The Country of the Blind and Other Stories Read online

  THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

  And Other Stories

  H. G. WELLS

  He stopped, and then made a dash to escape from theirclosing ranks.]

  INTRODUCTION

  The enterprise of Messrs. T. Nelson & Sons and the friendly accommodationof Messrs. Macmillan render possible this collection in one cover of allthe short stories by me that I care for any one to read again. Except forthe two series of linked incidents that make up the bulk of the bookcalled _Tales of Space and Time_, no short story of mine of theslightest merit is excluded from this volume. Many of very questionablemerit 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 ofthe effect of discovery that I was once an industrious writer of shortstories, and that I am no longer anything of the kind. I have not writtenone now for quite a long time, and in the past five or six years I havemade scarcely one a year. The bulk of the fifty or sixty tales from whichthis present three-and-thirty have been chosen dates from the lastcentury. This edition is more definitive than I supposed when first Iarranged for it. In the presence of so conclusive an ebb and cessation analmost obituary manner seems justifiable.

  I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes that haverestricted the flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark, toothers as well as to myself, and in spite of the kindliest encouragementto continue from editors and readers. There was a time when life bubbledwith short stories; they were always coming to the surface of my mind, andit 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 moreexacting 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_, andpersuaded me by his simple and buoyant conviction that I could do what hedesired. There existed at the time only the little sketch, "The Jilting ofJane," included in this volume--at least, that is the only tolerablefragment of fiction I find surviving from my pre-Lewis-Hind period. But Iset myself, so encouraged, to the experiment of inventing moving andinteresting things that could be given vividly in the little space ofeight or ten such pages as this, and for a time I found it a veryentertaining pursuit indeed. Mr. Hind's indicating finger had shown me anamusing possibility of the mind. I found that, taking almost anything as astarting-point and letting my thoughts play about it, there wouldpresently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, someabsurd or vivid little incident more or less relevant to that initialnucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating outof nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares;violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower-beds of suburbangardens; I would discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worldsruled 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 littleblue-grey books, whose covers opened like window-shutters to revealthe dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East; Mr. Barrie haddemonstrated what could be done in a little space through the panes of his_Window in Thrums_. The _National Observer_ was at the climax ofits career of heroic insistence upon lyrical brevity and a vivid finish,and Mr. Frank Harris was not only printing good short stories by otherpeople, but writing still better ones himself in the dignified pages ofthe _Fortnightly Review. Longman's Magazine_, too, represented a_clientele_ of appreciative short-story readers that is nowscattered. Then came the generous opportunities of the _Yellow Book_,and the _National Observer_ died only to give birth to the _NewReview_. No short story of the slightest distinction went for longunrecognised. The sixpenny popular magazines had still to deaden down theconception of what a short story might be to the imaginative limitation ofthe common reader--and a maximum length of six thousand words. Shortstories broke out everywhere. Kipling was writing short stories; Barrie,Stevenson, Frank-Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least one perfect one, "TheHappy Hypocrite"; Henry James pursued his wonderful and inimitable bent;and among other names that occur to me, like a mixed handful of jewelsdrawn from a bag, are George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ellad'Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, EdwinPugh, 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 asmany more names with a little effort. I may be succumbing to theinfirmities of middle age, but I do not think the present decade canproduce any parallel to this list, or what is more remarkable, that thelater achievements in this field of any of the survivors from that time,with the sole exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare with the work theydid before 1900. It seems to me this outburst of short stories came notonly as a phase in literary development, but also as a phase in thedevelopment of the individual writers concerned.

  It is now quite unusual to see any adequate criticism of short stories inEnglish. I do not know how far the decline in short-story writing may notbe due to that. Every sort of artist demands human responses, and few mencan contrive to write merely for a publisher's cheque and silence, howeverreassuring that cheque may be. A mad millionaire who commissionedmasterpieces to burn would find it impossible to buy them. Scarcely anyartist will hesitate in the choice between money and attention; and it wasprimarily for that last and better sort of pay that the short stories ofthe '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, fromthe _a priori_ critic. Just as nowadays he goes about declaring thatthe 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 arbitrarystandards. There was a tendency to treat the short story as though it wasas definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what anyone of courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes' reading orso. It was either Mr. Edward Garnett or Mr. George Moore in a violentlyanti-Kipling mood who invented the distinction between the short story andthe anecdote. The short story was Maupassant; the anecdote was damnable.It was a quite infernal comment in its way, because it permitted nodefence. Fools caught it up and used it freely. Nothing is so destructivein a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Anyone could sayof any short story, "A mere anecdote," just as anyone can say"Incoherent!" of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiouslymonotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form isclosely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation. One felthopelessly open to a paralysing and unanswerable charge, and one's easeand happiness in the garden of one's fancies was more and more marred bythe dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a distress as vague andinexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning, and presently one shiveredand wanted to go indoors...It is the absurd fate of the imaginative writerthat he should be thus sensitive to atmospheric conditions.

  But after one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and Iwill confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field ofart. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me theinstinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tiredman 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 fromindigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protectivetendency towards rules that will reject, as it were, automatically themore 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 refusealtogether to recognise any hard and fast type for the Short Story, anymore 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 isas "trivial" as a Japanese print of insects seen closely between grassstems, or as spacious as the prospect of the plain of Italy from MonteMottarone. It does not matter whether it is human or inhuman, or whetherit leaves you thinking deeply or radiantly but superficially pleased. Somethings are more easily done as short stories than others and moreabundantly done, but one of the many pleasures of short-story writing isto achieve the impossible.

  At any rate, that is the present writer's conception of the art of theshort story, as the jolly art of making something very bright and moving;it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful or profoundlyilluminating, having only this essential, that it should take from fifteento fifty minutes to read aloud. All the rest is just whatever inventionand imagination and the mood can give--a vision of buttered slides on abusy day or of unprecedented worlds. In that spirit of miscellaneousexpectation these stories should be received. Each is intended to be athing by itself; and if it is not too ungrateful to kindly andenterprising publishers, I would confess I would much prefer to see eachprinted expensively alone, and left in a little brown-paper cover to lieabout a room against the needs of a quite casual curiosity. And I wouldrather this volume were found in the bedrooms of convalescents and indentists' parlours and railway trains than in gentlemen's studies. I wouldrather have it dipped in and dipped in again than read severely through.Essentially it is a miscellany of inventions, many of which were verypleasant to write; and its end is more than attained if some of them arerefreshing and agreeable to read. I have now re-read them all, and I amglad to think I wrote them. I like them, but I cannot tell how much theassociations of old happinesses gives them a flavour for me. I make noclaims for them and no apology; they will be read as long as people readthem. Things written either live or die; unless it be for a place ofjudgment upon Academic impostors, there is no apologetic intermediatestate.

  I may add that I have tried to set a date to most of these stories, butthat they are not arranged in strictly chronological order.

  H. G. WELLS.