Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire: A Biography. - book reviews

National Review, March 7, 1994 by Anthony Lejeune

Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire: A Biography, by Tom Pocock (Trafalgar Square, 263 pp., $45)

NADA THE LILY begat The Jungle Book, which begat Tarzan of the Apes; each author, that is, was prompted by an earlier tale of a hero growing up among savage beasts. The Jungle Book and Tarzan are familiar enough still, but does anybody now read Nada the Lily, a richly exciting novel about Chaka and the murderous power struggles of Zululand? (I know Digby Anderson does. He told us so in these pages recently. But he is a returned prodigal.) How many of Rider Haggard's other books are even familiar as names? King Solomon's Mines, I suppose (if only because the latest, extremely bad, film version featured the subsequently celebrated Miss Sharon Stone), and She (personified most recently by Ursula Andress), perhaps Allan Quatermain; not much else.

Which is a great pity; for Haggard was a master storyteller in the grand style, unrivaled, it seems to me, by modern successors. With typical Victorian energy he wrote over fifty novels, few of which occupied him for more than a couple of months or distracted him from other activities. Personally I like the later romances even better than the early ones: they have more depth, more maturity.

His new biographer--Tom Pocock, an English naval historian who is, like me, of an age when Haggard bulked large in every school library--evades the question by concentrating less on the books than on Haggard's life and political ideas and endeavors. The "lost empire" of the title is the British Empire, not so much as it was but as the literary philosophers of imperialism hoped that it would be.

Two things shaped Haggard's mind as a young man. The girl he loved married someone else, and, although they were to meet again in tragic circumstances, he carried the image, the idea, of a perfect lost love with him to the end of his life---and perhaps beyond, since he at least half believed they might be reunited in another world or another incarnation. And, like many younger sons, he sought a career on the wild borders of a still expanding empire. He went, with a staunch but unromantic wife, to South Africa, where he served as a government official, tried his hand at farming, and witnessed the final stages of the Zulu War and the first stages of the Boer War.

After a few years he returned to England, but the wide African landscapes, the warlike dignity of the Zulus, and the sense of imperial duty had so colored his imagination that, when he started to write, it was inevitably about Africa and its peoples. His books did for Africa what Kipling did for India. They were a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic (except, naturally, with highbrow critics, who didn't like Kipling either).

Haggard was well launched on a literary career, but typical again both of the man and of the times thought it second best to the life of action and public service. He assumed the responsibilities, to which both he and his wife were born, of a minor Norfolk squire. Agricultural politics became a chief interest, and it was for his work on that subject, not for his novel-writing, that he was eventually knighted. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Conservative, but even if he had been elected, the bundle of policies he espoused, including a form of land nationalization, tariff protection, and a minimum wage, would surely have rendered him too much of a maverick for party preferment. Like most idea-driven literary men who test the waters of practical politics, he became disillusioned. Parliament, he wrote in his diary, "is hardly the place for a self-respecting man."

A flight from the land and its values--urbanization, as we would say -- was, he thought, a principal reason why empires decline. He urged schemes that would encourage young Englishmen to occupy the wide open spaces of an empire he likened to a great house with many empty rooms. The government, as is the way of governments, talked politely and set up commissions on which Haggard sat, but did too little too late.

He believed straightforwardly in Britain's civilizing mission; that a race higher (albeit temporarily) on the ladder of evolution had a duty to rule and help those on the lower rungs. He believed what, until recently, would have been generally accepted as quite obviously true--that different races have different characteristics, some of which are more admirable than others. He admired the Zulus, whom he considered the Romans of Africa, sympathizing with them much more than with the Boers.

With Egypt and its ancient beliefs he felt a particular affinity. His chilling encounter with a fortune-teller in Luxor was recorded by his daughter Lilias and is impossible to disbelieve; it might have come from one of his own books. As he grew old, he said, it seemed to him that "the spirit of man is like those great icebergs which float in Arctic seas--towering masses of blue-green ice, which yet hide fourfifths of their bulk beneath the water"; a view that, in those later books, he attributed to the old hunter with whom, of course, he had always identified. "It becomes every day more clear to me, Allan Quatermain, that each of us is a mystery living in the midst of mysteries, bringing them with us when we are born and taking them away with us when we die; doubtless into a land of other and yet greater mysteries."