53. Haggard rides again: Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works
I hope Mr. Cohen's excellent Rider Haggard: His Life and Works will move people to reconsider the whole Haggard question. For there really is a problem here. The vices of his style are inexcusable; the vapidity (and frequency) of his reflections, hard to bear. But it is no longer any good pretending that his best work was merely an ephemeral and commercial success. It has not passed away like the works of Ouida, Mrs Oliphant, Stanley Weyman, or Max Pemberton. It has survived the whole climate of opinion which once made its imperialism and vague pieties acceptable. The promised time ‘when the Rudyards cease from Kipling and the Haggards are no more’ has failed to arrive. Obstinately, scandalously, Haggard continues to be read and re-read. Why?
The significant fact for me is the feeling we have as we close King Solomon's Mines, or, still more, She. ‘If only . . . ’ are the words that rise to our lips. If only we could have had this very same story told by a Stevenson, a Tolkien, or a William Golding. If only, faute de mieux, we were even allowed to re-write it ourselves!
Note, the very same story. It is not the construction that is faulty. From the move of the first pawn to the final checkmate, Haggard usually plays like a master. His openings – what story in the world opens better than She? – are full of alluring promise, and his catastrophes triumphantly keep it.
The lack of detailed character-study is not a fault at all. An adventure story neither needs nor admits it. Even in real life, adventures tend to obliterate fine shades. Hardship and danger strip us down to the bare moral essentials. The distinction between shirker and helper, brave and cowardly, trusty and treacherous, overrides everything else. ‘Character’ in the novelist's sense is a flower that expands fully where people are safe, fed, dry, and warmed. That adventure stories remind us of this is one of their merits.
The real defects of Haggard are two. First, he can't write. Or rather (I learned from Mr. Cohen) won't. Won't be bothered. Hence the clichés, jocosities, frothy eloquence. When he speaks through the mouth of Quatermain he makes some play with the unliterary character of the simple hunter. It never dawned on him that what he wrote in his own person was a great deal worse – ‘literary’ in the most damning sense of the word.
Secondly, the intellectual defects. No one after reading Mr. Cohen can believe that Haggard was out of touch with reality. Apparently his agriculture and sociological works are a solid meal of hard-won facts and of conclusions firmly drawn. When he decided that the only hope for the land lay in a scheme which flouted all his political preferences and shattered all his treasured hopes for his own class and his own family, he recommended that scheme without flinching.
Here lies the true greatness of the man; what Mr. Cohen calls his ‘overall sturdiness’. Even as an author he can sometimes be shrewd – as when in She Allan Quartermain neither succumbs to the charms of Ayesha nor believes her ‘tall’ autobiographical stories. By making Quartermain keep his head Haggard shows that he can keep his own.
But though Haggard had sense, he was ludicrously unaware of his limitations. He attempts to philosophise. Again and again in his stories we see a commonplace intelligence, armed (or hampered) with an eclectic outfit of vaguely Christian, theosophical, and spiritualistic notions, trying to say something profound about that fatal subject ‘Life’. This is seen at its embarrassing worst whenever Ayesha speaks. If she was really Wisdom's daughter, she did not take after her parents. Her thought is of the regrettable type called ‘Higher’.
What keeps us reading in spite of all these defects is of course the story itself, the myth. Haggard is the text-book case of the mythopoeic gift pure and simple – isolated, as if for inspection, from nearly all those more specifically literary powers with which it so fortunately co-exists in, say, The Ancient Mariner, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or The Lord of the Rings. To make matters even clearer, in Haggard himself the mythopoeic power seems to have grown less as the literary art improved. Ayesha is not such good myth as She, but is better written.
This gift, when it exists, in full measure, is irresistible. We can say of this, as Aristotle did of metaphor, ‘no man can learn it from another’. It is the work that Kipling called ‘the daemon’. It triumphs over all obstacles and makes us tolerate all faults. It is quite unaffected by any foolish notions which the author himself, after the daemon has left him, may entertain about his own myths. He knows no more about them than any other man. It was silly of Haggard to treasure a belief that there was, in a factual sense, ‘something in’ his myths. But we, as readers, need not concern ourselves with that at all.
The mythical status of She is indisputable. As we all know, Jung went to it for the embodiment of an archetype. But even Jung did not, I think, get to the centre. If his view were right, the myth ought to function only for those to whom Ayesha is a powerfully erotic image. And she is not so for all who love She. To myself, for example, Ayesha or any other tragedy Queen – any tall, crowned, stormy, deep-breasted contralto with thunder in her brow and lightnings in her eye – is one of the most effective anti-aphrodisiacs in the world. Ultimately the life of the myth is elsewhere.
The story of Ayesha is not an escape, but it is about escape; about an attempt at the great escape, daringly made and terribly frustrated. The closest relative, perhaps its child, is Morris's Well at the World's End, which came ten years later. Both stories externalise the same psychological forces; our irreconcilable reluctance to die, our craving for an immortality in the flesh, our empirical knowledge that this is impossible, our intermittent awareness that it is not even really desirable, and (octaves deeper than all these) a very primitive feeling that the attempt, if it could be made, would be unlawful and would call down the vengeance of the gods. In both books the wild, transporting, and (we feel) forbidden hope is aroused. When fruition seems almost in sight, terrifying disasters shatter our dream. Haggard's version is better than Morris's. Morris makes his heroine too human, too wholesome. Haggard, truer to our feelings, surrounds the lonely she-Prometheus with terror and misery.
Haggard's best work will survive because it is based on an appeal well above high-water mark. The fullest tides of fashion cannot demolish it. A great myth is relevant as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.
Haggard will last, but so will the hatred of Haggard. The vindictiveness with which adverse critics attacked him in his own day had, no doubt, some local and temporary causes. His own truculence was one. Another was the natural jealousy of the gigadibs who can produce only a succès d'estime for the writer who produces ‘popular’ – but also living and viable – work. The author of a Gorboduc always has a keen eye for the faults of a Tamburlaine. But there was, and there always will be, a deeper cause. No one is indifferent to the mythopoeic. You either love it or else hate it ‘with a perfect hatred’.
This hatred comes in part from a reluctance to meet Archetypes; it is an involuntary witness to their disquieting vitality. Partly it springs from an uneasy awareness that most ‘popular’ fiction, if only it embodies a real myth, is so very much more serious than what is generally called ‘serious’ literature. For it deals with the permanent and inevitable, whereas an hour's shelling, or perhaps a ten mile walk, or even a dose of salts, might annihilate many of the problems in which the characters of a refined and subtle novel are entangled. Read James’ letters and see what happened to him for some weeks after the war broke out in 1914. He presently builds up the Jamesian world again; but for a time it seemed to have ‘left not a wrack behind’.