The British Barbarians | Page 4

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