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