The Country of the Blind

The Country of the Blind, And
Other Stories,
by H. G. Wells

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by H. G. Wells
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Title: The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories
Author: H. G. Wells
Release Date: April 2, 2004 [eBook #11870]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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