My first acquaintance with Mr. Merrick's engaging and stimulatingmuse was made in the pages of Violet Moses, an early work, whichappeared, I remember, in three volumes. Reading it again in the lightof my appreciation of what its author has done since, I think of itnow as I felt of it then. It has great promise, and though its textureis slight its fibres are of steel. It shows the light hand, which hasgrown no heavier, though it has grown surer, the little effervescenceof cynicism, with never a hiccough in it, the underlying, deeply-fundedsympathy with real things, great things and fine things, and theseriousness of aim which, tantalisingly, stops short just where youwant 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 neverdoes. He is one of the most discreet dissectors of the human heart wehave.
In Violet Moses Mr. Merrick avoided the great issue after comingup against it more than once. So did he in The Quaint Companions, amaturer but less ambitious study. I don't know why he avoided it inViolet's case, unless it was because he found it too big a matter forhis light battery. In the Companions' case I do know. It was becausehe came upon another problem which interested him more, a problem witha sentimental attraction far more potent than any he could have got outof 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 thisseems a long way from Cynthia, which is my immediate business, butis 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 tackleit, not because it is too big for his guns, as Violet's was, and notbecause he finds another which he likes better, as he did when he wasupon The Companions, but because, I am going to suggest, he found ittoo small. He took up his positions, opened his attack, and the enemyin his trenches dissolved in mist.
The problem with which Cynthia opens is the familiar one of thenovelist, considered as such, and as lover, husband, father andcitizen. Now it's an odd thing, but not so odd as it seems at firstblush, that while you may conceive a poet in these relations andsucceed in interesting your readers, you will fail with a novelist.I cannot now remember a single interesting novel about a novelist.There is Pendennis of course; but who believes that Pen was a greatnovelist, or cares what kind of a novelist he was? Who cares aboutWalter Lorraine? Would anybody give twopence to read it? The reasonis that in the poet the manifestations of literary genius are directand explicit—some are susceptible of quotation, some may be cut outwith the scissors—while in the novelist they are oblique and implied.Humphrey Kent in Cynthia is in no sense an explicit genius; we arenot, in fact, told that he was a genius at all. His technique seems tohave been that of Mr. George Moore, then rather fashionable. The bookputs it no higher than this, that the hero, with an obvious bent forwriting, marries in a hurry and then finds out that he cannot be anhonest man and support his wife and child by the same stroke. It is notwhether he can be a good novelist and a good lover too, but whether hecan be a good novel