Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 1.pdf/17

 A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE ATLANTIC EDITION

a firm of publishers has the enterprise to issue a collected edition of a man's writings, and there are subscribers to such a publication, it ill becomes him to question the permanent value of the material so honoured. There is only one graceful response to this compliment, and that is to take himself as seriously as he has been taken, and to set out his writings with as brave a face as possible. "Writings" he will call them, in this preface at least, rather than "Works" as the title has it, because they are so miscellaneous and uneven.

Whatever benefit may accrue to publisher and subscriber through the publication of this edition, on the author at any rate it has inflicted the salutary discipline of rereading himself from the beginning and the necessity of a provisional summing up of his own activities. There is, he finds, a very strong temptation in this occasion to present his display as much more coherent and orderly than it is in reality. Of course, the unity due to personality was inevitable. We have, it is plain, a mind projected here upon the world, amused by the spectacle without, but rather more concerned by the urgency within. But there does also seem to be something more than the mere unity of a developing character throughout these ix