final
book rights. A man who elects to publish direct, instead of running his
story through the columns of a newspaper, is forfeiting, in other words,
three-quarters of his income. This loss the prophet who cares for his
mission could cheerfully endure, of course, if only the diminished
income were enough for him to live upon. But in order to write, he
must first eat. In my own case, for example, up till the time when
I published The Woman who Did, I could never live on the proceeds
of direct publication; nor could I even secure a publisher who would
consent to aid me in introducing to the world what I thought most
important for it. Having now found such a publisher--having secured my
mountain--I am prepared to go on delivering my message from its top, as
long as the world will consent to hear it. I will willingly forgo the
serial value of my novels, and forfeit three-quarters of the amount I
might otherwise earn, for the sake of uttering the truth that is in me,
boldly and openly, to a perverse generation.
For this reason, and in order to mark the distinction between
these books which are really mine--my own in thought, in spirit, in
teaching--and those which I have produced, sorely against my will,
to satisfy editors, I propose in future to add the words, “A Hill-top
Novel,” to every one of my stories which I write of my own accord,
simply and solely for the sake of embodying and enforcing my own
opinions.
Not that, as critics have sometimes supposed me to mean, I ever wrote a
line, even in fiction, contrary to my own profound beliefs. I have never
said a thing I did not think: but I have sometimes had to abstain from
saying many things I did think. When I wished to purvey strong meat for
men, I was condemned to provide milk for babes. In the Hill-top Novels,
I hope to reverse all that--to say my say in my own way, representing
the world as it appears to me, not as editors and formalists would like
me to represent it.
The Hill-top Novels, however, will not constitute, in the ordinary
sense, a series. I shall add the name, as a Trade Mark, to any story, by
whomsoever published, which I have written as the expression of my own
individuality. Nor will they necessarily appear in the first instance
in volume form. If ever I should be lucky enough to find an editor
sufficiently bold and sufficiently righteous to venture upon running a
Hill-top Novel as a serial through his columns, I will gladly embrace
that mode of publication. But while editors remain as pusillanimous and
as careless of moral progress as they are at present, I have little hope
that I shall persuade any one of them to accept a work written with a
single eye to the enlightenment and bettering of humanity.
Whenever, therefore, in future, the words “A Hill-top Novel” appear
upon the title-page of a book by me, the reader who cares for truth and
righteousness may take it for granted that the book represents my own
original thinking, whether good or bad, on some important point in human
society or human evolution.
Not, again, that any one of these novels will deliberately attempt to
PROVE anything. I have been amused at the allegations brought by
certain critics against The Woman who Did that it “failed to prove”
the practicability of unions such as Herminia's and Alan's. The famous
Scotsman, in the same spirit, objected to Paradise Lost that it “proved
naething”: but his criticism has not been generally endorsed as valid.
To say the truth, it is absurd to suppose a work of imagination can
prove or disprove anything. The author holds the strings of all his
puppets, and can pull them as he likes, for good or evil: he can make
his experiments turn out well or ill: he can contrive that his unions
should end happily or miserably: how, then, can his story be said to
PROVE anything? A novel is not a proposition in Euclid. I give due
notice beforehand to reviewers in general, that if any principle at all
is “proved” by any of my Hill-top Novels, it will be simply this: “Act
as I think right, for the highest good of human kind, and you will
infallibly and inevitably come to a bad end for it.”
Not to prove anything, but to suggest ideas, to arouse emotions, is, I
take it, the true function of fiction. One wishes to make one's readers
THINK about problems they have never considered, FEEL with sentiments
they have disliked or hated. The novelist as prophet has his duty
defined for him in those divine words of Shelley's:
“Singing songs unbidden
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”
That, too, is the reason that impels me to embody such views as these
in romantic fiction, not in deliberate treatises. “Why sow your ideas
broadcast,” many honest critics say, “in novels where mere boys and
girls can read them? Why not formulate them in serious and argumentative
books, where wise men alone will come across them?” The answer is,
because wise men are wise already: it is the boys and girls of a
community who stand most in need of suggestion and instruction. Women,
in particular, are the chief readers of fiction; and it is women whom
one mainly desires to arouse to interest in profound problems by the
aid of this vehicle. Especially should one arouse them to such living
interest while they are still young and plastic, before they have
crystallised and hardened into the conventional marionettes of polite
society. Make them think while they are young: make them feel while they
are sensitive: it is then alone that they will think and feel, if ever.
I will venture, indeed, to enforce my views on this subject by a little
apologue which I have somewhere read, or heard,--or invented.
A Revolutionist desired to issue an Election Address to the Working Men
of Bermondsey. The Rector of the Parish saw it at the printer's, and
came to him, much perturbed. “Why write it in English?” he asked. “It
will only inflame the minds of the lower orders. Why not allow me to
translate it into Ciceronian Latin? It would then be comprehensible to
all University men; your logic would be duly and deliberately weighed:
and the tanners and tinkers, who are so very impressionable, would not
be poisoned by it.” “My friend,” said the Revolutionist, “it is the
tanners and tinkers _I_ want to get at. My object is, to win this
election; University graduates will not help me to win it.”
The business of the preacher is above all things to preach; but in order
to preach, he must first reach his audience. The audience in this case
consists in large part of women and girls, who are most simply and
easily reached by fiction. Therefore, fiction is today the best medium
for the preacher of righteousness who addresses humanity.
Why, once more, this particular name, “A Hill-top Novel”? For something
like this reason.
I am writing in my study on a heather-clad hill-top. When I raise my eye
from my sheet of foolscap, it falls upon miles and miles of broad open
moorland. My window looks out upon unsullied nature. Everything around
is fresh and pure and wholesome. Through the open casement, the scent of
the pines blows in with the breeze from the neighbouring firwood. Keen
airs sigh through the pine-needles. Grasshoppers chirp from deep tangles
of bracken. The song of a skylark drops from the sky like soft rain
in summer; in the evening, a nightjar croons to us his monotonously
passionate love-wail from his perch on the gnarled boughs of the
wind-swept larch that crowns the upland. But away below in the valley,
as night draws on, a lurid glare reddens the north-eastern horizon. It
marks the spot where the great wen of London heaves and festers. Up here
on the free hills, the sharp air blows in upon us, limpid and clear from
a thousand leagues of open ocean; down there in the crowded town,
it stagnates and ferments, polluted with the diseases and vices of
centuries.
This is an urban age. The men of the villages, alas, are leaving behind
them the green fields and purple moors of their childhood, are foolishly
crowding into the narrow lanes and purlieus of the great cities. Strange
decadent sins and morbid pleasures entice them thither. But I desire
in these books to utter a word once more in favour of higher and purer
ideals of life and art. Those who sicken of the foul air and lurid
light of towns may still wander side by side with me on these heathery
highlands. Far, far below, the theatre and the music-hall spread their
garish gas-lamps. Let who will heed them. But here on the open hill-top
we know fresher and more wholesome delights. Those feverish joys allure
us not. O decadents of the town, we have seen your sham idyls, your
tinsel Arcadias. We have tired of their stuffy atmosphere, their
dazzling jets, their weary ways, their gaudy dresses; we shun the sunken
cheeks, the lack-lustre eyes, the heart-sick souls of your painted
goddesses. We love not the fetid air, thick and hot with human breath,
and reeking with tobacco smoke, of your modern Parnassus--a Parnassus
whose crags were reared and shaped by the hands of the stage-carpenter!
Your studied dalliance with your venal muses is little to our taste.
Your halls are too stifling with carbonic acid gas; for us, we breathe
oxygen.
And the oxygen of the hill-tops is purer, keener, rarer, more ethereal.
It is rich in ozone. Now, ozone stands to common oxygen itself as the
clean-cut metal to the dull and leaden exposed surface. Nascent and ever
renascent, it has electrical attraction; it leaps to the embrace of the
atom it selects, but only under the influence of powerful affinities;
and what it clasps once, it clasps for ever. That is the pure air which
we drink in on the heather-clad heights--not the venomous air of the
crowded casino, nor even the close air of the middle-class parlour. It
thrills and nerves us. How we smile, we who live here, when some dweller
in the mists and smoke of the valley confounds our delicate atmosphere,
redolent of honey and echoing the manifold murmur of bees, with that
stifling miasma of the gambling hell and the dancing saloon! Trust
me, dear friend, the moorland air is far other than you fancy. You can
wander up here along the purple ridges, hand locked in hand with those
you love, without fear of harm to yourself or your comrade. No Bloom of
Ninon here, but fresh cheeks like the peach-blossom where the sun
has kissed it: no casual fruition of loveless, joyless harlots, but
life-long saturation of your own heart's desire in your own heart's
innocence. Ozone is better than all the champagne in the Strand or
Piccadilly. If only you will believe it, it is purity and life and
sympathy and vigour. Its perfect freshness and perpetual fount of youth
keep your age from withering. It crimsons the sunset and lives in the
afterglow. If these delights thy mind may move, leave, oh, leave the
meretricious town, and come to the airy peaks. Such joy is ours, unknown
to the squalid village which spreads its swamps where the poet's silver
Thames runs dull and leaden.
Have we never our doubts, though, up here on the hill-tops? Ay, marry,
have we! Are we so sure that these gospels we preach with all our hearts
are the true and final ones? Who shall answer that question? For myself,
as I lift up my eyes from my paper once more, my gaze falls first on the
golden bracken that waves joyously over the sandstone ridge without, and
then, within, on a little white shelf where lies the greatest book of
our greatest philosopher. I open it at random and consult its sortes.
What comfort and counsel has Herbert Spencer for those who venture to
see otherwise than the mass of their contemporaries?
“Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest
it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself
by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him duly
realise the fact that opinion is the agency through which character
adapts external arrangements to itself--that his opinion rightly forms
part of this agency--is a unit of force, constituting, with other such
units, the general power which works out social changes; and he will
perceive that he may properly give full utterance to his innermost
conviction; leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for
nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and
repugnances to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and
beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He must remember
that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future;
and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not
carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly consider
himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the Unknown
Cause; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain belief, he
is thereby authorised to profess and act out that belief. For, to render
in their highest sense the words of the poet--
'Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes.'
“Not as adventitious therefore will the wise man regard the faith which
is in him. The highest truth he sees he will fearlessly utter; knowing
that, let what may come of it, he is thus playing his right part in the
world--knowing that if he can effect the change he aims at--well: if
not--well also; though not SO well.”
That passage comforts me. These, then, are my ideas. They may be right,
they may be wrong. But at least they are the sincere and personal
convictions of an honest man, warranted in him by that spirit of the
age, of which each of us is but an automatic mouthpiece.