iv
Like Main Street a decade later, The Broad Highway was possibly conceived and certainly executed in a spirit of revolt. Such rebellions are common, and the only wisdom that can be uttered in respect of them is embodied in that proverb which says that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Editors and publishers endeavor to give the public what the public wants. The public, very naturally, never knows what it wants until it tastes it. The public is like a husband sitting down to his wife’s dinner. He may like everything or nothing; he may enormously relish the unexpected, placed before him with inward perturbation and in a spirit of desperate doubt. He may pounce with appetite upon, and sing loudly the praise of, some dish denounced by him and refused by his palate the week before. If a writer attempt to please editors or publishers, who, in turn, are attempting to please their publics, he will be successful with the entrepreneurs and possibly with the audiences. And his temperament may make such a course the very best thing. If his temperament is otherwise, sooner or later he will please himself; and if he can then get published a large public may just possibly discover that he greatly pleases them.
The completed manuscript of The Broad Highway was submitted to the Century Company and Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York, both of whom failed to come to terms and returned it shortly. It was then submitted to Dodd, Mead & Company, who indicated a conditional acceptance and asked the author to come in and discuss possible changes. The firm’s readers offered their suggestions and Farnol took notes. The principal result was that he cut 20,000 words out of the book, which still remained of 200,000-word length, or twice the length of the usual “full-length” novel. The alterations were not enough to give the publisher the necessary confidence; the year was 1907, the year of the money panic; and the manuscript was finally returned to Farnol with a definite declination. The reasons were sound: There had been a bad slump in Wall Street, the book was formidably long, the author was unknown, the interest of the tale might be almost wholly for English readers. But there was another reason in the nature of the novel to which a few words should be devoted.
Robert Louis Stevenson had died in 1894. His work spawned a school of historical fiction, much of it pseudo-historical, which had dominated the American book market for years. The public taste did not discriminate during that decade between the good and the bad; To Have and To Hold and When Knighthood Was in Flower were equally hailed as masterpieces and alike elevated to the top of the heap. From that day, indeed, dates the name and the peculiarity of the “best seller.” The term remains, but it has only in very recent years begun to undergo a transformation of meaning, the idea of relativity having crept in. With a truer perception and a better sense of proportion, we now tend to speak of a book as a best seller in its class, or in relation to the literary merit of the work or the record of the author or generally with an eye to what sale could be expected in the circumstances. The fact of a sale in so many figures remains; but the estimation in which the fact is held is quite different. A sale of 20,000 copies that would have passed unregarded twenty years ago is now likely to be accounted as of the greatest significance.
What was fundamentally the trouble in 1907 was not to be stated with 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]