Leonard Merrick

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”