| Note: | Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://archive.org/details/onemansviewwithi00merruoft |
This story can be said to date, though quite in the sense that astory legitimately may. It is historic, though that is not to sayold-fashioned. If one searches by internal evidence for the time ofits writing, 1889 might be a safe guess. It was about then that manyLondoners (besides the American girls in the story) were given theirfirst glimpse of Niagara at the Panorama near Victoria Street. Thebuilding is a motor garage now; it lies beneath the cliffs of QueenAnne's Mansions; aeroplanes may discover its queer round roof. And itwas in an ageing past too—for architectural ages veritably flash by inNew York—that Broadway could be said to spread into the "brightnessof Union Square." To-day there is but a chaos of dingy decay owningto that name. Soon it will be smart skyscrapers, no doubt; when thetide of business has covered it, as now the tide of fashion leavesit derelict. Duluth, too, with its "storekeepers spitting on woodensidewalks"! Duluth foresees a Lake Front that will rival Chicago.
But in such honest "dating," and in the inferences we may draw from it,lie perhaps some of the peculiar merits of Mr. Merrick's method—hisstraight telling of a tale. And digging to the heart of the book, theOne Man's View of his faithless wife—more importantly too, the wife'sview of herself—is, in a sense, an "historic" view. Not, of course, inits human essentials. Those must be true or false of this man and thiswoman whenever, however they lived and suffered. Such sufferings aredateless. And whether they are truly or falsely told, let the readerjudge. No preface-writer need pre-judge for him. For in such things,the teller of the tale, from the heart of his subject, speaks straightto the heart and conscience of his audience, and will succeed or failby no measurable virtue of style or wit, but by the truth that is inhim, by how much of it they are open to receive.
Look besides with ever so slightly an historical eye at thecircumstances in which the lives of these two were set to grow, andto flourish or perish, as it was easier or harder to tend them. Seethe girl with her simple passion for the theatre—so apt a channelfor her happy ambition as it appears—and that baulked, her very lifebaulked. To-day, this war-day, and most surely for the immediateenfranchised to-morrow breaking so close, the same girl will turn herback light-heartedly on the glamour of that little tinselled world tomany another prospect of self-fulfilment.
And the lawyer, lost in his law. If a Solicitor-Generalship is hisaim, he will be worldly-wise enough, one hopes, to come home not tootired to make at least a passably attractive figure at his wife'swell-chosen dinner-parties. Or is that phase of English government nowalso to pass? N