RIDER HAGGARD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 664, 28 March 1952, Page 13

RIDER HAGGARD

THE CLOAK+THAT 1 LEFT, a biography of Henry Rider Haggard, by Lilias Rider Heggard; Hodder and Stoughton. English price, 18/-. HOSE of us who as boys thrilled to the door of stone closing on the treasure chamber with Gagool underneath or Umslopogaas holding the stair, learned later what a many-sided man was the author. Some of his New Zealand admirers saw him when he came here as a member of the Dominions Commission. This biography by his daughter Lilias supplements his own | story, The Days Of My Life, and_ is written with more detachment than is common in filial tributes. Miss Haggard | draws attention to streaks of weakness in the Haggard family. Rider Haggard’s whole career was a romance. When, as an important civil servant, he raised the British flag in the Transvaal with his own hands, he was not yet of age. He witnessed the surrender to the Boers after Majuba. He was a farmer in South Africa and England, and a barrister. In his Rural England, an agricultural survey of 26 counties written before the first war, he pleaded for that regeneration of the countryside which later was recognised as vital, and as an imperialist he was equally practical in his vision Lilias Haggard skilfully weaves into her narrative the threads of these interests, those of her father’s domestic life, and the activity by which he is best known. His first. books made no stir. Then challenged to write anything | half as good as Treasure-Jsland, he sat | down that day to begin King Solomon's Mines, finished it in six weeks, and soon found himself famous. Haggard had a genius for story-telling; at any rate what his friend Rudyard Kipling called his "daemon" drove him fast and far, to the delight of the world. King Solormon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, Jess and She, were all written within 14 months. His | strain of mysticism-he believed in reincarnation-helped to give him anuncanny insight into strange ways of life. Haggard’s extraordinary mastery of | Zulu material was based on personal contect-there was a living original of (continued on next page).

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(cogynued from previous page) Umslopogaas, and he is photographed here impressively-but he was strikingly successful with societies back in history, such as-the saga-times of Iceland, the Mexico of Montezuma, and the Egypt of Cleopatra. Haggard was a_ very genuine person, but a man with few intimate friends. Kipling, who was even more reserved, was one, and the account of their close friendship as set out here is exceptionally valuable. In Kipling’s phrase they hatched tales together, and it: was from something Haggard wrote that Kipling got the idea for the Jungle

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