The Complete Works of Leonard Merrick

New York: E. P. Dutton and Company. 1918-1919. To be complete in 13 volumes, of which 6 are now ready. In addition to the regular edition, published at $1.75 per volume, there will be a limited edition of 1500 copies, sold only in sets.

AN American edition of Leonard Merrick is coming out: four or five volumes have already appeared; the rest are due shortly. They will be read as rapidly as they appear; for it is the special power of Mr. Merrick that he writes with an ease of touch, a speed of style, and a fine sure hand, that sweep us on with thoughtful laughter to the splendid closes. He comes to us as an apostle of literature, and particularly of the drama. To be sure, his heroes are not always actors or dramatists, nor his settings entirely restricted to Bohemia. Still, it is primarily of artists and for lovers of art that he writes, especially of the professional and for the amateur and supporter of the theatre. Merrick can write charmingly of other things; but he is at his best when he takes us to see the stage of the early eighties and shows us the conditions against which men like Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones contended. It is therefore delightfully appropriate that the introduction to The Position of Peggy Harper should have been assigned to Pinero, himself, like Merrick, once an ambitious young actor struggling against the self-same obstacles faced by the hero of the novel. And for all the other books in the set there are provided introductions written by noted authors — Barrie, Wells, Hewlett, Chesterton, and others acting as literary toast-masters. Rarely has a living writer acquired — to use one of Merrick’s favorite words — such kudos.

Yet the success of any thus heralded author deserves to be something more than a haughty triumph of artistic prestige; and there is in Mr. Merrick’s work, aside from the severely intellectual and stylistic qualities lauded by his fellow writers, genuine warmth of feeling for the great mass of novel readers. Had he been appealing only to æsthetes or philosophers, he would not have attempted to emulate in the structure of his novels the crisp and difficult technique of the short story. Far more revelatory, however, is the impression that, along with an uncompromising and almost obstinate determination to tell the truth artistically, Merrick is endowed with a sense, exquisitely keen, of the public taste—a well-nigh pathetic dependence on the sympathy of his audience. At a moment when he fancies the reader’s attention wandering from the pages of Conrad, his anxiety wrings from him the plea: ‘Be gracious to me; yield to the book another finger-tip— I feel it slipping. Say, “Poor drivel as it is, a man has written it in the hope of pleasing me.” For he has, indeed. On many a fine morning I have plodded when I would rather have sunned myself where the band played; on many an evening I have wound my feet around the legs of the table and budged not, when the next room and a new novel — paid for and unopened — wooed me as with a siren song.’ This from a writer who is habitually impersonal and objective.

Despite Merrick’s anxiety to win smiles, he never wavers from his ideals. The logic of his theme he pursues to its utmost extremity, and he makes his author-heroes do likewise. Just as he extols the serious literary worker, he deprecates the conscienceless hack. One would have to search far for an indictment of charlatanism in letters as impressive as the situation in Cynthia, where Humphrey Kent, unable to dispose of his own honest literary work, is engaged by a lady novelist to dash off inferior tales which she publishes under her own name. Soon the magazines are full of these abortive stories; wherefore poor Kent finds himself in the maddening predicament of being able to market his meanest wares under another’s name, while his most choice products, unaided by the lady novelist’s renown, go the rounds of the publishers. Thus, though Merrick is fully aware of what people like to read, he responds only to popular demands deserving recognition. He draws a distinction between a writer who regards himself as a public servant and one who truckles to the vulgar.

The publishers deserve thanks for presenting to American readers at large this interesting and worthy edition. R. W.