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.