Already he has had imitators; his method looked too easy not to be imitated; but it must be harder than it looks for none of them has succeeded. Perhaps he cannot do it twice himself, for his “Oliver Cromwell,” fashioned on similar lines, does not, in my thinking, reveal so true and convincing a portrait of the man. Nearly ten years earlier Drinkwater had tried his hand on the great Protector in a blank verse poem sympathetically and dramatically conceived but not altogether rising to the height of its subject. Like “Abraham Lincoln,” the later “Oliver Cromwell” is a chronicle play, but he has allowed himself more latitude in this than in that. He has less warrant for some of his incidents; the pathos he introduces into Cromwell’s home life is occasionally just a trifle stagey, and he has sentimentalized Oliver himself, made him less of the sturdy, bluff, uncompromising Roundhead that we know from his letters and speeches and the researches of Carlyle; but it is a vivid, vital piece of portraiture and so often catches the manner and spirit of the original as to leave a final impression of likeness in which its unlikelier aspects are lost. I am told it does not act so well as it reads, but if it does not rival “Lincoln” on the boards one has to remember that it has not the advantage of timeliness that “Lincoln” had.
I have said nothing of John Drinkwater’s excursions into criticism; his studies of Swinburne and Morris, of “The Lyric,” “The Way of Poetry”; for what he has written about poetry and the drama is of small importance in comparison with the poetry and the dramas he has written. As poet and dramatist he has developed slowly, and it is too soon yet to pass judgment on him. Plenty of men spend their lives in trying vainly to live up to a brilliant first book, but he began without fireworks and has grown steadily from the start, and is still young enough not to have done growing.
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.