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When I was an undergraduate at Oxford I used to go out on Sundays to the home of lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington. There we found what we thought was a formidable salon of intellectuals — D. H. Lawrence was sometimes there, and Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell and Augustus John. If one was so rash as to bring along a friend, Lady Ottoline used to say with some acidity, ‘Of course your friend is very welcome, but most of the people who come here are creative artists.’ It is amusing that Garsington before the Morrells was mainly notable as the place where Rider Haggard received the only important part of his education and that the name of Quatermain which he was to make famous all over the world was originally the name of a Garsington farmer for whom he had a liking. For it would be indeed hard to imagine two worlds more different than the world of Lady Ottoline Morrell and that of Rider Haggard.

     There are writers and artists and hangers-on of artists who exaggerate the importance of art and despise excessively the philistine world outside it. There have been plenty of writers — and many of them very good writers — who have been excessively anxious to appear as men of the world rather than merely as writers. Aeschylus, if we may judge from his epitaph, thought it more important that he had fought against the Persians than that he had written the world’s greatest tragedies. Scott, Congreve, Shakespeare in all probability. had the same foible. Rider Haggard had it, too, with of course the additional excuse that he was a writer very inferior to these. He not only did not write very well but he took a twisted pleasure in not taking trouble with his work. He boasted of his pot-boiling. He aimed at success and circulation and then with a curious perversity complained that he had not achieved the greatness which he had deliberately sacrificed for money. Mr Cohen sees all this quite unsparingly. I am not sure how far he sees the comedy of it — how intentional is the irony in such a sentence as he writes of Eric Brighteyes. ‘The Prince of Wales [i.e. the future Edward VII] and his family preferred it over all other Haggard tales.’

     His real life, Haggard would insist — half sincerely, half insincerely — was his public life: his championship of the cause of Empire and of British agriculture. His opinions on agriculture — on the need for smallholdings and for improved marketing and credit facilities — were indeed remarkably sensible and his technical books on farming deserve high praise, but again with that curious perversity he advocated his opinions in ways that were from the first certain to make the advocacy ineffective, in order — it is hard to resist the conclusion — to enjoy the luxury of complaining that he was a failure. One can understand a man who loves the countryside neglecting literature for farming, but it is hard to understand such a one neglecting farming in order to serve on innumerable committees and to go round the country making endless speeches before and after dinner. Haggard was for ever complaining that the reports of his committees led to no action. But long before Sir Alan Herbert did we really need another to tell us that committees are notoriously appointed in order to avoid the need for action? As one reads Mr Cohen’s careful and well-written book it is hard to know at which to be the more surprised — that anyone should have led so ineffective a life as Haggard or that anyone should ever have expected that a life of that sort would not be ineffective. He was obviously put on to futile committees because he was one of those rare beings who are willing to waste their time on futile committees. He was aware of this, but he preferred to serve and then to repay himself with self-pity. It is a strange and not a very attractive trait.

     Quite frankly I think that Mr Cohen could have found a more interesting subject for his considerable scholarship. Yet it is the business of an author to be read, and Haggard was read. So it cannot be wholly unprofitable to consider why. With Haggard, as with many other people, it is difficult to know where sincerity ended and insincerity began, but on the whole it must be said that he was an insincere man in his romantic writings. He knew a good deal about Africa. He did not really believe it at all probable that there was anything like King Solomon’s Mines in the centre of Africa. He played about with notions of transmigration and of transcending death. He was not perhaps himself quite clear how far he believed these notions but on the whole he did not believe. The important thing about ideas of that sort with him was not whether they were true but whether they were marketable, and there is of course a natural public appetite for mystery. Throughout all history people have always wanted to hear of some land just beyond their certain knowledge of which travellers’ tales can be told. Three-quarters of the way through the last century unknown Africa was such a land. No one indeed could seriously believe that it was probable that in the centre of Africa one would find either King Solomon’s Mines or such a creature as She. Still less was it probable that the Africans there would have characters remotely resembling those which Haggard ascribed to them. But one could not be quite sure. Today we know all too well what is in the middle of Africa, and those who want the excitement of guessing at the undiscovered must turn from Rider Haggard to space fiction. But Africa did the trick in the 1880s.

     That reason for Haggard’s enormous popularity has passed. So has the second reason. Art is to a large extent a compensation. It is natural to man to live a life surrounded by a good deal of violence. The life of the late Victorian Englishman was wholly abnormal in its freedom from violence, and it was the consequence of peace, retrenchment and reform that he tended to ask that his literature should supply him with the bloodshed which he did not come across in real life. ‘Are we never to shed blood again?’ asked Stevenson. Haggard was ready to provide this menu of massacre in abundance and Little Englishmen, living all too securely in Upper Tooting, thrilled at the imaginary massacres in darkest Africa which they could read about in Haggard’s novels. Alas, the twentieth century has answered Stevenson’s question all too definitely in the affirmative and the twentieth century reader has no necessity to turn to fiction in order to reassure himself that men are capable of killing one another.