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