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By NEAL ASCHERSON DOWN with a crash . . . , still grasping the knob of Inkosi-kaas, fell the brave old Zulu—dead.' The dying Umslopogaas, having held the great staircase of Zu-Vendis single- handed against hundreds to save the lives of his white comrades and a white-skinned queen, staggers in his blood to the sacred stone and uttering a 'wild, heart-shaking shout' rends it with a last blow of his great axe and falls dead among the splinters. This single passage, the climax of Allan Quatermain, has had a notorious effect on the British mind. Even today, a reading of it has been known to reduce a tough class of forty secondary modern boys to silence and tears. In general, the myth of the mighty Zulu chief, loyal to the death and proud to die, has disposed two British generations to passionate sympathy for the tribal African and to the passionate illusion that his highest instincts are naturally expressed in loyalty to a just white friend. There must be dozens of weary District Commissioners and embittered farmers who were first propelled towards Africa by the choking feeling that rose as Umslopogaas crashed down dead. The very policy of Indirect Rule embodied a hopeless Colonial Office hope of rearing up a generation of loyal Zulu squires, of perfecting a literate Colonel Umslopogaas, JP.
The merit of such passages is another matter. Rider Haggard's contemporaries, Andrew Lang and Robert Louis Stevenson, considered that he was reviving 'Romance' in their company, and that his heroic stories were in the tradition of Homer and the border ballads. This was true only in that he wrote admiringly of physical action, ad- venture, battle. In his group of historical novels about the Zulu nation, especially in Nada the Lily, Haggard sometimes shows the callous and yet complete appreciation of valour which is found in the Iliad. But for the most part, the comparison fails, of course, as it was bound to. These romancers thought that the essence of the heroic was somehow to write 'amorally, exultantly' of battle and suffering. But their at- tempts to cork up the conventional scruples of their time often did no more than create a vacuum soon filled by the steam of their own more deeply personal emotions. The Lays of Ancient Rome convey not only the intended brassy clangs and neighings, but a subtle and lurid impression of pain which occurs in Virgil only rarely—and then where Virgil meant it to occur. Haggard's battle pieces often put nor- mal pity for violent death expressly to one side, but instead of some ageless exaltation over the grandeur of man in battle, there tends to in- trude a plain Victorian excitement over the striving of two teams to defeat each other. There is a lot of merry talk about rolling up wings and holding the centre: a lay becomes a com- mentary, and Armageddon turns out like Twickenham.
Haggard did not try hard to restrain his private longings. His elaborate scenes of battle and of collective heroism may be flat, but
the African narratives are elsewhere charged with his own fantasies, regrets and prejudices. His first fiction, Dawn and The Witch's Head, con- tains awkward but interesting attempts at psy- chological plotting. But then, encouraged by the success of the South African episodes in The Witch's Head, he let his imagination go. The three famous African adventures, King Solo- mon's Mines, Allan Quatermain and She, have torrential pace, and their writing is uninhibited in a way which distinguishes them from true novels and makes each of them into the relic of an act of eruption or overflow. What one holds when one picks up a copy of She is, I suppose, a sort of clinker. (In this, the tales have unex- pected kinship to some, pornographic stories.) As if conscious of this privateneSs, Haggard studs his tales with every kind of detail, from ethnology to notes by imaginary editors, which may give an effect of verisimilitude.
Mr. Morton Cohen's new study of Rider Haggard* finds fault with his carelessness and his strong dislike of revision. The explanation may be that the tales were so tenderly personal that severe correction would have amounted to self-inflicted wounds. The adventures are liberating adventures which Rider Haggard would have liked to happen to himself, •and in telling them he relieved a little of his own rest- lessness and his nervous passion to excal. The stories rush on from episode to episode, r ?calling E. M. Forster's vision of the primal nove: st as a caveman frantically gabbling to stave off the stone axe of the bored listener.
Henry Rider Haggard lived only a short period of his life in Africa, but it was far the happiest part. Born in 1856 in Norfolk, the sixth son of the squire of Bradenham, he was badly chivvied by his father for supposed stupidity and sent to Ipswich Grammar School instead of to Win- chester or Shrewsbury with his brothers. His quietness disguised a powerful imagination which in his adolescence fed itself on spiritualism. Then in 1875 his father packed him off to Natal on the staff of a new Lieutenant-Governor. During the next six years, Haggard made the acquaintance of the veld, the ox-wagon and the martial tribes of Southern Africa. He learned Zulu, and learned to hate the Boer with an in- curious contempt which he never quite con- quered. He met the original of Umslopogaas in a Swazi aide-de-camp attached to Theophilus Shepstone, and rode far into the interior on a dangerous mission to Chief Secocoeni's kraal. And he was a success personally. At the absurd age of twenty-one, he became Registrar of the Transvaal, and Haggard's own hands pulled up the Union Jack over Pretoria, when the Transvaal was annexed in 1877. With his energy and brains, Haggard would probably have be- come one of the significant figures in the pre- history of the Union. But at this point his life '1' RIDER HAGGARD. By Morton Cohen. (Hutchin- son, 30s.) began to go wrong. His girl back in England jilted him. Permanently wounded by the betrayal, he went back to Norfolk, married another girl' brought her back to Africa, and then, feeling that it was too hard a place for a young wife and baby, returned to Norfolk for good. He meant to emigrate once more, but apart from an abut' tive treasure-hunt in Mexico he never did.
Haggard wrote his romances to make moneY, hated the writing of them, and put his willing energy into projects like his great study °I English farming in its disastrous decline. kle, always thought of himself as a Conservative, bat Rural England and the later Rural Denmark turn out under Mr. Cohen's sharp analysis le contain elements of a home-grown peasant socialism. Towards the end of his life, durta the First World War, he was appointed to ths, Royal Dominions Commission and travelled about the world in authority and independence for a few years. So much achievement, however; did not comfort his vague sense that he had missed a tide, probably by leaving Africa e00 soon. Mr. Cohen assembles from a mass of letter and memoirs the strange picture of Rider Hag: gard as writer and as squire of his wifel Norfolk estates. At times, he was a genial Vic' torian: 'maybe it was all a little barbaric; e, guest reflected, 'with Rider's loud . . . voice and laugh and . . . his explosive "What Hey! What Hey1" which shook the rafters.' At other times; his lurking self-pity and sense of futility WOO° make life miserable for his family. With all Mr,' Cohen's dutiful listing of the man's editions and friends he does not give enough attention .t° Haggard's psychology—the lasting fear of 10' significance impressed on him by his contemptU' ous father and his inability to gain anything b°,t
. further grievances from his relations women.
Among his other failures Haggard fails as ! serious novelist. His second novel, The Witc0 Head, is set mainly in Norfolk society, although its famous passages follow the hero through the Zulu War, and in the first part of it Rider Hag; gard has tried very hard to make the actions no the book issue from the complexities of human character. It is not a success, but this eta, to conform to tradition, governing his naturs1 taste for the sinister, does produce about the only convincing woman in all his work: Florence Ceswick, the hot-hearted girl whose inhibitions drive her into destructive bitterness. Florence has more interest in her than a dozen eye-flas' ing queens or reincarnate She's. But Haggai did not manage to keep this marriage ° discipline and emotion together. Instead, the late books slice a great division between niggling' complicated England and simple, noble Africa' Haggard threw over the study of painful human realities for African fables, for fireworks of ewer tive writing like the horrible scene in which the lovely and immortal She meets all her year; at once, and withers into a bald and shrivelled monkey-creature. He never wrote intensively about Norfolle, society again because his imagination remained fastened on his African experience: he did no stay still enough or long enough in Africa to be interested by the fact that human character might be as tortuous in epic surroundings a, in Norfolk. Haggard set 'mind' against 'heart, and so placed a deadly limitation on his wonder,- ful tales. As Mr. Morton Cohen says, 'he never really tried to understand the gift of writing-0 did he honour it.' There are wild, heart-shaking shouts in his novels and no background noise of intelligent conversation is allowed to compete.
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