Rider Haggard Looks Back

MORTON N. COHEN

.IDER HAGGARD belongs to adventure, to bold, often
brutal, action. We do not readily think of him as a man
of deep feeling or as someone concerned with the hu¬
man soul, the spirit. And yet, along with the external, adventur¬
ous side of life, the inner, contemplative, spiritual world was
enormously important to him.

A manuscript tliat the Libraries recently acquired on the Mixer
Fund is concerned with Llaggard's inner being, with memory,
and with the meaning of natural promptings, of life itself. The
manuscript consists of one and one-half, 8" x 13" pages and is en¬
tirely in Haggard's hand. It is evidently a first draft, containing
several deletions and additions. AVe cannot tell when Haggard
wrote the essay, but surely it was when he was in his prime, in
what he calls his "middle life"; and in the work he takes a long
look backwards to childhood and tries to say something signifi¬
cant about the whole of life.

Had the essay been published when Haggard wrote it, one
wonders whether it would have pleased the readers of the time.
Would those readers not have expected Rider Haggard to remin¬
isce about some remarkable adventures of his and to tell a tale or
two of excitement or escape, the sort of thing they had grown to
expect from the storyteller?

Indeed, Haggard could have drawn upon a good many personal
adventures to write about, for he lived an eventful life and had
much to look back upon. He knew, when he wrote the essay, that
his name carried a magical ring to it, that it conjured up for the
English reader visions of the British Empire in its heyday, and

Opposite: Sir Hcnr\" Rider H;iti<r;ir(l in Ab\"d()s Tcniplc in K<j\'pr in 1924.

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