Cynthia / With an Introduction by Maurice Hewlett

My first acquaintance with Mr. Merrick's engaging and stimulating muse was made in the pages of Violet Moses , an early work, which appeared, I remember, in three volumes. Reading it again in the light of my appreciation of what its author has done since, I think of it now as I felt of it then. It has great promise, and though its texture is slight its fibres are of steel. It shows the light hand, which has grown no heavier, though it has grown surer, the little effervescence of cynicism, with never a hiccough in it, the underlying, deeply-funded sympathy with real things, great things and fine things, and the seriousness of aim which, tantalisingly, stops short just where you want it to go on, and provokes the reader to get every book of Mr. Merrick's as it appears, just to see him let himself go—which he never does. He is one of the most discreet dissectors of the human heart we have.
In Violet Moses Mr. Merrick avoided the great issue after coming up against it more than once. So did he in The Quaint Companions, a maturer but less ambitious study. I don't know why he avoided it in Violet's case, unless it was because he found it too big a matter for his light battery. In the Companions' case I do know. It was because he came upon another problem which interested him more, a problem with a sentimental attraction far more potent than any he could have got out of miscegenation. The result was the growth, out of a rather ugly root, of a charming and tender idyll of two poets, an idyll, nevertheless, with a psychological crux involved in its delicate tracery. All this seems a long way from Cynthia , which is my immediate business, but is not so in truth. In Cynthia (which, I believe, followed Violet ) you have a problem of psychology laid out before you, and again Mr. Merrick does not, I think, fairly tackle it. But he fails to tackle it, not because it is too big for his guns, as Violet's was, and not because he finds another which he likes better, as he did when he was upon The Companions , but because, I am going to suggest, he found it too small. He took up his positions, opened his attack, and the enemy in his trenches dissolved in mist.