Mr. Jeffery Farnol is an Englishman, and his best-known book, _The Broad
Highway_, is redolent of the atmosphere of his native country.
Nevertheless it was written in the United States of America, and perhaps
it has enjoyed its greatest popularity there. Yet three American
publishers refused the book, and so Mr. Farnol is one of a long list of
authors who have worked their way through much tribulation to success.
I confess that such episodes in the romance of publishing attract me
mightily. I rather like to hear of the short-sighted publisher who
rejects an author's book and finds out, when too late, that he has lost
money and reputation by his lack of prescience. And I like also to hear
the story of the loyal friend who, reading a manuscript, stands by his
judgment and introduces that friend to a publisher, with the happiest
results for both. That is Mr. Farnol's personal romance. The friend in
question was Mr. Shirley Byron Jevons, to whom the manuscript was sent
from America. Mr. Jevons, after an enthusiastic perusal, carried it to
Mr. Fred J. Rymer, a director of Sampson Low, Marston & Co., the
publishers. The book was published, and a sale throughout the
English-speaking world of 600,000 was the result. I hope I may be
forgiven for recalling that Mr. Rymer brought the manuscript to me.
Well do I remember his enthusiasm and my lack of it. I have read too
many manuscripts in my life as an editor ever to wish to usurp the
duties of a publisher or of a publisher's literary adviser. I should
hate the life. Think of that publisher and what he would feel about you
if perchance you had persuaded him to refuse this or that "best-seller,"
as our American friends call the very popular book. Imagine the feelings
of the publishers whose readers advised them to refuse Charlotte
Bronte's _Professor_ without at the same time persuading the author to
write a _Jane Eyre_. But Mr. Rymer was an old acquaintance and I
promised to read his new-found story. I added the remark, I remember,
that I was rather used to publishers counting their geese as swans. Mr.
Rymer told me long afterwards that he brought the book to me because he
knew of my devotion to George Borrow.
In any case I read _The Broad Highway_ with avidity, and recognised 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 fervour, 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 modernise it, is destined to win the favour of the crowd.
And thus Mr. Jeffery Farnol has entered into his kingdom.
Mr. Farnol was born in Birmingham some thirty-six years ago. His early
years were spent at Lee, in Kent, where he and a younger brother Ewart,
who fell in the Boer War, went to school. Our author recalls with
gratitude that his mother never failed to believe in his possession of a
literary gift, and had, in his boyhood, hopes of seeing him an author,
and faith that he would be a successful one. But circumstances seemed
to throw him into a quite different kind of activity, and everything
pointed to the probability that his livelihood would be obtained in a
world remote from literature. Schooldays were followed by an
apprenticeship to engineering in London and in Birmingham. His
experience included the work of the smithy, which must have been of
service to him when he came to write _The Broad Highway_. Very badly
equipped for the struggle of life in a strange land he rashly betook
himself to New York, where his wife--he married when quite young--had
friends. I imagine that a great gulf is fixed between the world to
which Mr. Farnol introduces us in his romances and the early struggles
that he met with in New York. For a long period he was a scene painter
at the Astor Theatre, "and must," a friend assures us, "have daubed
miles of scenery in his time." His income from this work was
supplemented by the sale of occasional short stories. And then, in this
most practical of cities, amid an atmosphere of up-to-dateness and
progress of which those who only know the quieter ways of London can
form no idea, he wrote his romance of an unprogressive world with stage
coaches, boxers, and idyllic love--the world that Mr. Austin Dobson has
so happily presented in his poem, "A Gentleman of the Old School":
He lived in that past Georgian day,
When men were less inclined to say
That "Time is Gold," and overlay
With toil their pleasure;
He held some land, and dwelt thereon,--
Where, I forget,--the house is gone;
His Christian name, I think, was John,--
His surname, Leisure.
Then followed some unhappy days which lengthened into months during
which the author of _The Broad Highway_ was endeavouring to find a
publisher. Three separate publishing houses in New York refused the
book; two turned it down without ceremony; a third gave as a reason that
it was "too long and too English." One of the actors of the Astor
Theatre was about to fulfil an engagement in Boston, and offered to show
the manuscript to a publisher in that city. Long months afterwards that
friend returned to New York, and Mr. Farnol found to his chagrin that he
had forgotten all about his promise. The unlucky story was still at the
bottom of his trunk. The author, now almost in despair, sent the
manuscript to his wife, who was residing at Engelwood, New Jersey, and
asked her to burn it. But his wife had the happy thought of sending it
to England--to Mr. Shirley Jevons, who was then occupying the editorial
chair of _The Sportsman_, and was a friend of the family. Mr. Jevons
read it with enthusiasm, and with such results as we have already noted.
The book sold like wildfire. The author returned to England to win
further laurels. Here I find a pleasant coincidence in the fact that
the London firm of Sampson Low, having accepted the story, offered it to
Little, Brown & Co. of Boston, where their accomplished representative,
Mr. Herbert Jenkins, at once perceived the merits of the story and
acquired the American rights. This, it seems, was the very firm to
which Mr. Farnol's actor-friend intended to show the manuscript and
forgot to keep his promise. _The Broad Highway_, as I have said, sold
in hundreds of thousands. It has appeared in an edition de luxe with
beautiful illustrations by C. E. Brock. 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 archaeology," and that the author "has never felt what he
has written but has gathered it up from books," one can but 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
travelled 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 chapter.
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."
One might almost have believed that it was impossible to accomplish the
"trick" twice and to provide yet a second adventure story as good as the
first, but this our author has achieved in _The Amateur Gentleman_,
where the adventures of Barnabas, the son of the prize-fighter, are as
varied and exciting as those of Peter Vibart in the earlier romance. Mr.
Farnol has been responsible for yet two other stories, _The Money Moon_
and _The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_, but nothing has he written quite in
the lines of _The Chronicles of the Imp_. Here indeed is a simple story
with which we may pass a pleasant hour. I hope you will like the Imp
and his Aunt as much as I have done. Alone among the successful authors
of our generation--among those, that is, whose work runs into
circulations of hundreds of thousands--Mr. Farnol wins me by his
unpretentiousness. He has no gospel to preach, no crude law of life to
enunciate. He is content to entertain and amuse, to give us sunny hours
of recreation, and never more than now are writers of this order needed
for our solace.
*CONTENTS*