This may be purely fantastic, but the fact remains that Leonard Merrick is a personality of a gracious and retiring order; he is seldom seen in literary circles, and has no skill in self-advertisement. Once, not long ago, I told him I had often wondered that such stories as his had not from the first taken the public by storm, and asked if he could to any extent help me to understand why they had not done so. He accepted the implications in my question with a smile and said, in the quietest, most impartial fashion, “I don’t know. Of course I have been disappointed when my books were freely praised by the critics and did not meet with the large circulations I had hoped for them, and sometimes, when I have thought about it, I have had a suspicion that perhaps I wrote too much of artists—of novelists, journalists, actors—and, moreover, too much about artists who failed. I fancy the public are not particularly interested in the artist; they prefer to read about people more like themselves—people with whom and whose ways they are more familiar. Or if they are to be told of the artist, they want him to be a hero—they want to be told how he struggled through thrilling trials and difficulties to happiness and prosperity at last—they don’t want to be saddened by a tale of his failure; they don’t want to know about him unless he was the sort of man who could conquer fate and circumstance romantically and, as the Americans say, make good in the end. And I have seen a good deal of the artist’s life, and seen how there is bound to be far more failure than success in it, and I suppose I have tried to picture it truthfully. Perhaps that was a mistake and I ought, in the language of the theater, to have kept my eye on the box-office. I don’t know. That is merely a casual notion of mine, and may not account for anything.”
However that may be, and whatever it was that kept the large public that has come to him by degrees from promptly appreciating him, Merrick’s greatness as a novelist has from the beginning been fully realized by his fellow-craftsmen; he has all along been the novelists’ novelist, somewhat as Keats was the poets’ poet, and the collected edition of his works bore testimony to this in prefaces to the various volumes by Barrie, Wells, Locke, Chesterton, Neil Munro, Neil Lyons, and other distinguished authors. None was more generous in his acclaim than Barrie, who had long before greeted him as a master of fiction and, in his introduction to “Conrad in Quest of his Youth,” said, “I know scarcely a novel by any living Englishman, except a score or so of Mr. Hardy’s, that I would rather have written.” Allowing for his very different angle of vision, Merrick is as true a realist as Hardy, but he touches in his characters and incidents with a lighter hand, and has as shrewd a sense of the comedy—the piteous comedy it may be at times—as Hardy has of the tragedy of existence. He does not show his men and women as the foredoomed and helpless victims of a blind, indifferent, implacable life-force, but simply tells his story of them, what they did and what they felt and said, and any spiritual, moral, or social problem involved in their doings and sufferings is implicit in his dramatization of their lives and characters; he does not take you aside to expound it or dogmatize about it: there it is—that is how things happen, and he is a showman, not a preacher. His prevailing qualities are a Gallic sparkle and effervescence of wit and gaiety—especially in such tales as make up “While Paris Laughed” and “A Chair on the Boulevard”—a limitless charity and pity for the follies, weaknesses, caprices of mankind, a charm of sentiment that just stops short of sentimentality, a quick sensitiveness to the humor and pathos of common life, the anxieties of living by precarious employment; the tragedy of straitened circumstances; the sheer joy of living in spite of everything.
He has experienced much of the life he has depicted, and has put not a little of his personal experiences into “The Worldings,” into “Laurels and the Lady,” one of the stories of “The Man Who Understood Women,” and into other of his books. Usually there is nothing to tell of a novelist’s early days, except that he went to certain schools, practiced journalism for a while, then wrote a book or two which found acceptance sooner or later and thereafter took up permanent residence in the literary world. But Merrick’s career has been less orthodox and more varied.
A Londoner born, he went with his people to South Africa when he was eighteen and, entering the South African Civil Service, became clerk in the Magistrate’s Court on the Diamond Fields. But he had not the smallest intention of settling down to that. He was, as he told me, born “stage-struck,” and his one ambition as a youth was to tread the boards and achieve fame as an actor. In 1884 he returned to England and obtained an introduction to Augustus Harris, who gave him an engagement to act in a touring company that was traveling the country with one of the big Drury Lane autumn melodramas. He proved himself a thoroughly capable player, yet would have lost his part, because the touring manager was bent on pushing him out and supplanting him with a friend of his own, but for the voluntary intervention of another member of the company who wrote privately to Harris urging him to go down and see Leonard Merrick’s acting for himself before making any change. Harris did so, with the result that Merrick retained his position in the company for two years, at the end of which period, his enthusiasm for the actor’s life being cooled, he retired from the profession for good. Not until some years later did he discover by chance that the member of the company who, without his knowledge, had befriended him and saved him from dismissal, was Arthur Collins, who, in due season, was to succeed Augustus Harris as Drury Lane’s managing director.
When the disillusioned mummer strutted his little hour before the footlights for the last time he was twenty-three, and “The Position of Peggy Harper” is by no means the only one of his books to which his two years in motley have yielded a rich harvest. Since then, except that he wrote “The Free Pardon” with F. C. Phillips and some very popular dramas in collaboration with George R. Sims, the stage has ceased to lure him and he has devoted himself to the writing of stories.
Nor did he lose much time in passing from the one calling to the other, for his first book appeared when he was twenty-four. His second novel, “Violet Moses,” was rejected by Chatto & Windus, but accepted by Bentley; and his third, “The Man Who Was Good,” was rejected by Bentley as not up to the level of the other, but promptly accepted by Chatto & Windus; one of life’s lighter ironies that nobody—certainly not Merrick—would have wished to evade. He had published some half dozen novels before he began to write short stories. He confesses that he prefers to write these, and there are stories in at least two of his volumes that for delicate satirical comedy and subtle art of narration have not been surpassed by any of his contemporaries.
From the outset, Merrick met with a more popular reception in America than in this country; his books enjoyed a considerable vogue there, and his short stories were soon in great demand with the American magazines. This has happened to so many other of our writers that one merely mentions it as a biographical fact and not as matter for surprise. His first real success with short stories over here came when his agent, A. P. Watt, handed one of his books to the editor of the Bystander, urging him to read it and see whether its stories were not of the sort he wanted. He read it, and commissioned six, and before these had all appeared commissioned a further twelve. Thereafter, the trouble was not to place such stories but to write as many as were required.
While he was in his thirties Leonard Merrick lived for some time in Paris, and Paris still draws him at intervals from the retirement of his English home, for he finds there ideas and stimulation, and can work there as he never can in London. As a rule, the Londoner born has a sneaking regard for his city and cannot be long away from it without feeling its intangible human hands plucking at his heart and its multitudinous voices calling him back, but in spite of the fact that he is a true-blue Cockney, born, in 1864, at Belsize Park, on the skirts of Hampstead, Merrick tells you he does not love London. It is the most comfortable of cities, he admits, but he finds it uninspiring and can work better and more easily when he is almost anywhere away from it—especially when he is in Paris.
ALAN ALEXANDER MILNE
