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The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories By: H. G. Wells (1866-1946) |
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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 ... Continue reading book >>
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