King Solomon's Mines (38 page)

—November 7, 1885

 

‘King Solomon’s Mines’ is a capital boy’s books, to which the purely fabulous foundation is no drawback. The marvellous adventures of Captain Good and his friends in the land that lay beyond the “Suliman Mountains” appeal, through devices familiar and novel, to the healthy boy’s ardor for fighting savages and coming off victorious, with the spoils of Golconda to boot.

—February 4, 1886

Mr. Haggard, in dedicating his novel of Allan Quatermain to his son, expresses the hope that he and other boys may find in it something that will help them to “attain to the state and dignity of English gentlemen.” That there is anything in the temper and tendency of Mr. Haggard’s books positively inimical to the pursuit of such an ideal we do not go so far as roundly to assert....

We may observe that the repugnance inspired by the details of Mr. Haggard’s murdering and massacring passages is sometimes still further aggravated by a tone of levity and even facetiousness accompanying the ghastly recital. One of his characters, a great amateur in homicide, with a hundred murders on his hands, deprecates some modes of killing a man as being not sufficiently “sportsmanlike.” This person’s favourite method is then circumstantially described, with a certain gusto suggestive of admiration—the admirer being Allan Quatermain, the autobiographic hero of two of the novels. For our own part, we are not so sensitive to the humorous side of carnage as Mr. Haggard appears to be, and we confess we find in it little to amuse....

[King Solomon’s Mines]
exhibits some of Mr. Haggard’s choicest flowers of humour. Captain Good is caught by a party of savages at a time when he happens to be divested of his nether garment, and to keep up the first impression thus produced upon their untutored minds, he goes for several days without that article of clothing. This incident, amplified by various detail, is quite the strong feature and pivot of interest throughout several chapters, Mr. Haggard being evidently delighted with such fair fruit of his humorous invention. We are sure it is meant for humour; not, indeed, because we ourselves find anything very amusing in it, but because we know of nothing else that it can be meant for. Though it affects us rather sadly, we think it can hardly be intended as an experiment in pathos....

If it suited us to condescend to such humble particularities, we could produce from Mr. Haggard’s writings an array of sentences betokening an ignorance of the principles of syntax which might discredit any schoolboy. We care not to pursue such small game. For after all, individual solecisms sink into insignificance beside the collective folly and futility of these books. As the world is said to be wiser than its wisest man, so Mr. Haggard’s writings in their totality are worse than the worst things which they contain.

We have spoken with a degree of severity which will perhaps be attributed to private animus. We not only disclaim any such motive, we go farther, and do not hesitate to say that it is to the very fact of the utter absence of all personal considerations that our severity is due. The intrusion of such considerations would have brought human compunctions and relentings—would have begotten an unwillingness to deliver the maximum sentence which we believe such eminent offenses against good taste and good sense demand. It is only by rigidly shutting our eyes to everything but the general and public aspect of the case that we are enabled to go through the performance of such an unpleasant judicial duty. It is not that we grudge Mr. Haggard his undeserved success, but that we grudge the comparative neglect of meritorious fiction which the rage for meretricious fiction implies. We believe Mr. Haggard’s own inmost literary conscience will ratify our pronouncement. He is a clever man, well able to take the measure of his own charlatanry—very likely the last person in the world to mistake his own charlatanry for genius. He is a clever man, for to gauge public taste is not done by a sort of fluke, but argues very considerable if not always scrupulous talents; and he has accurately gauged the taste of a section of the reading public, which the triumph of his experiment proves to be a large section. But that taste—the taste for such an ill-compounded
mélange
of the sham-real and the sham-romantic—is a deplorable symptom. There is among the very poor in our large cities a class of persons who nightly resort to the gin-shop to purchase a mixture of every known liquor, the heterogeneous rinsings of a hundred glasses. The flavour of this unnameable beverage defies imagination, but the liquor has for its lovers one transcendent virtue—it distances all rivalry in the work of procuring swift and thorough inebriation. Its devotees would not thank you for a bottle of the finest Château Yquem, when the great end and aim of drinking—the being made drunk—can be reached by such an infinitely readier agency. The taste for novels like Mr. Rider Haggard’s is quite as truly the craving for coarse and violent intoxicants because they coarsely and violently intoxicate. But the victims of this thirst are without the excuse which the indigent topers to whom we liken them may plead. The poor tippler might say that he bought his unutterable beverage because he could not afford a better. But the noblest vintages of literature may be purchased as cheaply as their vilest substitutes. When we have abundance of exquisite grapes in our vineyards, is it not almost incredible that persons who pretend to some connoisseurship should be content to besot themselves with a thick, raw concoction, destitute of fragrance, destitute of sparkle, destitute of everything but the power to induce a crude inebriety of mind and a morbid state of the intellectual peptics? It is indeed almost incredible, but the pity of it is, it is true.

—September 1, 1888

 

MORTON NORTON COHEN

Haggard adds to the impact of his adventures by putting them in the form of memoirs; by writing errors into the text so that he, as editor, may correct them in footnotes; by introducing a mass of meticulous detail in describing far-away places, the people who inhabit them, the costumes they wear, even the utensils they eat with. The formula is a psychological powerhouse, and in Haggard’s hands it seldom fails, no matter how steep his tale or how flat his minor characters, to draw the reader into a strange and distant world.

—from
Rider Haggard: His Life and Works
(1960)

 

C. S. LEWIS

The real defects of Haggard are two. First, he can’t write. Or rather (I learn 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.... Though Haggard had sense, he was ludicrously unaware of his limitations.

—from
On Stories and Other Essays on Literature
(1966)

1. Does
King Solomon’s Mines
appeal to anything beyond the perpetual male adolescent that seems to be lodged somewhere within all of us?

2. What is an adventure? Why do we want to have one (in our imaginations if not in the flesh)?

3. Would
King Solomon’s Mines
be a better novel if a feisty and beautiful woman had been a participant in the adventures?

4. It is no longer common for adventure novelists to set their fictions in Africa. Any ideas about why?

5. In the treatment of Africans in the novel, is there anything beyond the old racist stereotypes?

6. What would you say has kept this novel popular, widely read and translated, and often imitated for more than 100 years?

The Annotated “She”: A Critical Edition of H. Rider Haggard’s Victorian Romance.
Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Norman Etherington. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. An expert on Haggard provides much helpful documentation.

Diary of an African Journey: The Return of Rider Haggard.
Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Stephen Coan. New York: New York University Press, 2001. A perspicacious look at the latest views on Haggard.

King Solomon’s Mines.
Edited, with an introduction, by Dennis Butts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Good, succinct notes.

King Solomon’s Mines.
Edited by James Danly. Introduction by Alexandra Fuller. New York: Modern Library, 2002. Extensive notes.

King Solomon’s Mines.
Edited by Gerald Monsman. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. An intelligent workbook format with additional texts relating to the novel.

The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard,
1914-1925. Edited by D. S. Higgins. London: Cassell, 1980.

Cohen, Morton Norton.
Rider Haggard: His Life and Work.
Second edition. London: Macmillan, 1968. The standard biography, written with great affection for Haggard.

Etherington, Norman.
Rider Haggard.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. A useful summary.

Haggard, H. Rider.
The Days of My Life: An Autobiography.
Edited by C. J. Longman. London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1926. Haggard’s own view, which is surprisingly reliable.

Haggard, Lilias Rider.
The Cloak That I Left: A Biography of the Author Henry Rider Haggard, K.B.I., by His Daughter Lilias Rider Haggard.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1951. The view of Haggard’s daughter, an essential source for all biographers.

Manthorpe, Victoria.
Children of the Empire: The Victorian Haggards.
London: Victor Gollancz, 1996. More on Haggard’s family circle.

Pocock, Tom.
Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993. An enthusiastic look at Haggard and his times.

Chrisman, Laura.
Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. A useful comparative study.

Fraser, Robert.
Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle.
Plymouth, UK: Northcote House, in association with the British Council, 1998. Haggard among his literary friends and competitors.

Katz, Wendy Roberta.
Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire: A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. A well-researched view of Haggard as racist and imperialist.

Leibfried, Philip.
Rudyard Kipling and Sir Henry Rider Haggard on Screen, Stage, Radio, and Television.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999. A reliable study of Haggard’s impact on the mass media.

Low, Gail Ching-Liang.
White SkinslBlack Masks: Representation and Colonialism.
London: Routledge, 1995. A general study that includes discussion of Haggard’s work.

Siemens, Lloyd, with Roger Neufeld.
The Critical Reception of Sir Henry Rider Haggard: An Annotated Bibliography, 1882-1991.
Greensboro: University of North Carolina at Greensboro Press, 1991. How journalists and others have reacted to Haggard.

Stiebel, Lindy.
Imagining Africa: Landscape in H. Rider Haggard’s African Romances.
Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2001. An in-depth look at Africa as Haggard understood it.

Whatmore, D. E. H.
Rider Haggard: A Bibliography.
Westport, CT: Meckler Publishing, 1987. A good starting point for any student of Haggard’s work.