vigor until 1914, when Frank Swinnerton’s critique of Stevenson[17]
was to appear with such concluding sentences as these: “Stevenson ...
created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old
costume-chest.... If romance rests upon no better base than this, if
romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a
personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence,
a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. And if it is dead, Stevenson
killed it.” Such, even in 1907, was in various quarters uneasily felt
to be the fact. In 1907, it is true, George Meredith was spending his
declining years in poetry, and Thomas Hardy was at work on _The Dynast_;
but _The Way of All Flesh_ had been published four years earlier, Shaw’s
plays were being staged, the dead George Gissing was at last coming into
attention, Mr. Galsworthy had just given us _The Man of Property_, Mr.
Wells was brewing _Tono-Bungay_, and Mr. Bennett was at work on _The
Old Wives’ Tale_. If the lid of the costume-chest was still raised, it
had every appearance of being propped most insecurely. All cogent and
immediate reasons aside, the publisher of books had every psychological
and intuitive reason for doubting the appeal of a volume of 500 closely
printed pages, much of it in dialect and all of it concerned with Kentish
scenes of a hundred years earlier.
To return to _The Broad Highway_: An actor with whom the author had
become acquainted at the Astor Theatre was about to play an engagement
in Boston, and offered to show the manuscript to friends in the office
of Little, Brown and Company. Farnol waited for some word in vain; after
several months he learned that the actor had returned to New York, and
sought him out. The actor had visited the publishing house but had
completely forgotten the manuscript.... It was taken from the bottom of
his trunk, where it had lain all the while, and Farnol was minded, first
to sell it, with all rights, for $500. Mr. Hawley said Farnol would do
no such thing, “if I have to buy it myself.” Farnol’s next impulse was
to burn the cumbersome bundle. He finally gave it to his wife, and Mrs.
Farnol sent it to her husband’s mother in England. Shirley Byron Jevons,
at that time editor of The Sportsman, was the next to see it. He took it
to the publishing house of Sampson Low, Marston & Company, introducing it
with: “Here is another _Lorna Doone_”—Blackmore’s novel having been the
firm’s greatest fiction success. The publishing house accepted the book
and had drawn an agreement with Mr. Jevons as Mr. Farnol’s agent when
the author appeared unexpectedly. In fact, Farnol, discouraged by his
fortunes in America, had simply got on the boat with his wife and little
daughter. A new agreement was drawn with him direct, and signed. Then,
but some time before the book was set up in type, the publisher showed it
to Clement K. Shorter, editor of The Sphere, whose devotion to the work
of George Borrow was well known. Mr. Shorter’s account of the incident
embodies an interesting estimate of the book:[18]
“I read _The Broad Highway_ with avidity, and recognized at once—as who
would not have done?—that here was a striking addition to picaresque
romances, that the author had not read _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_ and
the best stories by Defoe and Fielding for nothing, nor had he walked
along the broad highways of England without observation and profit any
more than had the creator of _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_. For the vast
multitude of readers of each epoch the dictum of Emerson stands: ‘Every
age must write its own books.’ It is of no use for the pedantic critic
to affirm, with pontifical fervor, that Cervantes and Le Sage and Defoe
are masters of literature and that our contemporaries are but pigmies in
comparison. The great reading public of any age will not be bullied into
reading the authors who have reached the dignity of classics. The writer
who can catch some element of the spirit of the ‘masters’ and modernize
it is destined to win the favor of the crowd. And thus Mr. Jeffery Farnol
has entered into his kingdom.... _The Broad Highway_ sold in hundreds
of thousands. It is a breezy, healthy book, as unpretentious as it is
sincere. Neither its author nor his friends need to worry themselves as
to whether it is a masterpiece of literature. For our day, at least, it
has added to the stock of harmless pleasures. To the critic who complains
that ‘it is but an exercise in archæology,’ and that the author ‘has
never felt what he has written but has gathered it up from books, one can
reply in the language of Goldsmith’s Mr. Burchell, ‘Fudge.’ It is still
possible in England, in spite of its railway trains and its mechanical
development, to feel the impulse which inspired Charles Dickens, George
Borrow and all the masters of the picaresque romance, who have in days
gone by traveled with delight through the countryside, seeking adventures
and finding them. ‘I felt some desire,’ says Lavengro, ‘to meet with one
of those adventures which, upon the roads of England, are as plentiful
as blackberries in autumn.’ Mr. Farnol has a talent for recreating such
adventures, and he is perfectly frank with his readers, anticipating
a certain type of criticism. ‘Whereas the writing of books was once a
painful art,’ he makes Peter Vibart say in _The Broad Highway_, ‘it has
of late become a trick very easy of accomplishment, requiring no regard
for probability and little thought, so long as it is packed sufficiently
full of impossible incidents through which a ridiculous heroine and a
more absurd hero duly sigh their appointed way to the last chapters.
Whereas books were once a power, they are of late degenerated into things
of amusement, with which to kill an idle hour, and be promptly forgotten
the next.’”
The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. On a famous occasion the
late Maurice Hewlett tore to shreds the historicity of the work of James
Branch Cabell, and Mr. Cabell completely lost his temper. Mr. Farnol’s
hero in _Beltane the Smith_ “finds himself in an England which from the
internal evidence of friars, bowmen, arms and armor we might vaguely
describe as Edwardian (Edward I., II., III.)—the pikes he appears to
have borrowed from a later period. And yet it is not Edwardian either;
for there is no hint of a king in it all, and never, never was there
such an anarchical England, save in the reign of Stephen of Blois.”[19]
Mr. Farnol’s Latin, says J. P. Collins, “gives one the shivers. He mixes
his _thee’s_ and his _ye’s_, and precisians may murmur at his forms of
archaic diction. But ... if Farnol makes a slip in the way of detail, or
lapses into excess, he preserves the most important thing, and that is
atmosphere.”[20] Everyone will recall Scott’s inaccuracies in _Ivanhoe_,
of which the most serious was the depiction of a state of feeling between
the Saxons and Normans existing a century earlier than the time of the
novel.
Mr. Shorter has made us longer; it remains to say that _The Broad
Highway_, accepted in England, was offered by the English publisher in
America, in one instance to Dodd, Mead & Company, who again declined it.
Little, Brown and Company were the acceptors, learning for the first time
of the actor’s delinquency a few years earlier. The book was published on
both sides of the ocean and sprang into instant success. In the midst of
the smother of applause, appeals, money and golden prospects Mr. Farnol
had a moment. He ejaculated: “Just think! I’ve lost four years of my
life!”[21]
v
He was 33—ten years older than it has been done, and thirty years younger
than it has been done, also.[22] Mr. Henry Sydnor Harrison achieved
_Queed_ at 31, Sinclair Lewis was 35 when _Main Street_ appeared. On the
whole, the four years seem not an excessive price to have paid for a
coup, nor thirty-three years long to have found oneself. The point was
neither in the success nor the time taken to reach it; it was in Mr.
Farnol’s ability to keep his head on his shoulders. This he proceeded to
do; although he sold, while yet unwritten, the serial rights to his next
work, pressure upon him did not prevent his destroying ten unsatisfactory
chapters, as has been related, and although as he said at the time, “I
really cannot blame the magazine people,” he was emphatic in saying, “I
never wish to undergo such an experience again.”[23] Two years elapsed
after the publication of _The Broad Highway_ before the appearance of
_The Amateur Gentleman_; and except for the publication of a piece of
work written before _The Broad Highway_[24] and his effort to help in
the war (_Great Britain at War_), he has had only nine books brought
out in the dozen years since he raised the curtain. And of these one,
_The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_, a romance in prose, blank verse and rhyme,
is a novelty written for his daughter, Gillian, published because what
had entertained one girl might very conceivably entertain others. Mr.
Farnol’s method of keeping his head on his shoulders has been to practise
industry without becoming industrial. Although homesick at first on his
return to England, he settled in Kent, at Lee, with a den at the top of
the house where he could work from midnight to breakfast. Old English
books lined two walls of this refuge; another wall was given up to a
collection of old pistols and sabres; and on the desk there usually lay
a dictionary of slang dated 1812. More recently the Farnols have lived
at the seashore at Brighton, but the winters are generally spent at
Ospedaletti, which is on the Italian Riviera.
Except for a short visit to report for the London Daily Mail the fight
between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in 1921,[25] Mr. Farnol had
not revisited America until autumn, 1923. At that time visitors met a
shortish man, anything but a figure of romance, whose outstanding trait
was his genuine friendliness, “a friendliness which is not an affectation
with which he tries to put strangers at their ease, but an actual part
of him.”[26] To see him rehearse and enact, rather than merely outline,
his next novel was an exceptional experience, for at such times he suits
his voice to his characters and displays a considerable range of dramatic
skill. Interviewers developed evidences of a struggle in the romancer’s
mind between the type of woman he writes about and the types more usual
today; however, chivalry, or perhaps the romantic vision, enabled him
to come through the ordeal by newsprint without dishonor. He denied the
possibility of platonic love and friendships. “After a certain point,
such friendships are bound to be no longer platonic. Mark me! I know
they wouldn’t be in my case, anyway.”[27] A subject he did not tire of
discussing was the wonder of America.[28] To several who talked with
him he expressed the intention of writing another novel about New York
City.[29] “New York should be called ‘The City of Great Adventures,’” he
said, with characteristic enthusiasm, “because anything _might_ happen in
New York.”[30]
More expressive of the man is the story of how his slightest novel came
to be published. He was discussing with his mother the advisability of
bringing out work written before _The Broad Highway_. “Look here,” he
said to her, “why not rout out _Mr. Tawnish_? You have been very good
to me, and I can never properly repay you, but if you can do anything
with _Mr. Tawnish_ you shall have it.” The tale—one that reminds most
readers of Tarkington’s _Monsieur Beaucaire_—was taken out of a drawer,
touched up and added to, and accepted for book publication. The advance
royalties, constituting a generous gift, were handed over to Mrs. Henry
Farnol. This was in the autumn of 1913.
vi
In an article appearing at the height of Mr. Farnol’s first success,
Henry Keats wrote: “_The Broad Highway_ has seemed to the critics
to invite comparison with so many different masters of the English
novel—George Borrow, Blackmore, Le Sage, Dickens, Stevenson, Thackeray,
to mention a few—that I asked him about his ‘foster-father.’ Mr. Farnol
smiled. ‘I would not know my own literary parent if I met him out here
in the broad highway of Kent,’ he exclaimed. Judging from his subsequent
confessions, the creator of Peter Vibart and Charmian is under greater
indebtedness to Laurence Sterne than to any of the immortals named above.
And that was owing to the friend of his ‘boyish ambitions,’ to whom _The
Broad Highway_ is dedicated. Mr. Shirley Byron Jevons was the first, some
years since, to call Mr. Farnol’s attention to the supreme difficulty of
writing a book dealing with the abstract, citing, as a rare example of
success in that line, Sterne’s _Tristram Shandy_. A copy of that unusual
book was speedily procured by Mr. Farnol, and he recalls as though an
impression of yesterday the manner in which he was ‘enthralled’ by its
pages. ‘Then,’ he adds, ‘I went on to The Spectator and The Tatler,
the reading of which showed me how great is the loss of those who are
unacquainted with the Queen Anne essayists.’”[31] This settles the matter
of style.
Certain books by Mr. Farnol—_The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_, _Great
Britain at War_, and _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_, each outside the
true succession of his work—have been incidentally characterized. A
descriptive note on his principal novels may perhaps fittingly conclude
this account.
_The Broad Highway_ (1911) has probably already been sufficiently
described, as it must be familiar to many who may read these lines. _The
Amateur Gentleman_ (1913) has for hero Barnabas, son of a retired and
famous boxing champion of England. Having come into a legacy, the young
man resolves to journey to London to become a gentleman. The period is
that of the Prince Regent. There is a rapid series of adventures on the
journey; Barnabas meets Cleone, the heroine; he acquires a valet and
establishes himself with the quality, and the fashionable world loses
him, for he returns home again. _Beltane the Smith_ (1915) concerns a
golden-haired giant and matchless swordsman whose odyssey of adventure
is lived in a much earlier England. _The Definite Object_ (1917) is the
story of a young New Yorker whose wealth has taken from him all incentive
to action. For want of a definite object in life he is toying with the
thought of suicide when he surprises a youthful burglar in the act of
entering his rooms. Then, as “Mr. Geoffrey,” he takes up lodgings with
the housebreaker in the old Hell’s Kitchen district of New York—which
was the region between Thirty-fourth and Forty-second Streets and
west of Sixth Avenue. _Our Admirable Betty_ (1918) is a return to the
dimension of _The Broad Highway_ and _The Amateur Gentleman_. _Black
Bartlemy’s Treasure_ (1920) and _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_ (1921) are
tales of piracy and the Spanish Main, the second novel completing the
first. _Peregrine’s Progress_ (1922) more closely than any other book
approximates the scenes and action of _The Broad Highway_; it is laid in
Kent, it relates a boy’s adventurings on the road and by the roadside,
and it reintroduces the Tinker. _Sir John Dering_ (1923) keeps to the
same period. A skilled swordsman who has incurred the enmity of the Lady
Herminia Barrasdaile is forced to fight duel after duel which she has
instigated in the hope that he will meet his death.
The dictum of Mr. Shorter best fits the case of this friendly writer and
honest workman. We have already quoted the words: “The great reading
public of any age will not be bullied into reading the authors who
have reached the dignity of classics. The writer who can catch some
element of the spirit of the ‘masters’ and modernize it is destined
to win the favor of the crowd.” The love of a fairy tale, delight in
action, pleasure in such characterizations as Black George, the Tinker,
and the Ancient—picturesque; in outline broadly simple—have been
potent. Stevenson was dead; the good as well as the bad of his legacy
had been swallowed up in a flood wherein the sound could no longer be
distinguished from the meretricious; what we loosely call realism was in
the ascendant. Years were to go by before “realism” could be seen to be
the necessary clearing of paths to an exploration of the romantic impulse
more intelligent as well as more subtle. In the meantime an age-old
thirst found these draughts to quench itself. On the porch of the “Bull”
at Sissinghurst the readers of Mr. Farnol have sat for many an afternoon,
washing the dust from their throats with a pleasant ale and enjoying the
surprising procession of knights, scholars, gipsies, gallants, pirates
and simple maids and ladies of fashion which has passed before them,
coming from and returning to a world without end, truly.
BOOKS BY JEFFERY FARNOL
1907 _My Lady Caprice_
In England: _The Chronicles of the Imp_
1911 _The Broad Highway_
_The Money Moon._ Earlier, in point of composition, than
_The Broad Highway_.
1913 _The Amateur Gentleman_
1913 _The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_. Earlier, in point of composition,
than _The Broad Highway_.
1915 _Beltane the Smith_
1917 _The Definite Object_
1918 _Great Britain at War_
In England: _Some War Impressions_
1918 _Our Admirable Betty_
1920 _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_
1920 _Black Bartlemy’s Treasure_
1921 _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_
1922 _Peregrine’s Progress_
1923 _Sir John Dering_
SOURCES ON JEFFERY FARNOL
_The Novels of Jeffery Farnol._ Booklet published by LITTLE, BROWN &
COMPANY, Boston, 1923.
_The Country of “The Broad Highway,”_ by Henry C. Shelley. THE BOOK NEWS
MONTHLY, October, 1912.
_Jeffery Farnol’s Life and Career_, by Herbert F. Jenkins. THE BOOK NEWS
MONTHLY, September, 1911.
_How I Began_, by Jeffery Farnol. Booklet published by SAMPSON LOW,
MARSTON & COMPANY, LTD., London. The text is reprinted from T. P.’s
Weekly of 14 February 1913.
_Love Still Ruling Motive in Life of the Modern Youth and Maiden_.
Interview by Marguerite Dean in The Evening World, New York, 28 June
1921. Note especially: “As a matter of fact I knew a charming fellow who
did, in real life, just what my hero did in _The Definite Object_—took
a little girl from the New York slums, educated her, loved and married
her.”
Other references will be found in the footnotes to the text of this
chapter. They do not include, by any means, all the interviews in
newspapers.
5. Adults Please Skip[32]
i
Not that age has anything to do with it. A man is as young as he feels
and a woman is as young as her imagination keeps her. The idea of never
growing up is a mistake. Everyone wants to grow up, but that’s no reason
for not keeping youthful.
There’s something in fellows like Irvin S. Cobb and Owen Johnson and
Ralph Henry Barbour which is just as good at forty as at fourteen—maybe
better. And there’s something in books like _Little Women_ that you keep
coming back to....
S’pose we’d better begin with the Bedtime Story Man. Half the children in
the United States of America are willing to call it a day when Thornton
W. Burgess says the word. Mr. Burgess owes his success to the fact that
he was born in a place called Sandwich in the State of Massachusetts.
It made him realize that something was needed “between the dark and
the daylight,” as Longfellow said. Having splendid eyesight and some
excellent connections, he was able to enter the best animal circles, and
early met Peter Rabbit, Lightfoot the Deer, and loads of others. The
way to meet them is by all means under Mr. Burgess’s auspices, in _The
Burgess Animal Book for Children_. Sammy Jay, Bob White and the feathered
companions who have more or less dealings with Striped Chipmunk and
Johnny Chuck are introduced in _The Burgess Bird Book for Children_. It
is a point of honor with Mr. Burgess always to let his animal friends
tell their own stories. Louis Agassiz Fuertes illustrates these books
with pictures in full colors. For example, he shows fifty-eight birds in
all their glory. _The Burgess Bird Book for Children_ brought cries of
joy from Dr. W. T. Hornaday, who is America’s leading naturalist and who
presides over more animals at the New York Zoo than went into the ark
with Noah. But wait! Here’s a third volume to put with these two, _The
Burgess Flower Book for Children_, also illustrated in color and black
and white and showing 103 flowers. You should see the color pictures, for
instance, of the yellow adder’s-tongue and the wild columbine! Let it be
stressed: the books by Burgess are the most popular and most successful
published for _little_ children. Their interest and joy is communicable
to the child of four years—and they are read and re-read by boys and
girls up to twelve, and sometimes by their elders.
Rose Fyleman, with _Fairies and Chimneys_, _The Fairy Flute_, and _The
Fairy Green_, won some time ago chief honors as the children’s poet; and
now she seems to be on the path to distinguished honors for her prose
stories. _The Rainbow Cat_, whose color scheme included orange hind
legs and a red, red tail, gave the greatest satisfaction, and so will
_Forty Good Night Tales_, in which errant fairies explain themselves. But
probably the most ambitious book is the new _Rose Fyleman’s Fairy Book_.
Rose Fyleman for fairies, as the advertisers would say.
Did you see _Number One Joy Street_, ever? At any rate, you will see
_Number Two Joy Street_, won’t you? Like the first book, it has a jolly
cover and endpapers, and plenty of illustrations in color and otherwise.
The collection of prose and verse for boys and girls in _Number Two Joy
Street_ is from writers whose names will make even older people prick up
their ears—Gilbert K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, A. A. Milne, Hilaire
Belloc, Hugh Walpole, Laurence Housman and Rose Fyleman are some of them.
With such an array of contributors, you will have very hard work to keep
your copy of this book for your very own. It will be necessary to speak
nicely but firmly to older people.
You will also need to explain that you must be left alone with Edna
Geister’s new book, _What Shall We Play_. Grownups are almost certain to
think that they ought to stick around and tell you how to go about the
fifty best games in this book. They are wrong. Miss Geister herself says
so. She says she took the very best out of her hundreds of inspirations
for play and took pains to explain them so that children can play them
without help or direction, and at sight. _Let’s Play_ is another one of
her game books written especially for boys and girls. _It Is To Laugh_ is
a little more grown-up (not a great deal).
_The Velveteen Rabbit_, by Margery Williams, has remarkable pictures.
As you look at William Nicholson’s drawings (they were made on stone,
which gives them their peculiar texture) you can really see the sawdust
hero come to life and leap for joy! We will come in a moment to other
books with glorious pictures, but first let us see if we have one or
two more books for four and five and six years. Yes. Here is _Mother
Hubbard’s Wonderful Cupboard_, by Maude Radford Warren and Eve Davenport,
who also wrote _Tales Told by the Gander_ and _Adventures in the Old
Woman’s Shoe_. The scheme in each of these books is the delightful one
of continuing the Mother Goose stories. Mother Goose, with her unfinished
tales, is extremely tantalizing. Probably the good woman told all she
knew, but it is by no means enough. For instance, she appeared to know
nothing of the circumstances in which Mother Hubbard acquired her dog.
They were highly interesting. You see, she needed some one to work for
and be interested in, and as no child was available she took Diccon, who
was a trained, performing dog attached to a circus, but so ill that his
owner thought he wouldn’t live long anyway. C. A. Federer has made the
many illustrations, some of them in color.
_The Wiggly Weasel and Other Stories_, by Mabel Marlowe, is another book
with many pictures that is full of the fun of clever animals, brownies,
and their kin.
Perhaps you take part in plays? Then, if you are young enough, I think
you will be enthusiastic over the seven gay masques in _The Magic Sea
Shell and Other Plays_, by John Farrar. There is probably a place in the
garden that looks as though a play were about to begin there, or a spot
down the meadow or a roomy chimney-corner in the house. Home-made music
and costumes, please!