Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

In other particulars “The Doomdorf Mystery” exemplifies the artistry of the author. If I have not emphasized them, it is because they are cunning of hand and brain, craftsmanship, things to be learned, technical excellences which embellish but do not disclose the secret of inspiring art. The story is compactly told; tension is established at once and is drawn more tightly with every sentence; and the element of drama is much enhanced by the forward movement. Doomdorf is dead, but “Randolph,” says Abner, “let us go and lay an ambush for this assassin. _He is on the way here._” Not what has happened but what is to happen constitutes the true suspense. The prose style, by its brevity and by a somewhat Biblical diction, does its part to induce in the reader a sense of impending justice, of a divine retribution upon the evildoer. But it is also a prose that lends itself to little pictures, as of the circuit rider, sitting his big red-roan horse, bare-headed, in the court before the stone house; or of the woman, half a child, who thought that with Doomdorf’s death evil must have passed out of the world; or of Doomdorf in his coffin with the red firelight from the fireplace “shining on the dead man’s narrow, everlasting house.” The comparative loneliness, the wildness, and the smiling beauty of these mountains of western Virginia are used subtly in the creation of that thing in a story which we call “atmosphere” and the effect of which is to fix our mood. The tale is most economically told; the simplest and fewest means are made to produce an overwhelming effect. I have dwelt on it at length because it so perfectly illustrates the art of Melville Davisson Post, so arrestingly different from that of any of his contemporaries—different, perhaps, from anyone’s who has ever written.

iii

Mr. Post is one of the few who believe the plot’s the thing. He has said: “The primary object of all fiction is to entertain the reader. If, while it entertains, it also ennobles him this fiction becomes a work of art; but its primary business must be to entertain and not to educate or instruct him. The writer who presents a problem to be solved or a mystery to be untangled will be offering those qualities in his fiction which are of the most nearly universal appeal. A story should be clean-cut and with a single dominating germinal incident upon which it turns as a door upon a hinge, and not built up on a scaffolding of criss-cross stuff. Under the scheme of the universe it is the tragic things that seem the most real. ‘Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action of life ... the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy.’[6] The short story, like any work of art, is produced only by painstaking labor and according to certain structural rules. The laws that apply to mechanics and architecture are no more certain or established than those that apply to the construction of the short story. ‘All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.’[7] And the short story is to our age what the drama was to the Greeks. The Greeks would have been astounded at the idea common to our age that the highest form of literary structure may omit the framework of the plot. Plot is first, character is second.”[8]

Mr. Post takes his stand thus definitely against what is probably the prevailing literary opinion. For there is a creed, cardinal with many if not most of the best living writers, which says that the best art springs from characterization and not from a series of organized incidents, the plot;—which says, further, that if the characters of a story be chosen with care and presented with conviction, they will make all the plot that is necessary or desirable by their interaction on each other. An excellent example of this is such a novel as Frank Swinnerton’s _Nocturne_ or Willa Cather’s _A Lost Lady_. Yet it is not possible to refute Mr. Post by citing such books for he could easily point to other novels and stories if modesty forbade him to name his own work. Though there cannot and should not be any decision in this matter, for both the novel of character and the novel of incident are proper vehicles, it is interesting to consider plot as a means to an end.

The Greeks used plot in a manner very different from our use today. At a certain stage toward the close of a Greek tragedy the heavens theoretically opened and a god or goddess intervened, to rescue some, to doom others of the human actors. The purpose was to show man’s impotence before heaven, but also to show his courage, rashness, dignity and other qualities in the face and under the spell of overwhelming odds. The effect aimed at by the spectacle of Greek tragedy was one of emotional purification, a purging away in the minds of the beholders of all petty and little things, the celebrated _katharsis_ as it was called.[9] To the extent that modern fiction aims to show man’s impotence in the hands of destiny or fate, his valiance or his weak cowering or his pitiful but ineffectual struggle, the use of plot in our day is identical with that of the Greeks. One may easily think of examples in the work of Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and others. The trend has been toward pessimism as an inscrutable destiny has replaced a set of scrutable, jealous, all-too-human deities in the Olympian pantheon.

With Edgar Allan Poe the attempt was begun—indeed, was successfully made, for the time being, at least—to replace the divine with a human agency. Although the Greek drama had perished, all through the Middle Ages and afterward the effort had kept up to preserve the essence of miracle as an invaluable element in human drama. There were both miracles and miracle plays. In place of the Greek _deus ex machina_, “the god from the machine” with his interventions in human affairs, the world had its Francis of Assisi and its Joan of France. But for whatever reason the divine agency was gradually discredited, the force called Providence or destiny came increasingly to be ignored, and even so great a dramatist-poet as Shakespeare, unable or unwilling to open the heavens to defeat Shylock, could only open a lawbook instead.

What men do not feel as a force in their lives cannot safely be invoked in an appeal to their feelings, and Poe, a genius, knew it. In some of his stories he used in place of the Greek _deus ex machina_ the vaguely supernatural, impressive because vague. In other stories he took the human intelligence, sharpened it, and in the person of Monsieur Dupin made it serve his purpose. M. Dupin, not being a god, could not be omniscient; as the next best thing, Poe made his detective omniscient after the event. If the emotional effect of a Dupin remorselessly exposing the criminal is not as ennobling as retributive justice administered by a god from Olympus, or wrought by Christian miracle, the fault is not Poe’s. It is we who limit the terms of an appeal.

_Copyright by The Amon Studio, Clarksburg, W. Va._]

Mr. Post has himself commented on the flood of detective stories that followed Poe’s “until the stomach of the reader failed.” Disregarding merely imitative work, let us have a look at such substitutes as have been managed for divinity and fate. We commonly call one type of story a detective story simply because the solution of the mystery is assigned to some one person. He may be amateur or professional; from the standpoint of fictional plausibility he had, in most cases, better be a professional. Poe had his M. Dupin, Gaboriau, his M. Lecoq; Conan Doyle, his Sherlock Holmes. Mr. Post has Abner, his M. Jonquelle, prefect of police of Paris; his Sir Henry Marquis of Scotland Yard; his Captain Walker, chief of the United States Secret Service. If we are looking for Mr. Post’s difference from Poe and others we shall not find it here. The use of a detective is not inevitable; when there is none we call the tale a mystery story. The method of telling is not fixed; and it is doubtful if anyone will surpass the extreme ingenuity and plausibility of Wilkie Collins in a book like _The Moonstone_, where successive contributed accounts by the actors unfold the mystery at last. One of the few American writers whose economy of words suggests a comparison with Mr. Post was O. Henry. And O. Henry was also a believer in plots, even if the plot consisted, as sometimes it did, in little more than a few minutes of mystification.

Poe had replaced the god from the machine with the man from the detective bureau, but further progress seemed for some time to be blocked. All that anyone was able to do was to produce a crime and then solve it, to build up a mystery and then explain it. This inevitably caused repetition. The weakness was so marked that many writers tried to withhold the solution or explanation until the very end, even at the cost of making it confused, hurried, improbable. Even so, no real quality of drama characterized the period between the crime at the commencement and the disclosure at the finish of the tale. I do not know who was the first to discover that the way to achieve drama was to have the crime going on, to make the tale a race between the detective and the criminal. The method can, however, be very well observed in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s first novel, _The Circular Staircase_ (1908); and of course it is somewhat implied in the operations of Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’s _The Woman in White_, many years earlier. But this discovery constituted the only technical advance of any importance since Poe. As a noticeable refinement upon this discovery Melville Davisson Post has invented the type of mystery or detective-mystery tale in which the mysteriousness and the solution are developed together. Not suitable for the novel, which must have action, this formula of Mr. Post’s is admirable for the short story, in which there is no room for a race with crime but only for a few moments of breathlessness before a dénouement.

This refinement of Mr. Post’s whereby repetition is avoided, the development of the mystery and its solution side by side, is usually hailed as his greatest achievement. I happen to think that he has in certain of his tales achieved something very much greater. It seems to me that in some of his work Mr. Post has put the _deus ex machina_ back in place, has by a little lifted the mere detective story to the dignity of something like the old Greek tragedy, and in so doing has at least partially restored to the people the purge of pity and the cleansing of a reverent terror.

iv

For whatever tribute one may pay him on the technical side, and every book of his increases the tribute that is his due, the thing that has remained unsaid is his use of plot for ennobling the heart and mind of the reader. He is right, of course, when he says that the primary business of the writer must be to entertain; but more rightly right when he adds that it is possible to do the something more in a work which may aspire to be called a work of art. Anna Katharine Green once wrote: “Crime must touch our imagination by showing people like ourselves but incredibly transformed by some overwhelming motive.” The author of _The Leavenworth Case_ and all those other novels which have entertained their hundreds of thousands, despite appalling technical shortcomings which she never ceased to struggle with but was never able to overcome, was one of the terribly few to command our respect and our admiration in this crucial affair. She was one of the few with whom plot was never anything but a means to an end, and that end, the highest. Of others, it is easy to think at once of O. Henry; it is in this that I would compare him with Mr. Post, and not in any lesser detail such as the power to tell a story with the fewest possible words. All the emphasis that has been put on short story construction in America, all the trumpeting that has proclaimed American writers as the masters of the short story on the technical side will ultimately go for nothing if the fact is lost sight of that a short story is a cup to be brimmed with feeling. And as to the feelings poured into these slender chalices, by their effects shall ye know them.

There is a curious parallel between Mr. Post and another contemporary American writer, Arthur Train. Both began as lawyers, and both showed unusual ability in the practice of the law. Both are the authors of books in which the underlying attitude toward the law is one of that peculiar disdain which, perhaps, only an experienced lawyer can feel. Mr. Train’s stories of Ephraim Tutt display an indignation that is hot enough under their surface of weathered philosophy and levity and spirit of farce. But as long ago as 1896 Mr. Post had published _The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason_, his first book of all and one that must detain us a moment.

His career up to that time may be dealt with briefly. Born in Harrison County, West Virginia, 19 April 1871, the son of Ira Carper Post and Florence May Davisson Post, he was graduated (A.B.) from West Virginia University in 1891 and received his LL.B. from the same institution the year following. He was very shortly admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of West Virginia, of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, and of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served as a Presidential elector and secretary of the Electoral College in 1892. A young man not yet twenty-five, he conceived that “the high ground of the field of crime has not been explored; it has not even been entered. The book stalls have been filled to weariness with tales based upon plans whereby the detective or ferreting power of the State might be baffled. But, prodigious marvel! No writer has attempted to construct tales based upon plans whereby the punishing power of the State might be baffled.” And he reflected that the true drama would lie in a duel with the law. He thereupon created the figure of Randolph Mason, a skilled, unscrupulous lawyer who uses the law to defeat the ends of justice. Of these stories the masterpiece is probably “The Corpus Delicti.” Well-constructed, powerful, immensely entertaining, surely these dramas are of the essence of tragedy, surely they replace Poe’s detective with somebody far more nearly approaching the Greek god from the machine. In considering the effects of these remarkable tales we can hardly lose sight of their moral purge of pity and terror, their sense of the law man makes as a web which man may slip through or break or brush aside. Why, a true god from the machine, Mr. Post implies, is not necessary to us; we can destroy ourselves; heaven has only to leave us alone. This, in its turn, produces the much stronger secondary effect: the cry for a true god to order and reward and punish us.

_Uncle Abner_ (1918) has been well contrasted with _The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason_. “He has demonstrated that wrong may triumph over man-made laws, which are imperfect after all the centuries; but that right must win under the timeless Providence of God.”[10] In _Uncle Abner_ the _deus ex machina_ is fully restored. When it was known how Doomdorf had died, “Randolph made a great gesture, with his arm extended. ‘It is a world,’ he said, ‘filled with the mysterious joinder of accident!’ ‘It is a world,’ replied Abner, ‘filled with the mysterious justice of God!’”

v

Mr. Post married, in 1903, Ann Bloomfield Gamble, of Roanoke, Virginia. Mrs. Post died in 1919. The political career which seemed possibly to be opening before him in his twenties has been neglected for one more fascinating as an author; although he has served as a member of the board of regents of State Normal schools, as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Committee for West Virginia in 1898, and as a member of the advisory committee of the National Economic League on the question of efficiency in the administration of justice (1914-15). He lives at The Chalet, Lost Creek, R. F. D. 2, West Virginia, rides horseback and enjoys the company of his dog, and reads the classics. He is the author of other books besides _Uncle Abner_ which reveal his love for the West Virginia countryside and his power to make his stories take root and grow in that setting. Of his _Dwellers in the Hills_ (1901) Blanche Colton Williams says, in _Our Short Story Writers_: “To read it is to ride in memory along a country road bordered by sedge and ragweed; to note the hickories trembling in their yellow leaves; to hear the partridges’ call, the woodpecker’s tap, and the ‘golden belted bee booming past’; to cross the stream fringed with bulrushes; to hear men’s voices ‘reaching half a mile to the grazing steers on the sodded knobs’; to meet a neighbor’s boy astride a bag of corn, on his way to the grist mill; to stop at the blacksmith’s, there to watch the forging of a horseshoe; or at the wagoner’s to assist in the making of a wheel; to taste sweet corn pone and the striped bacon, and to roast potatoes in the ashes....”

With the exchange of West Virginia for Kentucky, this is also the background and the mood of _The Mountain School-Teacher_ (1922), but this short novel is an allegory of the life of Christ. A young schoolteacher appears in a mountain village. We first see him striding up a trail on the mountain, helping a little boy who is having trouble with an ox laden with a bag of corn. In the village the schoolteacher finds men and women of varied character. Some welcome him, and they are for the most part the poor and lowly; some regard him with suspicion and hate. The action parallels the life of Christ and is lived among people who are, despite nineteen centuries, singularly like the people of Christ’s time. In the end comes the trial of the schoolteacher on trumped-up charges. “If He came again,” the author seems to say, “it would happen as before.”

Such fiction does not come from a man who is primarily interested in railroads and coal, education and politics, nor from one whose final interest is to provide entertaining fiction.

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In recent books Mr. Post has allowed his fiction to follow him on his travels about the earth. _The Mystery at the Blue Villa_ (1919) has settings in Paris, Nice, Cairo, Ostend, London, New York and Washington; the war of 1914-18 is used with discretion as an occasional background. Mr. Poe’s mysticism can be quickly perceived in certain stories; the tragic quality is ascendant in such tales as “The Stolen Life” and “The Baron Starkheim”; and humor is not absent from “Lord Winton’s Adventure” and “The Witch of Lecca.” A story of retributive justice will be found in “The New Administration.” The scenes of most of the episodes in _The Sleuth of St. James’s Square_ (1920) are in America; the central figure about whom all the cases turn is Sir Henry Marquis, chief of the investigation department of Scotland Yard. The material is extremely colorful—from all over the world, in fact. _Monsieur Jonguelle, Prefect of Police of Paris_ (1923) has the same characteristics with the difference of the central figure and with various settings. The reader will observe in these books that the narrative standpoint is altered from story to story; to take _Monsieur Jonquelle_, some of the tales are related by the chief character, some by a third person, some by the author. The reason for the selection inheres in each affair and is worth some contemplation as you go on. _Walker of the Secret Service_ (1924) is pivoted upon a character who appears in “The Reward” in _The Sleuth of St. James’s Square_.

This new book of Mr. Post’s is a brilliant example of his technical skill throughout; it has also a special interest in the fact that the first six chapters are really a compressed novel. Walker, of the U. S. Secret Service, is introduced as a mere boy of vigorous physique who falls under the influence of two expert train robbers. The several exploits he had a share in are related with a steady crescendo of interest. At the end of the sixth chapter we have a clear picture of the fate of the two chiefs he served. The peculiar circumstances in which young Walker was taken into the Secret Service are shown; and the rest of the book records some of the famous cases he figured in. The motivation is that of _Uncle Abner_. “‘Crime always fails. There never was any man able to get away with it.... Sooner or later something turns up against which he is wholly unable to protect himself ... as though there were a power in the universe determined on the maintenance of justice.’”

Two of the most striking stories, “The Expert Detective” and “The ‘Mysterious Stranger’ Defense,” are developed from courtroom scenes—indeed, “The Expert Detective” is a single cross-examination of a witness. Probably this tale and one called “The Inspiration” must be added to the shorter roll of Mr. Post’s finest work, along with “The Corpus Delicti” and “The Doomdorf Mystery.”

The general method has been said, correctly, to combine the ratiocination of Poe’s stories with the dramatic method of the best French tellers of tales. The details of technique will bear and repay the closest scrutiny. But in certain stories Melville Davisson Post has put his high skill to a larger use than skill can accomplish; for those of his accomplishments an endowment and not an acquisition was requisite. When one says that of the relatively few American writers with that endowment in mind and heart he was able to bring to the enterprise in hand a skill greater than any of the others, one has indeed said all.

BOOKS BY MELVILLE DAVISSON POST

1896 _The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason_
1897 _The Man of Last Resort_
1901 _Dwellers in the Hills_
1909 _The Corrector of Destinies_
1910 _The Gilded Chair_
1912 _The Nameless Thing_
1918 _Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries_
1919 _The Mystery at the Blue Villa_
1920 _The Sleuth of St. James’s Square_
1922 _The Mountain School-Teacher_
1923 _Monsieur Jonquelle, Prefect of Police of Paris_
1924 _Walker of the Secret Service_

SOURCES ON MELVILLE DAVISSON POST

Mr. Post’s own two articles on the short story are of the highest value, not only to an understanding of his method, but as a contribution to the theory of literary structure—a contribution, unlike most, allied to and realized in practice.

His first article appeared under the title, “The Blight,” in the Saturday Evening Post for 26 December 1914. A shorter article on “The Mystery Story” appeared in the same magazine, 27 February 1915.

In April, 1924, while in New York for a short time Mr. Post dictated the following notes which amplify a little his written articles:

“The modern plan for the mystery or detective story can no longer follow the old formula invented by Poe and adopted by Gaboriau, Conan Doyle, etc. All life has grown quicker, the mind of the reader acts more quickly, our civilization is impatient at delays. In literature, and especially literature of this type, the reader will not wait for explanations. All explanations must be given to him in advance of the solution of the mystery.

“It became apparent upon a very careful study of the mystery story that something must be done to eliminate the obvious and to get rid of the delay in action and the detailed and tiresome explanation in the closing part. It occurred to me that these defects could be eliminated by folding together the arms of the Poe formula. Instead of giving the reader the mystery and then going over the same ground with the solution, the mystery and its solution might be given together. The developing of the mystery and the development toward the solution would go forward side by side; and when all the details of the mystery were uncovered the solution also would be uncovered and the end of the story arrived at. This is the plan which I followed in my later mystery-detective stories—the _Uncle Abner_ series, _Monsieur Jonquelle_, and _Walker of the Secret Service_. This new formula, as will at once be seen, very markedly increases the rapidity of action in a story, holds the reader’s interest throughout, and eliminates any impression of moving at any time over ground previously covered.

“It requires a greater care and more careful technique, for _every explanation which the reader must receive in order to understand either the mystery or the solution must be slipped into the story as it proceeds without any delay in its action_. There can be no pause for explanation. Each explanation must be a natural sequence and a part of the action and movement. The reader must never be conscious that he is being delayed for an explanation, and the elements of explanation must be so subtly suggested that one receives them as he receives the details of a landscape in an adventure scene, without being conscious of it.

“In undertaking to build up a story on this modern formula, one must first have a germinal or inciting incident upon which the whole story may turn as upon a hinge. Out of this controlling incident, the writer must develop both the mystery and its solution and must present them side by side to the reader in the direct movement of the story to the end. When the mystery is finally explained, the story is ended. There can be no further word or paragraph; there can be no added explanation. If a sufficient explanation has not preceded this point, the story has failed. If the reader has been compelled to pause at any point in the story long enough to realize that he is receiving an explanation, the story has failed.

“But it will not be enough if the writer of the mystery-detective story is able cleverly to work out his story according to this formula. He must be able to give this type of story the same literary distinction that can be given to any type of story. To do this he has only to realize a few of the primary rules of all literary structure. He must remember that everything, every form of character, has a certain dignity. This dignity the writer must realize and respect. Flaubert told Maupassant that in order to be original he had only to look at the thing which he wished to describe long enough and with such care that he saw in it something which no one had seen in it before. That rule ought to be amended to require the writer to look at every character and every situation long enough and with sufficient care to realize the dignity in it—that element of distinction which it invariably possesses in some direction—and when he has grasped that, to respect and convey it in his story.

“It may as well be said that no one form of literary structure is superior to another. The story dealing with the life and action of our highest types does not in itself result in any better literature than the story dealing with the lowest or most abandoned types; nor are physical adventures to be graded below metaphysical adventures. The mystery-detective story may be structurally so excellent and its workmanship so good that it is the equal of any form of literature.

“The obvious is at the base of all boredom. The thing that provides our perpetual interest in life is that the events lying just ahead of us cannot be determined. It is the mystery in the next moment, the next hour, the next day that we live to solve. If by any mental process we could ascertain the arrival of events ahead, no human being could endure the boredom of life. Something of this mystery, this uncertainty, must be caught up for the reader in the short story if his interest is to abide to the end. The skill of the author in preserving this uncertainty and mystery in events—in this imitation of life—will indicate the place to be assigned to him in the art he has undertaken.”

To an interviewer (by letter) who asked for the principal events of his life, Mr. Post once made a suitably whimsical answer:

“I was born like the sons of Atreus in the pasture land of horses. I was reared by a black woman who remembered her grandmother boiling a warrior’s head in a pot. I was given a degree by a college of unbeautiful nonsense. I have eaten dinner with a god. And I have kissed a princess in a land where men grind their wheat in the sky.”

4. Jeffery Farnol’s Gestes

i

A geste is a great exploit or an heroic achievement; the thing that has today pretty generally dwindled to a gesture. But although the fiction of Jeffery Farnol is full of gestures—of ladies who cry, “La!” and of ladies who swoon; of gentlemen who draw swords as naturally as they draw breath, or even more so—the succession of his work is a series of gestes. For one point, he followed his bent in the teeth of literary fashion and scored, at the outset, an enormous popular success. For another point, he kept his head when success was upon him. Although a favorite scene in his stories is one full of lightning fence, swifter guard and dexterous riposte, the true portrait of the author is decidedly different: It shows him in the patient and laborious attitudes of his own Black George, in the toil the young Farnol was himself committed to for a period in his youth, the heavy work of the forge and the foundry, the slow heating to malleability and the shape hammered out before cooling. After _The Broad Highway_ had captured the fancy of England and America, in an incautious moment Farnol the smith, Farnol the patient artificer, contracted to furnish his next tale as a serial in an American magazine. The editor blithely began publication with only part of the manuscript in hand. Dissatisfied with his work, the author at one stage tore up ten completed chapters. For several months he worked under pressure. In the end he kept the editor supplied. The experience did not lead him into the misconception that his smithy was a Ford factory. Nor has the fact that he can write one kind of tale ever led him to suppose that he ought to succeed with another variety; he followed _The Definite Object_ with _Our Admirable Betty_. It is surprising to reflect that he made his first hit by reviving a species of romance when romance of that species, and of pretty nearly every species, was justly considered to have breathed its last; but it is vastly more surprising to realize that he has continued to succeed by the same tactics. Almost ten years later another young man, similarly self-willed, was to score an equal success in America (though not in England) by the same sort of reckless behavior, only the title of the book was to be _Main Street_ and not _The Broad Highway_. But Sinclair Lewis, although unaware of his advantage, was setting a fashion, not defying one. Both Mr. Lewis’s novel and Mr. Farnol’s were the products of that kind of saturation which, while it cannot be relied upon to produce enduring literature, can nearly always be counted upon to produce literary phenomena. Such a phenomenon, certainly, was the Kentish tale of Peter Vibart, Charmian, the Tinker, Black George, and the Ancient, appearing as a book early in 1911 and rolling rapidly up to a sale of 500,000 copies in England and America. And though perhaps not a portent, as _Main Street_ has been a portent, it was a sign of far more significance than the appearance on the scene of a new individual writer. But let us tell the story of that story in orderly fashion.

ii

It begins with two little boys in their nightshirts listening furtively but eagerly outside the door of a room in which their father was reading aloud to their mother, whose eyes were on her needle. The book was _The Count of Monte Cristo_. The name of the older boy—he was eight—was John Jeffery Farnol; of the younger, who was to fall in the Boer War, Ewart Farnol. The family had removed from Birmingham, where Jeffery was born, to Lee, in Kent. The reading proceeded until a sneeze betrayed the boys. But after that they were admitted for an extra hour to the evening readings. The senior Farnol read excellently, varying his voice to suit the characters. He made the stories live, for Jeffery at least. From Cooper, Scott, Dickens, Dumas, Thackeray and Stevenson heard at home, Jeffery became a schoolboy who invented tales to entertain his fellows; in particular he started a story which he carried on for three months, winding it up with the close of term. When he had finished school he wanted to become a writer, but as there was not money to send him to one of the universities, his father thought the ambition foolish, and at 17 the boy was set to work in Birmingham with a firm of engineers and brassfounders. Manual labor at the forge was varied by a great deal of fighting with fists. He was short and thickset; he spent the lunch hour either telling stories to the other men, “stories from the classics,” as he says, “vividly touched up, no doubt, or making a rough drawing of some scowling diffident sitter.” As he sat drawing one noon, a man of the crowd looking over his shoulder remarked: “Ah, that’s all very well, but drawing ain’t manliness.” A test of manliness, inquiry developed, was the feat of a chap who had climbed up the inside of the big chimney. Farnol laid five shillings to half a crown that he could duplicate the deed. Says one account: “The chimney towered up, one hundred and twenty feet of blackness, choked with the soot of four years and with insecure stanchions, several of them broken.” He fastened his handkerchief at the top for all to see; it is easy to believe that the worst of the thing was the climb down with soot tumbling in his eyes. The men refused to pay their bets, he had to fight one of them, though sick and giddy, and was beaten. But a climax was near at hand. Farnol kept a note-book in which he was forever jotting down ideas and impressions. The foreman most reasonably objected to these interruptions of work. There were blows. Leaving the foreman “reclining in a daze against an anvil”—the words aren’t Farnol’s—the last Farnol saw of the place was his handkerchief fluttering from the chimney top.

“No good for work, always writing.” How singularly right the foreman’s verdict had been, some years were required to prove. For a time Farnol stayed at home and wrote stories, poems, whatnot. A few stories got printed. His father was unimpressed, except by the unanimity of family relatives in declaring that he was encouraging Jeffery to grow into an idle fellow. It seemed as if something might be constructed from his son’s natural aptitude for drawing. Jeffery began the study of line and figure drawing under Loudon at the Westminster Art School. He found everybody else at the school so much more clever that he became discouraged.

“I think I’ll write.”

“You can’t write,” said his father. “You’ve not had a University education.”

He went into his father’s business, but as he continued to write stories, and as some of them continued to get accepted, this arrangement was a failure. At this time his favorite recreation was cycling. “All the highroads and byroads of Kent, Surrey and Sussex became familiar to me. I wheeled between the flowery hedgerows and quenched my thirst at the wayside taverns. It was then, while watching villagers wending their way to church, that I first saw the Ancient. There he was, tall hat, smock-frock, shrewd, wrinkled face, and gnarled hands grasping his knobbly staff just as I have described him in _The Broad Highway_. And that was the first inception of the book, though it was not until several years afterward that it came to be written.” Black George was fashioned out of his own time spent at the Birmingham forge.

Farnol wasn’t yet twenty-one when he married Blanche Hawley, daughter of F. Hughson Hawley, a New York artist. The pair set out for America. The bride of seventeen had been sent to England on a visit. It was hoped that Mr. Hawley would take the news well. It was also hoped that Jeffery might sell stories more successfully in the United States. He had a negligible amount of money. The seven, and more than seven, lean years were beginning.

iii

Mr. Hawley received them well. In an interview a year ago[11] Mr. Farnol, recalling the New York period, is quoted as saying:

“I hadn’t a cent in the world. My wife had paid for the wedding ring and the honeymoon, and it seemed to me that after that it was up to me to do something. It has been said that her father remained adamant when we arrived, but that isn’t true. I’m expecting a knock on the bean from him when he reads that. On the contrary, I found him a delightful old cove, and we were forgiven.

_Photograph by E. Hoppé, London._]

“After that I went to work, living alone in a room at Thirty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue. One night, about 3 o’clock in the morning, I came across a man down by the river whose face was all covered with blood.

“‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him.

“‘I’m dying, kid, I’m dying!’ he told me.

“I took him home and fixed him up. It turned out that he was the leader of a notorious gang. I’ve never known a finer chap than he. I’ve found out in this life that if you scratch deep enough you’ll always find true worth.

“About a week after that night he came around and took me to a notorious saloon. He took me into the back room and introduced me to the bunch. Several of them have gone to the chair since, but they were good fellows.[12] I’ve gone into that saloon without a nickel in my pocket, and looking it. I’ve had one of the gang say to me: ‘Stony up against it, kid? Will a fiver help?’ and before I could know what happened the gang would have taken up a collection of $25 and given it to me.[13]

“My wife was living with her family at that time, but often she would come to bring me baskets with chicken and all sorts of delightful little delicacies. The neighborhood was a terrible one in those days, and I was afraid at first to have her come there. I told some of the boys about it. They told me never to worry again. They arranged that an unseen bodyguard should follow her from the street car and escort her to my room and back again when she was ready to leave.... She believed in me even then when it meant more to me than anything in the world. People don’t know it, but I am naturally a timid man. She gave me confidence in myself, and with it came the ability to succeed.”

The room at Thirty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue was a studio, “dismal, rat-haunted,” where a job as a painter of theatrical scenery compelled him to spend a great many of his nights and days. In intervals of scene-painting he began _The Broad Highway_. “I met O. Henry several times in the offices of Ainslee’s Magazine. I think it was Will Irwin who introduced us. O. Henry was unusually taciturn for an American, and I—well, I am an Englishman. So though we saw each other frequently, never more than ‘How d’ ye do’ passed between us.

“The pleasantest recollections I have of those old days was the time I spent in dabbling in painting and theatricals at the old Astor Theatre. One day a down-and-out young man got past the doorkeeper and strolled on the stage. ‘I’ve got a fortune here in my pocket,’ he said. ‘We all have that,’ I replied.

“The young fellow said he had been a cub reporter in Chicago, but now he was hungry and looking for a job. Finally he got the attention of the producer at the theatre. He pulled out a manuscript and began reading. The producer at first paid no attention, but gradually became more and more interested. When the first act had been read the producer said, ‘All right, I’ll take it.’ The starving dramatist was Eugene Walter and the manuscript was that of ‘Paid in Full.’”[14]

Farnol wrote in the studio and also at Mr. Hawley’s home, in Englewood, New Jersey. When _The Broad Highway_ was the best seller, Mr. Hawley rounded out the picture of the New York period.[15] “Farnol,” he said, “is a dreamer and a bookworm, and has just about as much practical idea of time and money as that type is popularly supposed to have. He kept right on writing, and night was the time he had to do it. Many a time when I’ve been detained late with a press of work I’d get home at midnight or thereabouts to find a light supper waiting for me and Jeffery up working, only waiting to be called to entertain me while I ate. For he is the most entertaining talker I’ve ever known and loves to talk. His natural speech is the phraseology in _The Broad Highway_.[16] It has become natural to him through many years of living with the characters in the books of that period he loves so well. And he is a born storyteller. He always kept us sitting overtime at meals, just as he used to keep me sitting up till 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning on the occasion of the midnight suppers. When he gets to spinning a yarn, whether telling it or writing it, he loses all knowledge of the flight of time. Often when I’ve come down to breakfast before catching my early train to New York I’ve found him just finishing his night’s work, fresh and enthusiastic. Even when his days are full of leisure he likes best to work at night. Then, he says, his brain is clearer, and there are no interruptions. His power of concentration and absorption is the most marvellous thing I’ve ever encountered. I remember once taking him to the Players Club with me for luncheon. After luncheon he wandered into the library and was delighted to see the work of Aphra Behn, an early writer I’d never heard of, but belonging to his favorite period and well known to him. I left him there renewing her acquaintance with delight. I forgot all about him, but chancing to go back for dinner, on entering the library to my amazement I saw him sitting there in exactly the same posture in which I’d left him hours before. He didn’t know whether ten minutes or as many hours had elapsed.”

Farnol succeeded in selling a number of short stories and had some work as an illustrator. He wrote two light romances, _My Lady Caprice_ and _The Money Moon_, which magazines bought. For two years he put all his spare time on _The Broad Highway_, the history of which is among the curiosities of book publishing.

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]