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 anythin