Publisher's Synopsis
IF masculine and feminine comedy really differ, it may be in their attitudes towards youth. The imaginative woman of middle age, you may say, regrets and worships youth while the imaginative man of middle age regrets and laughs at it, or laughs at himself for regretting it. This is Leonard Merrick's dominating note, though sometimes his laughter is pretty plaintive. He himself has been, or was, for some time a "Conrad in quest of his youth." The theme echoes in several of the tales now collected in the new limited edition, under the title "The Man Who Understood Women." You hear it in the old actor's lament for his lost romance, with its mocking title, "A Very Good Thing For the Girl," in "The Woman Who Wished to Die," with its pair snatching belatedly at the joy of youth; in "The Child in the Garden," with its demure Victorian title and its impish flouting of the virtuous middle age.
Queerly enough, in the last story of the lot (chronologically an early story perhaps?) Mr. Merrick lets himself handle precisely the "Conrad" material with something very much like Victorian sentiment. Here we have a gay, dreaming youth bending to the treadmill and becoming a man of acknowledged "success." At the moment when he has won general recognition as a great lawyer and a "dry stick," a relic of his youth turns up to mock him. Long ago in his stage-loving days he has written a farce -- accepted by a manager but never produced and almost forgotten. Now it is to be "put on" in the provinces, and the author, under his old pen-name, is invited to rehearsals.
The upshot is a rebirth of the "Bob Lawless" whose shoes have been filled by that dry stick, Robert Blackstone, prominent member of the bar; and a "heart interest" which does not (as so often with this writer) crumble to dust in our hands. Of course he does not even here lapse into the grosser errors of the sentimental method. He does not try to make us believe the farce a masterpiece: "'No Flies on Flossie' tottered for six nights, died and was buried" sums up that work. Nor does he force Robert Blackstone, K. C., to throw up his job in order to make way for the cheerful "Bob." But his smile, as he tells his story, lacks the bitter (not embittered) quirk which may as much as anything have protected him from the embraces of a huge public.
--Weekly Review, Vol. 1
