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.