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THE DAYS OF MY LIFE
portant than the substance of the story. I cannot believe that
they are right. The substance is, as it were, the soul of the matter; the style is its outward and visible body. I prefer a creation
with a great soul, even if its form is somewhat marred, to one
with a beautifully fi nished form and very little soul. Of course
when the two are found together, a rare event, there is perfection. Also people differ in their ideas of what style really is.
By it some understand inverted sentences, unusual words and
far-fetched metaphors or allusions, making up a whole that
is diffi cult to comprehend. Others hold that the greater the
simplicity of the language, the better the style. I am not an
authority, but my own view is that above all things the written
word should be clear and absolutely readable, and that work
which does not fulfi l these conditions can scarcely be expected
to endure. It runs a grave risk of passing with the fashion of
the hour. To take a single instance, the Authorised version of
the Old Testament, considered as literature, seems to me to
fulfi l all the requisites of good writing, in fact to be style in
the truest sense. Yet the meaning remains perfectly clear, and
were those books to cease to be studied for their religious contents, they would still always be read as a model of plain and
vigorous English.
But to return to Stevenson. Here I will add the last letter
save one that I received from him, though again I do not know
to what it refers, since the enclosure of which he speaks is
missing, or at any rate has not been found at present. Like the
others it is undated, but the allusion to “Nada the Lily” shows
that it must have been written about twenty years ago, at the
beginning of 1892.
281
H. RIDER HAGGARD
Valima Plantation, Samoan Islands.
Rider Haggard, Esq.
Dear Haggard, – In cleaning up the hideous mess
which accumulates about the man of letters I came on the
enclosed sheet. Its fi lthiness will indicate its age. But there
is internal evidence which to me dates it still further back;
and that is the reference to your brother Bazett. I now
know him well and regard him with the most sincere and
lively affection and respect. Indeed we are companions in
arms and have helped each other back and forth in some
very diffi cult and some very annoying affairs. This has given a wonderful jog to my sense of intimacy with yourself
until I have a diffi culty in remembering that I have never
seen you. Two remarks and I leave my fi lthy enclosure to
speak for itself. First, the equations on the fl y-leaf were not
in the least intended for you – they’re pieces of a lesson in
the Samoan language – and you must kindly regard them
as non-existent. Second, “Nada the Lily” is A1.
Sincerely yours,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
I only wish I could fi nd the “fi lthy enclosure,” or at least
remember with what it had to do.
I have one more allusion to my brother besides the letter
which came to me with “The Man Haggard.” It is written on a
little triangular bit of foolscap pinned into the manuscript of
“Nada the Lily.” I suppose that Lang must have sent it to me.
“If you see Haggard, tell him we have a great affection for
his brother. Our home rejoices when we see him coming; and
that Chaka mourning for his mother is great.”
282
THE DAYS OF MY LIFE
Here is this last letter pinned into the fi rst of the two accompanying, parchment-bound volumes, that which is entitled “An Object of Pity; or, The Man Haggard. A Romance.
By Many Competent Hands. Imprinted at Amsterdam.” These
volumes were sent to me by Stevenson in July 1893.
Tivoli Hotel, Apia, Samoa,
South Paci.
Dear Rider Haggard, – I send you herewith a couple of
small (and, so to speak, indecent) volumes in which your
brother and I have been indulging in the juvenile sport of
shying bricks at each other. Honi soit qui mal y pense, say
I. And I hope you will say the same. We are a large party,
with nothing to do – Lady Jersey, my wife, Captain Leigh,
your brother and I, and Mrs. Strong, my daughter-inlaw –
and that which we wrote was not according to wisdom. I
have heard some of yours called in question for steepness;
here is your revenge.
Yours very truly,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
The companion volume is entitled “Objects of Pity; or, Self
and Company. By a Gentleman of Quality. Imprinted at Amsterdam.” It is corrected throughout in my brother Bazett’s
handwriting. I should judge that it went to press without his
having the advantage of seeing proofs. Pinned to the title-page
is the following letter to me from Bazett.
Apia, Samoa: July 17, 1893.
Dear Rider, – Enclosed letter from R. L. Stevn. speaks
for itself. He says we all had nothing to do. He is wrong
283
H. RIDER HAGGARD
there. They wrote the “Object of Pity” on the days I was
at work at Comn. I did not write my letter till 3 [word illegible] after, when Stevenson insisted on having it printed
and took it to Sydney and had it printed. I was riled at
being called “an object of Pity” rather, so set to and gave
them a Roland for their Oliver.
We have had a very bad time here. I have seen sights
of “The French Revolution” – heads carried about in the
streets with yells and shouts – wounded and dead carried along. Also a beastly bloody axe which decapitated
“young Mataafa” shoved under my nose to admire and
adore. I told my friend “Safolu” to take his beastly thing
away and he seemed quite surprised.... These books are R.
L. S.‘s gift to you – write him a line....
Your loving brother,
Bazett M. Haggard.
Stevenson and I are great friends; he is such a good chap,
but as I say of him in my book.
As regards the volumes themselves, which seem to fetch a
great deal of money when they come on the market, I am only
able to say that I have studied them with great zeal but am
unable to make head or tail of them. Perhaps this is because I
do not possess the key to the joke or understand the local allusions.
I have only one more relic of Stevenson, a very amusing
poem which he wrote to Lang and myself on “The World’s
Desire,” or rather a copy of it, for I believe that Lang has lost
the original. Again I must express my sorrow that I never saw
284
THE DAYS OF MY LIFE
Stevenson. Evidently he was a delightful man and as brilliant
as he was charming; truly a master of his craft. “Dr. Jeckell and
Mr. Hyde” has always seemed to me one of the most remarkable things of its sort in the English language. Longman gave
me an early copy of it just after it was issued from the press,
and this I still possess somewhere. I shall never forget the thrill
with which I read the story; in places the horror of it is enough
to cause the hair to rise. His essays, too, are almost unmatched,
at any rate in our time, and next to these I should put “The
Master of Ballantrae.” At least such is my individual taste.
About “King Solomon’s Mines” I have only this to add. In it
I made a mistake with reference to an eclipse, which brought
me into much trouble with astronomers, and also with numbers of the reading public who hurried to expose my ignorance. In a subsequent edition I rectifi ed the mistake, but that
produced more trouble, since students of the work had violent
arguments between themselves, each quoting the versions
that they had read, and wrote to me to settle their disputes. I
have always found the movements of the heavenly bodies very
ticklish things to touch. Whatever one says about the moon,
for instance, is pretty sure to be wrong.
I may say this further, that no book that I have written
seems to have conveyed a greater idea of reality. At this moment I hold in my hand at least a dozen letters sorted from
what I call “Unknown Correspondents,” by which I mean
communications received from individuals with whom I
have no personal acquaintance. Every one of the writers of
these epistles is anxious to know whether or not the work is
a record of fact. Even the great dealer in precious stones, Mr.
Streeter – I fear I must say the late Mr. Streeter – approached
285
H. RIDER HAGGARD
me on the subject. I believe he actually sent an expedition to
look for King Solomon’s Mines, or at any rate talked of doing
so. Nor was he so far out in his reckoning, for since that day
they have been discovered – more or less. At any rate Rhodesia has been discovered, which is a land full of gems and
gold, the same land, I believe, as that whence King Solomon
did actually draw his wealth. Also Queen Sheba’s Breasts have
been found, or something very like to them, and traces of the
great road that I describe. Doubtless I heard faint rumours of
these things during my sojourn in Africa, having made it my
habit through life to keep my ears open; but at the best they
were very faint. The remainder I imagined, and imagination
has often proved to be the precursor of the truth. The mines of
Kukuana land, alias Rhodesia, are destined to produce much
more treasure than ever Solomon or the Phoenicians won out
of them. Who built the vast Zimbabwe and other temples or
fortresses? Some ridiculous scientist has alleged within the last
few years that these were reared by the Portuguese at the time
that those very Portuguese were talking of them as the work
of the devil or of ancient magicians in an unknown age. The
thing is absurd. Those edifi ces are the relics of a lost civilisation which worshipped the Nature gods. Who they were, what
they were, we do not and perhaps never shall know. Andrew
Lang has stated the whole problem much better than I can ever
hope to do, in a poem he once wrote at my request for a paper
in which I was interested. I do not think that those verses have
ever been republished, so I will quote two of them:
1
1
Republished in The Poetical Words of Andrew Lang, vol. iii, p. 42
(1923), under the title of “Zimbabwe.” – Ed.
286
THE DAYS OF MY LIFE
Into the darkness whence they came,
They passed – their country knoweth none,
They and their gods without a name
Partake the same oblivion.
Their work they did, their work is done,
Whose gold, it may be, shone like fi re,
About the brows of Solomon,
And in the House of God’s Desire.
The pestilence, the desert spear,
Smote them: they passed with none to tell
The names of them that laboured here:
Stark walls and crumbling crucible,
Straight gates, and graves, and ruined well,
Abide, dumb monuments of old.
We know, but that men fought and fell,
Like us – like us – for love of gold.
A girls’ school, or some members of it, evidently weary of
the society of their own sex, wrote congratulating me with
great earnestness because I had in “King Solomon’s Mines”
produced a thrilling book “without a heroine.”
Truly in those days my industry was great. While on my
summer holiday in 1885 I wrote “Allan Quatermain,” the sequel to “King Solomon’s Mines,” from the fi rst word to the last,
although it did not appear until about a couple of years later,
after it had run through Longman’s Magazine. On what exact
dates I began and fi nished the story I do not know, though
287
H. RIDER HAGGARD
possibly these are entered on the manuscript, of which I made
a present to my friend Charles Longman.
On my return to town in the late autumn I began a novel
of a very different style, which was afterwards published under
the name of “Jess.” The manuscript of “Jess” does not state the
date of its commencement, but at the end appears the date of
December 31, 1885, showing that it was fi nished on that day.
This book I wrote for the most part in the chambers, at 1 Elm
Court, that I shared with Mr. Kerr, the son of Commissioner
Kerr, upon an old teak table with a leather top. This table,
which I bought of a second-hand dealer, had evidently begun
life in some ship where the cabins were low, for it was so short
in the legs that, until they were heightened in some way, it
used to make my back ache to write at it; also it has all the solidity common to ship’s furniture. Now it is used for trimming
lamps in the basement of Ditchingham House.
Whenever I was not engaged in Court, where I hung about
a great deal, and even for a while reported Divorce and Probate
cases for The Times on behalf of that journal’s regular reporter,
an old barrister name Kelly, when he was absent on a holiday,
I sat at this table in the dingy room at 1 Elm Court and toiled
at “Jess.” Sometimes this was no easy task, since young barristers of my acquaintance, with time upon their hands, would
enter and scoff at my literary labours. In the evening I placed
what I had written in a kind of American cloth music-roll,
which either my wife or Miss Barber made for me, and carried
it home to West Kensington, so that I might continue my work
1
1
These dates are not entered on the MS. – Ed.
288
THE DAYS OF MY LIFE
after dinner. In fact, there were two of these rolls. The fi rst of
them I lost on my homeward way, I know not how or where.
It contained about a dozen foolscap sheets of closely written
manuscript of one of the most important parts of the book,
that which, amongst other things, describes the character of
Frank Muller and how, after he had attempted the murder of
Neal and Jess in the Vaal River, he galloped away pursued by
his own terrors. I remember that I was much distressed at this
loss, thinking that what I had written was the best thing I had
ever done. I waited awhile, hoping that the address written
within the case might bring it back to me. But it never did. So
I rewrote the missing sheets from memory, which has never
been my strong point. I wonder whether they are better or
worse than those that departed!
So soon as “Jess,” of which I will speak more hereafter, was
fi nished, or rather about a month later, I began another tale
which the world knows as “She.” The exact date of its commencement is uncertain, for it has been obliterated by a clip
that fastened the manuscript together, and all that remains is
“Feb.86.” At the end, however, is inscribed “Finished 18 March
1886.” Therefore, even supposing that it was begun upon the
1st February, which would mean that I had allowed myself a
month’s rest after fi nishing “Jess,” the whole romance was completed in a little over six weeks. Moreover, it was never rewritten,
and the manuscript carries but few corrections. The fact is that
it was written at white heat, almost without rest, and that is the
best way to compose.
I remember that when I sat down to the task my ideas as to its
development were of the vaguest. The only clear notion that I had
in my head was that of an immortal woman inspired by an immor-
289
H. RIDER HAGGARD
tal love. All the rest shaped itself round this fi gure. And it came – it
came faster than my poor aching hand could set it down.
Well do I recall taking the completed manuscript to the offi ce
of my literary agent, Mr. A. P. Watt, and throwing it on the table
with the remark: “There is what I shall be remembered by.” Well
do I recall also visiting Mr. Watt at his offi ce, which then was at 2
Paternoster Square, and fi nding him out. As the business was urgent, and I did not wish to have to return, I sat down at his table,
asked for some foolscap, and in the hour or two that I had to
wait wrote the scene of the destruction of She in the Fire of Life.
This, however, was of course a little while – it may have been a
few days – before I delivered the manuscript.
It would seem, therefore, that between January 1885 and
March 18, 1886, with my own hand, and unassisted by any secretary, I wrote “King Solomon’s Mines,” “Allan Quatermain,”
“Jess,” and “She.” Also I followed my profession, spending many
hours of each day studying in chambers, or in Court, where I had
some devilling practice, carried on my usual correspondence,
and attended to the affairs of a man with a young family and a
certain landed estate.
A little later on the work grew even harder, for to it was added the toil of an enormous correspondence hurled at me by every
kind of person from all over the earth. If I may judge by those
which remain marked with a letter A for “answered,” I seem
to have done my best to reply to all these scribes, hundreds of
them, even down to the autograph-hunter, a task which must
have taken up a good part of every day, and this in addition to
all my other work. No wonder that my health began to give out
at last, goaded as I was at that period of my life by constant and
venomous attacks.
290
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