A Chair on the Boulevard | Page 2

upon all folk who are able to take a really cheerful view of life.
All of Mr. Merrick's sermons--I do not hesitate to call his novels
"sermons," because no decent novel can be anything else--all his
sermons, I say, point to this conclusion: that people who go out
deliberately to look for happiness, to kick for it, and fight for it, or who
try to buy it with money, will miss happiness; this being a state of
heart--a mere outgrowth, more often to be found by a careless and
self-forgetful vagrant than by the deliberate and self-conscious seeker.
A cheerful doctrine this. Not only cheerful, but self-evidently true. How
right it is, and how cheerful it is, to think that while philosophers and
clergymen strut about this world looking out, and smelling out, for its
prime experiences, more careless and less celebrated men are
continually finding such things, without effort, without care, in
irregular and unconsecrated places.
In novel after novel, Mr. Merrick has preached the same
good-humoured, cheerful doctrine: the doctrine of anti-fat. He asks us
to believe--he makes us believe--that a man (or woman) is not merely
virtuous, but merely sane, who exchanges the fats of fulfilment for the
little lean pleasures of honourable hope and high endeavour. Oh wise,
oh witty Mr. Merrick!
Mr. Merrick has not, to my knowledge, written one novel in which his
hero is represented as having achieved complacency. Mr. Merrick's
heroes all undergo the very human experience of "hitting a snag." They
are none of them represented as enjoying this experience; but none of
them whimper and none of them "rat."
If anybody could prove to me that Mr. Merrick had ever invented a
hero who submitted tamely to tame success, to fat prosperity; or who
had stepped, were it ever so lightly, into the dirty morass of accepted

comfort, then would I cheerfully admit to anybody that Leonard
Merrick is a Pessimistic Writer. But until this proof be forthcoming, I
stick to my opinion: I stick to the conviction that Mr. Merrick is the
gayest, cheer fullest, and most courageous of living humorists.
This opinion is a general opinion, applicable to Mr. Merrick's general
work. This morning, however, I am asked to narrow my field of view:
to contemplate not so much Mr. Merrick at large as Mr. Merrick in
particular: to look at Mr. Merrick in his relationship to this one
particular book: A Chair on the Boulevard.
Now, if I say, as I have said, that Mr. Merrick is cheerful in his capacity
of solemn novelist, what am I to say of Mr. Merrick in his lighter
aspect, that of a writer of feuilletons? Addressing myself to an
imaginary audience of Magazine Enthusiasts, I ask them to tell me
whether, judged even by comparison with their favourite fiction, some
of the stories to be found in this volume are not exquisitely amusing?
The first story in the book--that which Mr. Merrick calls "The Tragedy
of a Comic Song"--is in my view the funniest story of this century: but
I don't ask or expect the Magazine Enthusiast to share this view or to
endorse that judgment. "The Tragedy of a Comic Song" is essentially
one of those productions in which the reader is expected to collaborate.
The author has deliberately contrived certain voids of narrative; and his
reader is expected to populate these anecdotal wastes. This is asking
more than it is fair to ask of a Magazine Enthusiast. No genuine
Magazine reader cares for the elusive or allusive style in fiction. "The
Tragedy of a Comic Song" won't do for Bouverie Street, however well
and completely it may do for me.
But there are other stories in this book. There is that screaming farce
called "The Suicides in the Rue Sombre." Now, then, you Magazine
zealots, speak up and tell me truly: is there anything too difficult for
you in this? If so, the psychology of what is called "public taste"
becomes a subject not suited to public discussion.
The foregoing remarks and considerations apply equally to such stories
as "The Dress Clothes of M. Pomponnet" and "Tricotrin Entertains."

There are other stories which delight me, as, for example, "Little-
Flower-of-the-Wood": but this jerks us back again to the essential Mr.
Merrick: he who demands collaboration.
There are, again, other stories, and yet others; but to write down all
their titles here would be merely to transcribe the index page of the
book. Neither the reader nor I can afford to waste our time like that.
I have said nothing about the technical qualities of Mr. Merrick's work.
I don't intend to do so. It has long been a conceit of mine to believe that
professional vendors of letterpress should reserve their mutual
discussions of technique for technical occasions, such as