The British Barbarians | Page 6

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