The British Barbarians Read online

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  THE BRITISH BARBARIANS

  A HILL-TOP NOVEL

  By Grant Allen

  1895

  INTRODUCTION

  Which every reader of this book is requested to read before beginningthe 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 floodedwith stories of evil tendencies: a Hill-top Novel is one which raises aprotest 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 forearning his bread, and, incidentally, for finding a publisher to assisthim in promulgating his prophetic opinions, it has seldom happened thatwriters of exceptional aims have been able to proclaim to the world atlarge the things which they conceived to be best worth their tellingit. Especially has this been the case in the province of fiction. Letme explain the situation. Most novels nowadays have to run as serialsthrough magazines or newspapers; and the editors of these periodicalsare timid to a degree which outsiders would hardly believe with regardto the fiction they admit into their pages. Endless spells surroundthem. This story or episode would annoy their Catholic readers; that onewould repel their Wesleyan Methodist subscribers; such an incident isunfit for the perusal of the young person; such another would drive awaythe offended British matron. I do not myself believe there is any realground for this excessive and, to be quite frank, somewhat ridiculoustimidity. Incredible as it may seem to the ordinary editor, I am ofopinion that it would be possible to tell the truth, and yet preservethe circulation. A first-class journal does not really suffer becausetwo or three formalists or two or three bigots among its thousands ofsubscribers give it up for six weeks in a pet of ill-temper--and thentake it on again. Still, the effect remains: it is almost impossibleto get a novel printed in an English journal unless it is warranted tocontain nothing at all to which anybody, however narrow, could possiblyobject, on any grounds whatever, religious, political, social, moral,or aesthetic. The romance that appeals to the average editor must say orhint at nothing at all that is not universally believed and received byeverybody everywhere in this realm of Britain. But literature, as ThomasHardy 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 onceto the outside public, which has few such prejudices? Why not deliverone's message direct to those who are ready to consider it or at leastto hear it? Because, unfortunately, the serial rights of a novel at thepresent day are three times as valuable, in money worth, as the finalbook rights. A man who elects to publish direct, instead of running hisstory through the columns of a newspaper, is forfeiting, in other words,three-quarters of his income. This loss the prophet who cares for hismission could cheerfully endure, of course, if only the diminishedincome were enough for him to live upon. But in order to write, hemust first eat. In my own case, for example, up till the time whenI published The Woman who Did, I could never live on the proceedsof direct publication; nor could I even secure a publisher who wouldconsent to aid me in introducing to the world what I thought mostimportant for it. Having now found such a publisher--having secured mymountain--I am prepared to go on delivering my message from its top, aslong as the world will consent to hear it. I will willingly forgo theserial value of my novels, and forfeit three-quarters of the amount Imight 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 betweenthese books which are really mine--my own in thought, in spirit, inteaching--and those which I have produced, sorely against my will,to satisfy editors, I propose in future to add the words, "A Hill-topNovel," to every one of my stories which I write of my own accord,simply and solely for the sake of embodying and enforcing my ownopinions.

  Not that, as critics have sometimes supposed me to mean, I ever wrote aline, even in fiction, contrary to my own profound beliefs. I have neversaid a thing I did not think: but I have sometimes had to abstain fromsaying many things I did think. When I wished to purvey strong meat formen, 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, representingthe world as it appears to me, not as editors and formalists would likeme to represent it.

  The Hill-top Novels, however, will not constitute, in the ordinarysense, a series. I shall add the name, as a Trade Mark, to any story, bywhomsoever published, which I have written as the expression of my ownindividuality. Nor will they necessarily appear in the first instancein volume form. If ever I should be lucky enough to find an editorsufficiently bold and sufficiently righteous to venture upon running aHill-top Novel as a serial through his columns, I will gladly embracethat mode of publication. But while editors remain as pusillanimous andas careless of moral progress as they are at present, I have little hopethat I shall persuade any one of them to accept a work written with asingle eye to the enlightenment and bettering of humanity.

  Whenever, therefore, in future, the words "A Hill-top Novel" appearupon the title-page of a book by me, the reader who cares for truth andrighteousness may take it for granted that the book represents my ownoriginal thinking, whether good or bad, on some important point in humansociety or human evolution.

  Not, again, that any one of these novels will deliberately attempt toPROVE anything. I have been amused at the allegations brought bycertain critics against The Woman who Did that it "failed to prove"the practicability of unions such as Herminia's and Alan's. The famousScotsman, in the same spirit, objected to Paradise Lost that it "provednaething": but his criticism has not been generally endorsed as valid.To say the truth, it is absurd to suppose a work of imagination canprove or disprove anything. The author holds the strings of all hispuppets, and can pull them as he likes, for good or evil: he can makehis experiments turn out well or ill: he can contrive that his unionsshould end happily or miserably: how, then, can his story be said toPROVE anything? A novel is not a proposition in Euclid. I give duenotice beforehand to reviewers in general, that if any principle at allis "proved" by any of my Hill-top Novels, it will be simply this: "Actas I think right, for the highest good of human kind, and you willinfallibly and inevitably come to a bad end for it."

  Not to prove anything, but to suggest ideas, to arouse emotions, is, Itake it, the true function of fiction. One wishes to make one's readersTHINK about problems they have never considered, FEEL with sentimentsthey have disliked or hated. The novelist as prophet has his dutydefined 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 thesein romantic fiction, not in deliberate treatises. "Why sow your ideasbroadcast," many honest critics say, "in novels where mere boys andgirls can read them? Why not formulate them in serious and argumentativebooks, where wise men alone will come across them?" The answer is,because wise men are wise already: it is the boys and girls of acommunity who stand most in need of suggestion and instruction. Women,in particular, are the chief readers of fiction; and it is women whomone mainly desires to arouse to interest in profound problems by theaid of this vehicle. Especially should one arouse them to such livinginterest while they are still young and plastic, before they havecrystallised and hardened into the conventional marionettes of politesociety. Make them think while they are young: make them feel while theyare sensitive: it is then alone that they will th
ink and feel, if ever.I will venture, indeed, to enforce my views on this subject by a littleapologue which I have somewhere read, or heard,--or invented.

  A Revolutionist desired to issue an Election Address to the Working Menof Bermondsey. The Rector of the Parish saw it at the printer's, andcame to him, much perturbed. "Why write it in English?" he asked. "Itwill only inflame the minds of the lower orders. Why not allow me totranslate it into Ciceronian Latin? It would then be comprehensible toall University men; your logic would be duly and deliberately weighed:and the tanners and tinkers, who are so very impressionable, would notbe poisoned by it." "My friend," said the Revolutionist, "it is thetanners and tinkers _I_ want to get at. My object is, to win thiselection; University graduates will not help me to win it."

  The business of the preacher is above all things to preach; but in orderto preach, he must first reach his audience. The audience in this caseconsists in large part of women and girls, who are most simply andeasily reached by fiction. Therefore, fiction is today the best mediumfor the preacher of righteousness who addresses humanity.

  Why, once more, this particular name, "A Hill-top Novel"? For somethinglike this reason.

  I am writing in my study on a heather-clad hill-top. When I raise my eyefrom my sheet of foolscap, it falls upon miles and miles of broad openmoorland. My window looks out upon unsullied nature. Everything aroundis fresh and pure and wholesome. Through the open casement, the scent ofthe pines blows in with the breeze from the neighbouring firwood. Keenairs sigh through the pine-needles. Grasshoppers chirp from deep tanglesof bracken. The song of a skylark drops from the sky like soft rainin summer; in the evening, a nightjar croons to us his monotonouslypassionate love-wail from his perch on the gnarled boughs of thewind-swept larch that crowns the upland. But away below in the valley,as night draws on, a lurid glare reddens the north-eastern horizon. Itmarks the spot where the great wen of London heaves and festers. Up hereon the free hills, the sharp air blows in upon us, limpid and clear froma thousand leagues of open ocean; down there in the crowded town,it stagnates and ferments, polluted with the diseases and vices ofcenturies.

  This is an urban age. The men of the villages, alas, are leaving behindthem the green fields and purple moors of their childhood, are foolishlycrowding into the narrow lanes and purlieus of the great cities. Strangedecadent sins and morbid pleasures entice them thither. But I desirein these books to utter a word once more in favour of higher and purerideals of life and art. Those who sicken of the foul air and luridlight of towns may still wander side by side with me on these heatheryhighlands. Far, far below, the theatre and the music-hall spread theirgarish gas-lamps. Let who will heed them. But here on the open hill-topwe know fresher and more wholesome delights. Those feverish joys allureus not. O decadents of the town, we have seen your sham idyls, yourtinsel Arcadias. We have tired of their stuffy atmosphere, theirdazzling jets, their weary ways, their gaudy dresses; we shun the sunkencheeks, the lack-lustre eyes, the heart-sick souls of your paintedgoddesses. We love not the fetid air, thick and hot with human breath,and reeking with tobacco smoke, of your modern Parnassus--a Parnassuswhose 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 breatheoxygen.

  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 theclean-cut metal to the dull and leaden exposed surface. Nascent and everrenascent, it has electrical attraction; it leaps to the embrace of theatom it selects, but only under the influence of powerful affinities;and what it clasps once, it clasps for ever. That is the pure air whichwe drink in on the heather-clad heights--not the venomous air of thecrowded casino, nor even the close air of the middle-class parlour. Itthrills and nerves us. How we smile, we who live here, when some dwellerin the mists and smoke of the valley confounds our delicate atmosphere,redolent of honey and echoing the manifold murmur of bees, with thatstifling miasma of the gambling hell and the dancing saloon! Trustme, dear friend, the moorland air is far other than you fancy. You canwander up here along the purple ridges, hand locked in hand with thoseyou love, without fear of harm to yourself or your comrade. No Bloom ofNinon here, but fresh cheeks like the peach-blossom where the sunhas kissed it: no casual fruition of loveless, joyless harlots, butlife-long saturation of your own heart's desire in your own heart'sinnocence. Ozone is better than all the champagne in the Strand orPiccadilly. If only you will believe it, it is purity and life andsympathy and vigour. Its perfect freshness and perpetual fount of youthkeep your age from withering. It crimsons the sunset and lives in theafterglow. If these delights thy mind may move, leave, oh, leave themeretricious town, and come to the airy peaks. Such joy is ours, unknownto the squalid village which spreads its swamps where the poet's silverThames 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 heartsare 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 thegolden bracken that waves joyously over the sandstone ridge without, andthen, within, on a little white shelf where lies the greatest book ofour greatest philosopher. I open it at random and consult its sortes.What comfort and counsel has Herbert Spencer for those who venture tosee otherwise than the mass of their contemporaries?

  "Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lestit should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himselfby looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him dulyrealise the fact that opinion is the agency through which characteradapts external arrangements to itself--that his opinion rightly formspart of this agency--is a unit of force, constituting, with other suchunits, the general power which works out social changes; and he willperceive that he may properly give full utterance to his innermostconviction; leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not fornothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles andrepugnances to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, andbeliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He must rememberthat 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 notcarelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly considerhimself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the UnknownCause; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain belief, heis thereby authorised to profess and act out that belief. For, to renderin 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 whichis in him. The highest truth he sees he will fearlessly utter; knowingthat, let what may come of it, he is thus playing his right part in theworld--knowing that if he can effect the change he aims at--well: ifnot--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 personalconvictions of an honest man, warranted in him by that spirit of theage, of which each of us is but an automatic mouthpiece.

  G. A.

  THE BRITISH BARBARIANS