THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
And Other Stories
H. G. WELLS
[Illustration: He stopped, and then made a dash
to escape from their
closing ranks.]
INTRODUCTION
The enterprise of Messrs. T. Nelson & Sons and the
friendly accommodation
of Messrs. Macmillan render possible this collection
in one cover of all
the short stories by me that I care for any one to
read again. Except for
the two series of linked incidents that make up the
bulk of the book
called Tales of Space and Time, no short story
of mine of the
slightest merit is excluded from this volume.
Many of very questionable
merit find a place; it is an inclusive and not an
exclusive gathering.
And the task of selection and revision brings home
to me with something of
the effect of discovery that I was once an industrious
writer of short
stories, and that I am no longer anything of the kind.
I have not written
one now for quite a long time, and in the past five
or six years I have
made scarcely one a year. The bulk of the fifty
or sixty tales from which
this present three-and-thirty have been chosen dates
from the last
century. This edition is more definitive than
I supposed when first I
arranged for it. In the presence of so conclusive
an ebb and cessation an
almost obituary manner seems justifiable.
I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes
that have
restricted the flow of these inventions. It has
happened, I remark, to
others as well as to myself, and in spite of the kindliest
encouragement
to continue from editors and readers. There was
a time when life bubbled
with short stories; they were always coming to the
surface of my mind, and
it is no deliberate change of will that has thus restricted
my production.
It is rather, I think, a diversion of attention to
more sustained and more
exacting forms. It was my friend Mr. C.L.
Hind who set that spring going.
He urged me to write short stories for the Pall
Mall Budget, and
persuaded me by his simple and buoyant conviction
that I could do what he
desired. There existed at the time only the little
sketch, “The Jilting of
Jane,” included in this volume—at
least, that is the only tolerable
fragment of fiction I find surviving from my pre-Lewis-Hind
period. But I
set myself, so encouraged, to the experiment of inventing
moving and
interesting things that could be given vividly in
the little space of
eight or ten such pages as this, and for a time I
found it a very
entertaining pursuit indeed. Mr. Hind’s
indicating finger had shown me an
amusing possibility of the mind. I found that,
taking almost anything as a
starting-point and letting my thoughts play about
it, there would
presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite
inexplicable, some
absurd or vivid little incident more or less relevant
to that initial
nucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans
would come floating out
of nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric
monsters unawares;
violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower-beds
of suburban
gardens; I would discover I was peering into remote
and mysterious worlds
ruled by an order logical indeed but other than our
common sanity.
The ’nineties was a good and stimulating period
for a short-story writer.
Mr. Kipling had made his astonishing advent with a
series of little
blue-grey books, whose covers opened like window-shutters
to reveal
the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East;
Mr. Barrie had
demonstrated what could be done in a little space
through the panes of his
Window in Thrums. The National Observer
was at the climax of
its career of heroic insistence upon lyrical brevity
and a vivid finish,
and Mr. Frank Harris was not only printing good short
stories by other
people, but writing still better ones himself in the
dignified pages of
the Fortnightly Review. Longman’s Magazine,
too, represented a
clientèle of appreciative short-story readers
that is now
scattered. Then came the generous opportunities
of the Yellow Book,
and the National Observer died only to give
birth to the New
Review. No short story of the slightest distinction
went for long
unrecognised. The sixpenny popular magazines
had still to deaden down the
conception of what a short story might be to the imaginative
limitation of
the common reader—and a maximum length
of six thousand words. Short
stories broke out everywhere. Kipling was writing
short stories; Barrie,
Stevenson, Frank-Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least
one perfect one, “The
Happy Hypocrite”; Henry James pursued his wonderful
and inimitable bent;
and among other names that occur to me, like a mixed
handful of jewels
drawn from a bag, are George Street, Morley Roberts,
George Gissing, Ella
d’Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen
Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin
Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham, Arthur Morrison,
Marriott Watson,
George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland,
Pett Ridge, W.
W. Jacobs (who alone seems inexhaustible). I
dare say I could recall as
many more names with a little effort. I may be
succumbing to the
infirmities of middle age, but I do not think the
present decade can
produce any parallel to this list, or what is more
remarkable, that the
later achievements in this field of any of the survivors
from that time,
with the sole exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare
with the work they
did before 1900. It seems to me this outburst
of short stories came not
only as a phase in literary development, but also
as a phase in the
development of the individual writers concerned.
It is now quite unusual to see any adequate criticism
of short stories in
English. I do not know how far the decline in
short-story writing may not
be due to that. Every sort of artist demands
human responses, and few men
can contrive to write merely for a publisher’s
cheque and silence, however
reassuring that cheque may be. A mad millionaire
who commissioned
masterpieces to burn would find it impossible to buy
them. Scarcely any
artist will hesitate in the choice between money and
attention; and it was
primarily for that last and better sort of pay that
the short stories of
the ’nineties were written. People talked
about them tremendously,
compared them, and ranked them. That was the
thing that mattered.
It was not, of course, all good talk, and we suffered
then, as now, from
the à priori critic. Just as nowadays
he goes about declaring that
the work of such-and-such a dramatist is all very
amusing and delightful,
but “it isn’t a Play,” so we’
had a great deal of talk about the
short story, and found ourselves measured by all kinds
of arbitrary
standards. There was a tendency to treat the
short story as though it was
as definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being
just exactly what any
one of courage and imagination can get told in twenty
minutes’ reading or
so. It was either Mr. Edward Garnett or Mr. George
Moore in a violently
anti-Kipling mood who invented the distinction between
the short story and
the anecdote. The short story was Maupassant;
the anecdote was damnable.
It was a quite infernal comment in its way, because
it permitted no
defence. Fools caught it up and used it freely.
Nothing is so destructive
in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse.
Anyone could say
of any short story, “A mere anecdote,”
just as anyone can say
“Incoherent!” of any novel or of any sonata
that isn’t studiously
monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this
compact, amusing form is
closely associated in my mind with that discouraging
imputation. One felt
hopelessly open to a paralysing and unanswerable charge,
and one’s ease
and happiness in the garden of one’s fancies
was more and more marred by
the dread of it. It crept into one’s mind,
a distress as vague and
inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning, and
presently one shivered
and wanted to go indoors…It is the absurd fate of
the imaginative writer
that he should be thus sensitive to atmospheric conditions.
But after one has died as a maker one may still live
as a critic, and I
will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this
as in every field of
art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere
unities seems to me the
instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund.
It is the tired
man with a headache who values a work of art for what
it does not contain.
I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to
suffer from
indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop
a self-protective
tendency towards rules that will reject, as it were,
automatically the
more abundant and irregular forms. But this world
is not for the weary,
and in the long-run it is the new and variant that
matter. I refuse
altogether to recognise any hard and fast type for
the Short Story, any
more than I admit any limitation upon the liberties
of the Small Picture.
The short story is a fiction that may be read in something
under an hour,
and so that it is moving and delightful, it does not
matter whether it is
as “trivial” as a Japanese print of insects
seen closely between grass
stems, or as spacious as the prospect of the plain
of Italy from Monte
Mottarone. It does not matter whether it is human
or inhuman, or whether
it leaves you thinking deeply or radiantly but superficially
pleased. Some
things are more easily done as short stories than
others and more
abundantly done, but one of the many pleasures of
short-story writing is
to achieve the impossible.
At any rate, that is the present writer’s conception
of the art of the
short story, as the jolly art of making something
very bright and moving;
it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful
or profoundly
illuminating, having only this essential, that it
should take from fifteen
to fifty minutes to read aloud. All the rest
is just whatever invention
and imagination and the mood can give—a
vision of buttered slides on a
busy day or of unprecedented worlds. In that
spirit of miscellaneous
expectation these stories should be received.
Each is intended to be a
thing by itself; and if it is not too ungrateful to
kindly and
enterprising publishers, I would confess I would much
prefer to see each
printed expensively alone, and left in a little brown-paper
cover to lie
about a room against the needs of a quite casual curiosity.
And I would
rather this volume were found in the bedrooms of convalescents
and in
dentists’ parlours and railway trains than in
gentlemen’s studies. I would
rather have it dipped in and dipped in again than
read severely through.
Essentially it is a miscellany of inventions, many
of which were very
pleasant to write; and its end is more than attained
if some of them are
refreshing and agreeable to read. I have now
re-read them all, and I am
glad to think I wrote them. I like them, but
I cannot tell how much the
associations of old happinesses gives them a flavour
for me. I make no
claims for them and no apology; they will be read
as long as people read
them. Things written either live or die; unless
it be for a place of
judgment upon Academic impostors, there is no apologetic
intermediate
state.
I may add that I have tried to set a date to most
of these stories, but
that they are not arranged in strictly chronological
order.
H. G. WELLS.
CONTENTS.
I. THE JILTING OF JANE
II. THE CONE
III. THE STOLEN BACILLUS
IV. THE FLOWERING OF
THE STRANGE ORCHID
V. THE AVU OBSERVATORY
VI. AEPYORNIS ISLAND
VII. THE REMARKABLE CASE OF
DAVIDSON’S EYES.
VIII. THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS.
IX. THE MOTH
X. THE TREASURE IN THE
FOREST
XI. THE STORY OF THE
LATE MR. ELVESHAM
XII. UNDER THE KNIFE
XIII. THE SEA RAIDERS
XIV. THE OBLITERATED MAN
XV. THE PLATTNER STORY
XVI. THE RED ROOM
XVII. THE PURPLE PILEUS
XVIII. A SLIP UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
XIX. THE CRYSTAL EGG
XX. THE STAR
XXI. THE MAN WHO COULD WORK
MIRACLES
XXII. A VISION OF JUDGMENT
XXIII. JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD
XXIV. MISS WINCHELSEA’S HEART
XXV. A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON
XXVI. THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS
XXVII. THE NEW ACCELERATOR
XXVIII. THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT
XXIX. THE MAGIC SHOP
XXX. THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTS
XXXI. THE DOOR IN THE WALL
XXXII. THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
XXXIII. THE BEAUTIFUL SUIT
