BOOKS.
JESS.*
Tam tale gives perhaps a better opportunity of forming a clear estimate of the nature of Mr. Rider Haggard's literary power, than any of those in which he has ventured over the borders of the natural. Not that we mean to deny that a good portion of his skill as a writer is shown in these wild flights of imagination ; for that would be absurd ; but that one can judge better in a tale where all ie kept just within the bounds of natural possibility, what the imaginative qualities in Mr. Rider Haggard are, which enable him to transgress these bounds with so mach success. And this at least seems to us clear, that it is not any deficiency in the imaginative qualities, —in which, we suppose, Mr. Haggard thinks himself de- ficient, since he borrows the fruits of those qualities from another writer without that wise and proper acknowledgment which we should have expected from him,—that we should ever have thought of suspecting in these tales. The fragments of verse embodied in Jess, though they are passable enough, add nothing either to the force of the pictures of character, or to the charm of the story. In fact, these fragments of verse seem to us pieced in like a mosaic, without any particular appropriateness to the spot in which they are introduced, and to injure slightly, so far as they can be said to modify at all, the effect of the whole. There is plenty of poetry of a kind in Mr. Haggard; but it is the somewhat formless poetry which is not very easily expressed in verse. The sense of the mystery of the universe, of the mystery of its monotony, and of the monotony of its mystery ; the sense of the might of man's primi- tive instincts, and of the imperious law which controls that • Pon. By H. Rider Haggard. London: Smith, alder, and Go. might, and says, "Thus far shalt thsu go, and no farther ;" the sense of the immeasurable power of man and of his immeasurable weakness, neither frilly felt without an equally keen sense of the other,—in a word, all that goes to fire the courage of the adventurer, and, again, to make him quail at the audacity of his own weakness, is expressed in Mr. Rider Haggard's works
in language as forcible as any poem could give,—perhaps, to the ordinary reader, even more forcible than is consistent with the restraints of verse. Take, for instance, such a passage as this :—
" Tess shook her head as she answered, may be wrong, but I don't see how anybody who feels can be quite happy in a world of sickness, suffering, slaughter, and death. I saw a Kafir woman die yesterday, and her children crying over her. She was a poor creature and had a rough lot, but she loved her life, and her children loved her. Who ran be happy and thank God for his creation when he has just seen such a thing But there, Captain Niel, my ideas are very crude, and I dare say very wrong, and everybody has thought them before : at any rate, I am not going to inflict them on you. What is the use of it ? and she went on with a laugh : ' what is the use of anything ? The same old thoughts passing through the same human minds from year to year and century to century, jaet au the same clouds float across the same blue sky. The clouds are born in the sky, and the thoughts are born in the brain, and they both end in tears and re-arise in blinding, bewildering miet, and this is the beginning and end of thoughts and clouds. They arise out of the blue ; they overshadow and break into storms and tears, and then they are drawn up into the blue again, and the whole thing begins afresh. "
Or, again, take the passage in which, after speaking of the character of the half-Eoglish, half-Boer Frank Muller, who occupies the position of chief villain in the story, Mr. Rider Haggard describes the passion of superstitious fear in which Muller fled from the scene of his own wickedness :—
" The place of a man like Frank Muller is at the junction of the waters of civilisation and barbarism. Too civilised to possess those savage virtues which, such as they are, represent the quantum of innate good Nature has thought fit to allow in the mixture, Man ; and too barbarous to be subject to the tenderer restraints of cultivated society, he is at once strong in the strength of both and weak in their weaknesses. Animated by the spirit of barbarism, Superstition ; and almost entirely destitute of the spirit of civilisation, Mercy, be stands on the edge of both and an affront to both, as terrific a moral spec- tacle as the world can afford. Had be been a little more civilised, with his power of evil trained by education and cynical reflection to defy the attacks of those spasms of unreasoning spiritual terror and nnrestrainable passion that have their natural dwelling-place in the raw strong mind of uncultivated man, Frank Muller might have broken upon the world as a Napoleon. Had he been a little more savage, a little farther removed from the unconscious but present influence of a progressive race, he might have ground his fellows down and ruthlessly destroyed them in the madness of his rage and lust, like an Attila or a T'Chaka. As it was he was buffeted between two forces he did not realise, even when they swayed him, and thus at every step in his path towards a supremacy of evil an unseen power made stumbling-blocks of weaknesses which, if that path had been laid along a little higher or a little lower level in the scale of circumstance, would themselves have been deadly weapons of *over- mastering force. See him as with his dark heart filled up with fears, he thunders along from the scene of midnight death and murder his brain had not feared to plan and his hand to execute. Onward his black horse strides, companioned by the storm, like a dark thought travelling on the wings of Night. He does not believe in any God, and yet the terrible fears that spring up in his soul, born f ongus-like from a dew of blood, take shape and form, and seem to cry aloud, We are the messengers of the avenging God.' He glances up. High on the black bosom of the storm the finger of the lightning is writing that awful name, and again and again the voice of the thunder reads it out Mond in spirit.shaking accents. He shuts his dazed eyes, and even the falling rhythm of his horse's hoofs beats out, ' There is a God ! there is a God !' from the silent earth on which they strike. And so, on through the tempest and the night, flying from that which no man can leave behind."
There you see the poetry of which Mr. Rider Haggard is capable, in its most natural and primitive form. To our minds, either passage is worth a great many bits of verse like those which Mr. Haggard appears to have borrowed from another pen; and yet his writings are far too full of the natural passion of passages like these, to admit of the smallest doubt that they come from a rich store of poetic power in himself. When he ventures into the preternatural, it is not so much from love of the preternatural as from love of the natural, of which he wiehee to trace the powerful influence even over forms of life which are assumed to be more or less beyond the range of ordinary nature. In Jees, Mr. Haggard's great desire has been to study a heroic form of feminine love competent to rise to deeds greater than that of Judith, even though the secret longing of the heroine's own heart stood in the way of' such deeds. And on the whole, though he has succeeded better in painting his conception of the character than in enabling ns to realise how it showed itself in ordinary life,—for Jess's words are not often as impressive as her aotions,—we cannot deny that the effect is a striking one. We do apprehend the intensity of her nature, and we do
absolve her for her deed of blood, conceived as it was in a. tumult of excitement too fierce for calm judgment, and carried out in direct opposition to the impulse of selfish passion. But if the character of Jess is, on the whole, a success, we doubt whether any other of the principal characters in this book are decidedly successes. Silas Croft and Bessie are fair sketches ; but Captain Niel is naught. The character of Frank Muller is a fine conception, but not so executed as to impress ns with any deep belief in its reality. In fact, except the study of Jess herself, the only study in the book which is really impressive, is that of the old Boer woman who is profoundly convinced that there are three thousand men, neither more nor fewer, in the British Army, and who has a deadly skill in shying hot coffee at her prospective son-in-law
" ' The Captain is a rooibaatje P' said the old lady Aunt' Coetzee interrogatively, and yet with the certainty of one who states a fact. —John signified that be was.—' What does the Captain come to the "land" for ? Is it to spy ?'—The whole room listened attentively to their hostesa's question, and then turned their heads to listen for the answer.—' No. I have come to farm with Silas Croft.'—There was a general smile of incredulity. Could a rooibaatje farm ? Certainly not.—' There are three thousand men in the British Army,' announced the old vrouw oracularly, and coating a severe glance at the wolf in sheep's clothing, the man of blood who pretended to farm.—Every- body looked at John again, and awaited his answer in dead silence.— 'There are more than a hundred thousand men in the regular British Army, and as many more in the Indian Army, and twice as many more Volunteers,' he said, in a rather irritated voice.—This statement also was received with the most discouraging incredulity.—'There are- three thousand men in the British Army,' repeated the old lady, in a tone of certainty that was positively crashing.—' Yah, yak chimed in some of the younger men in churns.—' There are three thousand men in the British Army,' she repeated for the third time in triumph. 'If the Captain says that there are more he lies. It is natural that be should lie about his own army. My grandfather's brother was at Cape Town in the time of Governor Smith, and he saw the whole British Army. He counted them ; there were exactly three thousand. I say that there are three thousand men in the British Army.'—' Yah, yah! said the chorus ; and John gazed at this terrible person in bland exasperation.—' How many men do you command in the British Army ?' she interrogated after a solemn pause.—' A hundred,' said John sharply.—' Girl,' said the old woman, addressing one of her daughters, you have been to school and can reckon. How many times does one hundred go into three thousand r —The young lady addressed giggled confusedly, and looked for assistance to a eardonie young Boer whom she was going to marry, who shook his head sadly, indicating thereby that these were mysteries into which it was not well to pry. Thrown on her own resources, the young lady plunged into the recesses of an intricate calculation, in which her finger& played a considerable part, and finally, with an air of triumph, announced that it went twenty-six times exactly.—' Yab, yah P said the chorus, ' it goes twenty-six times exactly.'—' The Captain,' said the oracular old lady, who was rapidly driving John mad, ' commands a twenty-sixth part of the British Army, and he says that he comes here to farm with Uncle Silas Croft. He says,' she went on, with withering contempt,. that be comes here to farm when he commands a twenty-sixth part of the British Army. It is evident that he lies?— ' Yak yah !' said the chorus.—' It is natural that he should lie !' she continued ; 'all Englishmen lie, especially the rooibaatje Englishman, but he should not lie so badly. It must vex the dear Lord to hear a man lie so badly, even though he be an Englishman and a rooihaatje.
That is probably the transcript of some real experience, .and stands out in strong relief to the passion of the story. The old lady reappears towards the close, when she shows her proficiency in aiming with a cup of hot coffee as we have intimated, and on that occasion the reader learns that Mr. Rider Haggard can. do justice to the Boers, and even to so narrow a specimen of
Boer life as Tanta Coetzee. But the charm of Tees,—a very melancholy tale,—is, after all, not in its study of character, but
rather in the depth of masculine passion,—part pantheistic, part political and national, part moral,—which is pent up in this wild story.
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