JEFFERY FARNOL
Jeffery Farnol
Had it been, as some believe it is, an irrevocable law that a man’s mind and temperament are naturally moulded by his early environment, Jeffery Farnol ought to have been an uncompromising realist. Plenty of good things come out of Birmingham, but they are solid things; you would not suspect it was the native city of any peddler who had nothing but dreams to sell.
Scott, Ballantyne and Stevenson were all born in Edinburgh, a very haunt of romance; Mayne Reid came from Ireland which, though Shakespeare does not seem to have known it, is where fancy is bred; Stanley Weyman hails from just such a quaint little country town as he brings into some of his stories; Manchester nursed Harrison Ainsworth, and even Manchester carries on business as usual against a shop-soiled background of fantasy and the black arts. But Birmingham—well, Birmingham forgets that it was visited by the Normans and sacked by the Cavaliers; it has made itself new and large and is as go-ahead and modern as the day after to-morrow; a place of hard facts, factories, practical efficiency, profitable commerce, achievement in iron and steel, and apparently has no use for fancy and imagination except on strictly business lines, when it manufactures idols for the heathen and jewellery that is not what it seems.
Nevertheless, a fig from a thorn, a grape from a thistle, in Birmingham Jeffery Farnol was born, and it would not have been surprising if he had grown up to put present-day Birmingham and its people into his novels, as Arnold Bennett has put the Five Towns and their people into his; but instead of doing that he has perversely developed into one of the most essentially romantic of modern novelists. He was writing stories when he was nineteen, and some of them found their way into the magazines. For a while, feeling after a source of income, he coquetted with engineering, and there is some romance in that, but not of the sort that could hold him. He experimentalized in half a dozen trades and professions, and presently looked like becoming an artist with brush and pencil rather than with the pen. In those uncertain years, when he was still dividing his leisure between writing tales and painting landscapes and drawing caricatures, he came to London and spent his spare time at the Westminster Art School, where the now distinguished Japanese artist, Yoshio Markino, was one of his fellow-pupils.
Then, in 1902, he cut the painter in one sense, though not in another, and grown more enterprising went adventuring to America; where, having married the youngest daughter of Hughson Hawley, the American scenic artist, he took to scene-painting himself and did it diligently for two years at the Astor Theater, New York. When he was not busy splashing color on back-cloths, he was working strenuously at the writing of fiction, and if his first novel smacks somewhat of the conventions and artificialities of the theater in whose atmosphere he was living, his second, “The Broad Highway,” is as untrammeled by all such influences and as breezily, robustly alive with the wholesome, free air of the countryside of eighteenth century England and the native spirit of romance as if he had never heard of Birmingham or been within sight of a stage door.
With “The Broad Highway” he found himself at once; but he did not at once find a publisher with it. Often enough an author who has been rejected in England has been promptly received with open arms by a publisher and a public in America; then he has come home bringing his sheaves with him and been even more rapturously welcomed into the households and circulating libraries of his penitent countrymen. But in Farnol’s case the process was reversed. America would have none of “The Broad Highway”; her publishers returned it to him time after time, as they had returned “Mr. Tawnish,” which he had put away in despair. It had taken him two years to write what is nowadays the most popular of his books, and for three years it wandered round seeking acceptance or slept in his drawer between journeys, until he began to think it would never get out of manuscript into print at all.
It was looking travel worn and the worse for wear, and had been sleeping neglected in his drawer for some months, when his wife rescued it and, on the off chance, sent it over to England to an old friend of Farnol’s who, having read it with enthusiasm, passed it on to Sampson Low & Co., and it came to pass that “The Broad Highway” was then published immediately and as immediately successful. That was in 1910; and in the same year Jeffery Farnol came back to his own country and settled in Kent, which has given him so many scenes for the best of his romances.
Strange, you may say, that a novel so wholly and peculiarly English should have been written so far away from its proper setting and in such unpropitious surroundings, especially while Farnol had all the glamorous adventure and lurid, living romance of the American outlands waiting, as it were, at his elbow. But
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,”
and an eighteenth century England of a twentieth century New York; otherwise he might have been among the pioneer revivalists of the riotously romantic novel of the Wild West. Stranger still that when “The Broad Highway” recrossed the ocean it was no longer rejected and had soon scored an even larger success with American than with English readers. The magazines there opened their doors to the author without delay and made haste to secure the serial rights in his next stories before he had begun to think of them. Within the next three years, “The Money Moon” and “The Amateur Gentleman” had increased and firmly established his reputation, and the earlier “Mr. Tawnish” came out on the strength of their abounding popularity, which was more than strong enough to carry the tale of that elegant and honourable person much farther than it might have gone if it had not had such best sellers and long runners to set the pace for it.
Romance is Farnol’s native air, and he does not breathe happily in any other. When he tells a story of the trousered, railway-riding life round him he is like a wizard who has turned from his spells and incantations to build with mundane bricks and mortar instead of with magic—he does the ordinary thing capably but in the ordinary way. “The Chronicles of the Imp” is an entertaining trifle, and “The Definite Object” is a clever, exciting story of a young millionaire’s adventures in New York’s underworld, but they lack his distinctive touch, his individual manner; he is not himself in them. He is the antithesis of Antaeus and renews himself when he reaches, not the solid earth, but the impalpable shores of old romance. He can do wonders of picturesque realism with such charming latter-day fantasies as “The Money Moon,” but give him the knee-breeches or strapped pants and the open road and all the motley, thronging life of it in the gallant days of the Regency and he will spin you such virile, breezily masculine, joyously humorous romances as “The Broad Highway,” “The Amateur Gentleman” and “Peregrine’s Progress”; give him the hose and jerkin, the roistering merriment and rugged chivalries of the Middle Ages and he will weave you so glowing and lusty a saga as “Meltane the Smith”; and you will have far to go among recent books before you find more fascinating or more vigorously imaginative romances of piracy and stirring adventure on land and sea than “Black Bartlemy’s Treasure” and its sequel, “Martin Conisby’s Vengeance.”
He gives away the recipe for his best romance in that talk between Peter Vibart and another wayfarer which preludes “The Broad Highway”:
“As I sat of an early summer morning in the shade of a tree, eating fried bacon with a tinker, the thought came to me that I might some day write a book of my own; a book that should treat of the roads and by-roads, of trees, and wind in lonely places, of rapid brooks and lazy streams, of the glory of dawn, the glow of evening, and the purple solitude of night; a book of wayside inns and sequestered taverns; a book of country things and ways and people. And the thought pleased me much.
“‘But,’ objected the Tinker, for I had spoken my thought aloud, ‘trees and suchlike don’t sound very interestin’—leastways—not in a book, for after all a tree’s only a tree and an inn an inn; no, you must tell of other things as well.’
“‘Yes,’ said I, a little damped, ‘to be sure there is a highwayman——’
“‘Come, that’s a little better!’ said the Tinker encouragingly.
“‘Then,’ I went on, ticking off each item on my fingers, ‘come Tom Cragg, the pugilist——’
“‘Better and better!’ nodded the Tinker.
“‘——a long-legged soldier of the Peninsula, an adventure at a lonely tavern, a flight through woods at midnight pursued by desperate villains, and—a most extraordinary tinker.’”
The tinker approves of all these things, but urges that there must also be in the story blood, and baronets, and, above all, love and plenty of it, and though Peter Vibart is doubtful about these ingredients because he lacks experience of them, as he goes on his journey he makes acquaintance with them all, and they are all in the story before it ends. The tinker was only interpreting the passion for romance that is in Everyman when he pleaded for the inclusion of picturesque or emotional elements that Peter was for omitting, and the instant and continuing popularity of “The Broad Highway” shows that he was a correct interpreter.
Born no longer ago than 1878, Farnol is younger than that in everything but years. If he is seldom seen in literary circles it is simply because the country draws him more than the town; he is the most sociable of men, and his intimates will tell you that the geniality, the warmth of feeling, the shrewd, humorous philosophy that are in his books are also in himself; that his love of romance is as genuine and inherent as every other sense belonging to him, and, consequently, when he sits to write on the themes that naturally appeal to him he merely follows Samuel Daniel’s counsel and dips his pen into his heart.