The Man Who Understood Women and Other Stories/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
One of our most delightful novelists has recently written a preface to a collection of his short stories in which he apologises for disinterring them from magazines and resuscitating them in book form. I think he ought not to have done it. If a preface were needed, it should have been written rather as an appeal, than as a warning. It should have been in the nature of a bugle-blast. It should have said, in effect: "Here, my faithful and gentle readers who, owing to the limitations of time and space and the worries of the world, have missed much of my best and most cherished work—here is an opportunity of an unexpected feast." I confess that such an appeal would not have been modest—and the author in question is the most modest of our confraternity—but the assertion would have been true. Now, with the agreeable task before me of writing a preface to another man's collection, I am not bound by any such sense of modesty, and I should like to make clear once more certain issues which my friend above referred to has, to a certain extent, confused.
In the first place, it must be understood that the novel and the short story are two entirely distinct artistic expressions, as different as the great oil-painting and the miniature. And as rarely as the accomplished landscape-painter and the accomplished miniaturist are incarnate in one and the same individual, so rarely are the accomplished novelist and the accomplished short story writer thus incarnate. The most fervent admirers of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, among whom I am proud to count myself, will not claim for his novels, though possessing the incalculable and indefinable personal touch, the magical genius of expression which is to be found in all his work—even in the The Absent-minded Beggar, the perfection of statement and the flawless technique of Plain Tales from the Hills and Love's Handicap. In the same way we would not measure Guy de Maupassant's greatness by Une Vie or Mont Oriel; and though the late Henry Harland is best known by that study in sunshine, The Cardinal's Snuff-box, his real lovers turn to the inimitable short stories in Grey Roses and Comedies and Errors.
Conversely, some of the greatest novelists have but little value as short story writers. The so-called short stories of Dickens—The Cricket on the Hearth, The Chimes, a Christmas Carol—are between thirty and forty thousand words in length. Among Thackeray's many sketches may be found a few which we understand as short stories, but they do not rank with Henry Esmond and The Newcomes.
The essential novelist accustomed to his broad canvas, to the multiplicity of human destinies with which he is concerned and their inter-relation, to his varied backgrounds, to the free space which his art allows him both for minute analysis of character and for his own philosophical reflections on life, is apt to find himself absurdly cramped within the narrow confines of the short story. His short stories have a way of becoming condensed novels. They contain more stuff than they ought to hold, at a sacrifice of balance, directness and clearness of exposition. Now, without dogmatising in the conventional fashion, or indeed in any fashion, over what a short story ought or ought not to be, or asserting definite laws of technique, I think it is obvious that if a story told in ten thousand words would have been a better, clearer, more fully developed story told in a hundred thousand, it is not a perfectly told story. For, though there is a modern tendency to revolt against an older school of criticism which set technique over subject, and to scoff at form, yet we cannot get away from the fact that the told story, whether long or short, is a work of art, and is subject to the eternal canons whereby every art is governed. No matter what a man has to say, if he does not strive to express it perfectly, he is offending. The "condensed novel," being imperfect, is an offence.
On the other hand, the essential short story writer engaged upon a novel, is apt to be dismayed by the vastness of the canvas he has to cover. His habit of mind—minute, delicate and swift—wars against a conception of the architectonics of a novel. In consequence, his novel may appear thin, episodical and laboured, with scenes spun out beyond their value, thus missing their dramatic effect and spoiling the balance of the work. If, therefore, a story of a hundred thousand words could have been told more effectively in ten thousand, it is, like the "condensed novel," not a perfectly told story.
Briefly, the tendency of the essential novelist in writing a short story is to make literary condensed milk, while that of the essential short story writer working in the medium of a novel is to make milk and water.
Occasionally, of course, among the great writers of fiction we meet with the combination of the two faculties. Balzac the short story writer is as great as Balzac the novelist. The Contes Drolatiques alone would have brought him fame. Stevenson was master of both crafts. Who shall say whether The Sire de Malétroit's Door or The Ebb Tide is the more perfect work of art?
Now among contemporary writers, Mr. Leonard Merrick is eminently one who, like Balzac and Stevenson, is gifted with the double faculty. His reputation as a novelist rests on a sure foundation, and his novels in this edition of his works will be dealt with by other hands. But, owing to the fact of the novel being in the commercial world "more important" than the short story, his claim to the distinct reputation of a short story writer has more or less been overlooked. Again, it is popularly supposed that a writer of fiction regards the short story as either a relaxation from more arduous toil or as a means of adding a few extra pounds to his income. In his acquiescence in this disastrous superstition lies my quarrel with my distinguished preface-writing friend. Now, although I do not say that we are all such high-minded folk that none of us has ever stooped to "pot-boiling," yet I assert that every conscientious artist approaches a short story with the same earnestness as he does a novel. Further, that in proportion to its length he devotes to it more concentration, more loving and scrupulous care. There are days during the writing of a novel when that combination of fierce desire to work and sense of power which one loosely talks about as "inspiration," is at ebb, and others when it is at flow. Homer nods sometimes. No man can bestow equal essence of himself on every page of a long novel. But a short story is generally written at full-tide. By its nature it can be finished before the impulse is over. There is time to weigh every word of it, attend to the rhythm of every sentence, adjust the delicate balance of the various parts, and there is the thrilling consciousness of unity. Instead of the climax being months off, there it is at hand to be reached in a few glad hours. So, far from being an unconsidered trifle, the short story is a work of intense consideration, and as far as our poor words can matter, of profound importance.
It may be said that anything in the nature of a plea for the short story as a work of art is hopelessly belated—I am quite aware that the wise and gifted made it long ago, and I remember the preaching of the apostles of the early 'nineties—but its repetition is none the less useful. Every item in the welter of short stories with which the innumerable magazines both here and in America flood the reading public is not a masterpiece. Every item is not perfect work. Many are exceedingly bad—bad in conception, style and form. There is always the danger of the good being hidden, of bad and good being confused together in the public mind, and of the term "magazine story" becoming one of contemptuous and unthinking reproach, as was the term "yellow-back" a generation ago. Accordingly it is well that now and again a word should be said in deprecation of an attitude which a tired and fiction-worn world is liable to adopt; and it is well to remind it that in the aforesaid welter there are many beautiful works of art, and to beseech it to exercise discrimination.
The writer of an introduction to the work of a literary comrade labours under certain difficulties. He ought not to usurp the functions of the critic into whose hands the volume, when published, will come, and he is anxious, for the sake of prudence, not to use the language of hyperbole, though he has it in his heart to do so. But, at least, I can claim for these short stories of Mr. Leonard Merrick, that each, by its perfection of form and the sincerity of its making, takes rank as a work of art. In none is there a word too little or a word too much. Everywhere one sees evidence of the pain through which the soul of the artist has passed on its way to the joy of creation. Everywhere is seen the firmness of outline which only comes by conviction of truth, and the light and shade which is only attained by a man who loves his craft.
The field covered by Mr. Merrick in this collection is one which he has made peculiarly his own. Mainly it is the world of the artist, the poet, the journalist, in the years when hopes are high and funds are low, when the soul is full and the stomach empty. It is neither the Bohemia of yesterday's romance nor the Bohemia of drunken degradation, but the sober, clean-living, struggling Bohemia of to-day. It is a sedate, hard-up world of omnibuses, lodgings, second-rate tea shops and restaurants. Yet he does not belong to the static school who set down the mere greyness of their conditions. He is a poet, making—
"The violet of a legend blow
Among the chops and steaks,"
as in The Lady of Lyons'. To Rosie McLeod, living "up ninety-eight stairs of a dingy house in a dilapidated court" in Montparnasse, comes the prince in the Fairy Tale. There is true poetry in The Laurels and the Lady with its amazing end. And yet his method is simple, direct, romantic. He writes of things as they really are, but his vision pierces to their significance. He can be relentless in his presentation of a poignant situation, as in A Very Good Thing for the Girl, a realist of the realists if you like; but here, as everywhere in his work, are profound pity, tenderness and sympathetic knowledge of the human heart. He writes not only of things seen, but of things felt. Whatever qualities his work may have, it has the great quality essential to all artistic endeavour—sincerity.