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The Country of the Blind and Other Stories Introduction · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Introduction to the Country of the Blind and Other Stories.
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  Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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  Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information, not to volunteer, please
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  Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. Read by P. T. Yearsley, The
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  Speaker 1: Country of the Blind and Other Stories by H. G.
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  Speaker 1: Wells Introduction, The enterprise of Messrs T. Nelson and Sons,
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  Speaker 1: and the friendly accommodation of Messrs Macmillan render possible this
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  Speaker 1: collection in one cover, of all the short stories by
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  Speaker 1: me that I care for anyone to read again, except
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  Speaker 1: for the two series of linked incidents that make up
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  Speaker 1: the bulk of the book, called Tales of Space and Time.
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  Speaker 1: No short story of mine, of the slightest merit is
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  Speaker 1: excluded from this volume many a very questionable merit finder place.
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  Speaker 1: It is an inclusive and not an exclusive gathering, and
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  Speaker 1: the task of selection and revision brings home to me
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  Speaker 1: with something of the effect of discovery, that I was
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  Speaker 1: once an industrious writer of short stories, and that I
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  Speaker 1: am no longer anything of the kind. I have not
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  Speaker 1: written one now for quite a long time, and in
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  Speaker 1: the past five or six years I have scarcely made
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  Speaker 1: one a year. The bulk of the fifty or sixty
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  Speaker 1: tails from which this present three and thirty have been
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  Speaker 1: chosen dates from the last century. This edition is more
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  Speaker 1: definitive than I supposed when first I arranged for it.
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  Speaker 1: In the presence of so conclusive an ebb and cessation,
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  Speaker 1: an almost obituary manner seems justifiable. I find it a
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  Speaker 1: little difficult to disentangle the causes that have restricted the
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  Speaker 1: flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark to
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  Speaker 1: others as well as to myself, and in spite of
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  Speaker 1: the kindliest encouragement to continue for from editors and readers.
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  Speaker 1: There was a time when life bubbled with short stories.
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  Speaker 1: They were always coming to the surface of my mind.
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  Speaker 1: And it is no deliberate change of will that has
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  Speaker 1: thus restricted my production. It is, rather, I think, a
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  Speaker 1: diversion of attention to more sustained and more exacting forms.
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  Speaker 1: It was my friend C. L. Hind who set that
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  Speaker 1: spring going. He urged me to write short stories for
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  Speaker 1: the pall mall budget, and persuaded me by his simple
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  Speaker 1: and buoyant conviction that I could do what he desired.
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  Speaker 1: There existed at that time only the little sketch the
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  Speaker 1: jilting of Jane included in this volume. At least, that
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  Speaker 1: is the only tolerable fragment of fiction I find surviving
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  Speaker 1: from my pre Lewis Hind period. But I set myself
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  Speaker 1: so encouraged to the experiment of inventing moving and interesting
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  Speaker 1: things that could be given vividly in a little space
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  Speaker 1: of eight or ten such pages as this, and for
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  Speaker 1: a time I found it a very entertaining pursuit. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: mister Hind's indicating finger had shown me an amusing possibility
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  Speaker 1: of the mind. I found that taking almost anything as
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  Speaker 1: a starting point, and letting my thoughts play about it,
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  Speaker 1: there would presently come out of the darkness in a
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  Speaker 1: manner quite inexplicable, some absurd or vivid little incident more
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  Speaker 1: or less relevant to that initial nucleus. Little men in
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  Speaker 1: canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out of nothingness,
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  Speaker 1: incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares. Violent conflict would
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  Speaker 1: break out amidst the flower beds of suburban gardens. I
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  Speaker 1: would discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds
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  Speaker 1: ruled by an order logical, indeed, but other than our
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  Speaker 1: common sanity. The nineties the good and stimulating period for
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  Speaker 1: a short story writer. Mister Kipling had made his astonishing
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  Speaker 1: advent with a series of little blue gray books whose
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  Speaker 1: covers opened like window shutters to reveal the dusty sun
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  Speaker 1: glare and blazing colors of the East. Mister Barry had
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  Speaker 1: demonstrated what could be done in a little space through
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  Speaker 1: the panes of his window in Thrums. The National Observer
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  Speaker 1: was at the climax of its career of heroic insistence
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  Speaker 1: upon lyrical brevity and a vivid finish, and mister Frank
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  Speaker 1: Harris was not only printing good short stories by other people,
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  Speaker 1: but writing still better ones himself in the dignified pages
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  Speaker 1: of the Fortnightly Review. Longman's Magazine, too, represented a cleontelle
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  Speaker 1: of appreciative short story readers that is now scattered. Then
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  Speaker 1: came the generous opportunities of the Yellow Book, and the
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  Speaker 1: National Observer died only to give birth to the New Review.
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  Speaker 1: No short story of the slightest distinction went for long unrecognized.
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  Speaker 1: The six penny popular magazines had still to deaden down
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  Speaker 1: the conception of what a short story might be to
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  Speaker 1: the imaginative limitation of the common reader and the maximum
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  Speaker 1: length of six thousand words. Short stories broke out everywhere
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  Speaker 1: Kipling was writing short stories. Barry Stevenson, Frank Harris, Max
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  Speaker 1: Bierbohm wrote at least one perfect one, the happy Hypocrite,
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  Speaker 1: Henry James pursued his wonderful and inimitable bent, and among
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  Speaker 1: other names that occurred to me like a mixed handful
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  Speaker 1: of jewels drawn from a bag are George Street, Morley Roberts,
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  Speaker 1: George Gissing, Ella, Darcy Murray, Gilchrist, e Nesbitt, Stephen Crane,
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  Speaker 1: Joseph Conrad, Edwin Peu, Jerome k Jerome, Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Morrison,
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  Speaker 1: Marriott Watson, George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland,
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  Speaker 1: pet Ridge, W. W. Jacobs, who alone seems inexhaustible. I
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  Speaker 1: daresay I could recall as many more names with a
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  Speaker 1: little effort. I may be succumbing to the infirmities of
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  Speaker 1: middle age, but I do not think the present decade
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  Speaker 1: can produce any parallel to this list, or what is
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  Speaker 1: more remarkable, that the later achievements in this field of
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  Speaker 1: any of the survivors from that time, with the sole
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  Speaker 1: exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare with the work they
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  Speaker 1: did before nineteen hundred. It seems to me this outburst
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  Speaker 1: of short stories came not only as a phase in
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  Speaker 1: literary development, but also as a phase in the development
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  Speaker 1: of the individual writers concerned. It is now quite unusual
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  Speaker 1: to see any adequate criticism of short stories in English.
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  Speaker 1: I do not know how far the decline in short
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  Speaker 1: story writing may not be due to that. Every sort
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  Speaker 1: of artist demands human responses, and few men can contrive
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  Speaker 1: to write merely for a publisher's check and silence. However,
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  Speaker 1: reassuring that check may be a mad millionaire who commissioned
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  Speaker 1: masterpieces to burn would find it impossible to buy them scarcely.
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  Speaker 1: Any artist will hesitate in the choice between money and attention,
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  Speaker 1: And it was primarily for that last and better sort
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  Speaker 1: of pay that the short stories of the nineties were written.
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  Speaker 1: People talked about them, tremendously, compared them, and ranked them.
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  Speaker 1: That was the thing that mattered. It was not, of course,
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  Speaker 1: all good talk, and we suffered then as now from
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  Speaker 1: the a priori critic, just as nowadays he goes about
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  Speaker 1: declaring that the work of such and such a dramatist
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  Speaker 1: is all very amusing and delightful, but it isn't a play.
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  Speaker 1: So we had a great deal of talk about the
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  Speaker 1: short story and found ourselves measured by all kinds of
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  Speaker 1: arbitrary standards. There was a tendency to treat the short
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  Speaker 1: story as though it was as definable a form as
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  Speaker 1: the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what any one
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  Speaker 1: of courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes
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  Speaker 1: reading or so. It was either mister Edward Garnett or
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  Speaker 1: mister George Moore, in a violently anti Kipling mood, who
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  Speaker 1: invented the distinction between the short story and the anecdote.
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  Speaker 1: The short story was mo pessant. The anecdote was damnable.
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  Speaker 1: It was a quite infernal comment in its way because
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  Speaker 1: it permitted no defense. Fools caught it up and used
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  Speaker 1: it freely. Nothing is so destructive in a field of
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  Speaker 1: artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Any One
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  Speaker 1: could say of any short story a mere anecdote, just
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  Speaker 1: as any one can say incoherent of any novel or
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  Speaker 1: of any sonata that isn't studiously monotonous. The recession of
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  Speaker 1: enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is closely associated in
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  Speaker 1: my mind. With that discouraging imputation, one felt hopelessly open
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  Speaker 1: to a paralyzing and unanswerable charge, and one's ease and
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  Speaker 1: happiness in the garden of one's fancies was more and
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  Speaker 1: more marred by the dread of it. It crept into
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  Speaker 1: one's mind a distress as vague and inexpunable as a
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  Speaker 1: sea fog on a spring morning, and presently one shivered
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  Speaker 1: and wanted to go indoors. It is the absurd fate
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  Speaker 1: of the imaginative writer that he should be thus sensitive
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  Speaker 1: to atmospheric conditions. But after one has died as a maker,
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  Speaker 1: one may still live as a critic. And I will
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  Speaker 1: confess I am all for laxness and variety. In this
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  Speaker 1: as in every field of art. Insistence upon rigid forms
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  Speaker 1: and austere unities seems to me the instinctive reaction of
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  Speaker 1: the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired man
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  Speaker 1: with a headache who values the work of art for
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  Speaker 1: what it does not contain. I suppose it is the
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  Speaker 1: lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from indigestion and
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  Speaker 1: a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self protective tendency
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  Speaker 1: towards rules that will reject, as it were, automatically, the
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  Speaker 1: more abundant and irregular forms. But this world is not
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  Speaker 1: for the weary, and in the long run it is
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  Speaker 1: the new and variant that matter. I refuse altogether to
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  Speaker 1: recognize any hard and fast type for the short story,
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  Speaker 1: any more than I admit any limitation upon the liberties
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  Speaker 1: of the small picture. The short story is a fiction
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  Speaker 1: that may be read in something under an hour, and
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  Speaker 1: so that it is moving and delightful. It does not
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  Speaker 1: matter whether it is as trivial as a Japanese print
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  Speaker 1: of insects seen closely between grass stems, or as spacious
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  Speaker 1: as the prospect of the plain of Italy from Monte Matrone.
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  Speaker 1: It does not matter whether it is human or inhuman,
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  Speaker 1: or whether it leaves you thinking deeply or radiantly but
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  Speaker 1: superficiently pleased. Somethings are more easily done as short stories
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  Speaker 1: than others, and more abundantly done. But one of the
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  Speaker 1: many pleasures of short story writing is to achieve the
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  Speaker 1: impossible at any rate. That is the present writer's conception
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  Speaker 1: of the art of the short story as the jolly
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  Speaker 1: art of making something very bright and moving. It may
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  Speaker 1: be horrible or pathetic, or funny, or beautiful or profoundly illuminating,
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  Speaker 1: having only this essential that it should take from fifteen
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  Speaker 1: to fifty minutes to read aloud. All the rest is
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  Speaker 1: just whatever invention and imagination and the mood can give
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  Speaker 1: a vision of buttered slides on a busy day, or
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  Speaker 1: of unprecedented worlds. In that spirit of miscellaneous expectation, these
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  Speaker 1: stories should be received. Each is intended to be a
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  Speaker 1: thing by itself, And if it is not too ungrateful
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  Speaker 1: to kindly and enterprising publishers, I would confess I would
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  Speaker 1: much prefer to see each printed expensively, alone and left
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  Speaker 1: in a little brown paper cover to lie about a room,
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  Speaker 1: against the needs of a quite casual curiosity. And I
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  Speaker 1: would rather this volume were found in the bedrooms of convalescence,
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  Speaker 1: and in dentist's parlors and railway trains than in gentlemen's studies.
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  Speaker 1: I would rather have it dipped in and dipped in
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  Speaker 1: again than read severely through. Essentially, it is a miscellany
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  Speaker 1: of inventions, many of which were very pleasant to write,
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  Speaker 1: and its end is more than attained if some of
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  Speaker 1: them are refreshing and agreeable to read. I have now
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  Speaker 1: re read them all, and I am glad to think
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  Speaker 1: I wrote them. I like them, but I cannot tell
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  Speaker 1: how much the associations of old happinesses gives them a
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  Speaker 1: flavor for me. I make no claims for them and
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  Speaker 1: no apology. They will be read as long as people
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  Speaker 1: read them. Things written either live or die. Unless it
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  Speaker 1: be for a place of judgment upon academic imp posts.
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  Speaker 1: There is no apologetic intermediate state. I may add that
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  Speaker 1: I have tried to set a date to most of
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  Speaker 1: these stories, but they are not arranged in strictly chronological order. H. G. Wells,
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  Speaker 1: end of introduction,