DEATH OF LEONARD MERRICK

Southland Times, Issue 23948, 14 October 1939, Page 10

DEATH OF LEONARD MERRICK

HIS WORLD “ALMOST OBSOLETE” It was Leonard Merrick’s fate to be first too early and then too late for the fair, says The Times Literary Supplement in an obituary notice. Even the team of 12 eminent authors who were organized by Mr Alfred Wareing to reason with the British public about the value to literature of Merrick’s stories could not prevail. They came to praise but almost buried him. Merrick died as he lived, favoured by only a minority of readers. He paid the penalty of a delicacy of touch in irony and sentiment. His exquisiteness appealed to elderly fellow craftsmen who, were aware of his aim, but the general reading public could detect but little progression towards a crisis; indeed, there seemed to them no movement at all, except irrelevant ones. The initiated felt it was a strange misunderstanding; few writers, they believed, had such command of extravaganza, and, indeed, Merrick was a skilful conjuror.

A word can be said on behalf of the upbraided public. Merrick was fond of situations and psychologies which imposed a strain on the sense of the credible. The fault was more marked on the stage than in the book, where he had leisure for making the atmosphere. Again, 20 years ago, Merrick was beyond his public; in his later years the public was beyond the touch of Merrick’s sentimentalities. Today his world is almost obsolete. Those 12 eminent authors overdid the praise. They misled others into making comparisons with the classics and finding Merrick too light in the scales. Barrie, for example, made bewildering references to Sterne and Hardy, as if it were not enough to credit the author of “Conrad in Quest of His Youth,” in which were displayed Merrick’s qualities at their best, with a wit, sensitiveness and charm definitely his own. Literary and theatrical life in Paris and London (rather 1880-ish) provided his scenes and people—among the latter that real creation Tricotrin. Merrick is no longer the' “novelist’s novelist,” as he was to Barrie and W. D. Howells; but he had his own distinctiveness as a maker of nicely-turned phrases and nicely-turned characters.