A
Notional Exemplar
Henry Rider Haggard
was born at Bradenham near Thetford. His notions about nature came
from the intensively farmed border lands along the edges of the Waveney valley, the county
boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk. His boyhood impressions came from his father's
Brandenham Hall estate, and in later life, from his work as a tenant farmer at Ditchingham Hall.
Here his particular neighbourhood was at a point where the Norfolk and Suffolk clay-edge
landscapes become one.
It seems that it
is from his mother than Haggard drew his imaginative and literarary talents. She
wrote poems and songs which were published in various journals and it was a year after
Henry's birth that she published with Longman her first poem in book form entitled 'Myra', or
the 'Rose of the East: A Tale of the Afghan War'. The poem concerned the Kabul campaign of
1842. It also reflected on the 'mysterious law' or purpose of the universe which was one of the
central themes that Haggard was to develop in his fiction.
Time
passes- silently but swift
And
down its mighty current drift
The
circling worlds on high;
We
gaze upon them till some spark
Becoming
till now, extinguished dark
A
blank leaves in the sky;
That
which our hearts stand still with dread
We
think, that orb's bright course is sped
Our
haven may be nigh;
And
hush our souls in silent awe
And
muse on thy mysterious law
Unknown
Eternity.
The poem is a beautifully
worded plea for humility during the period when science was
becoming the new religion and the findings of Charles Darwin (1809-82) on the origin of the
species and the law of natural selection were still being fiercely debated.
It is interesting
that, like his mother, Henry became intrigued with spiritual ideas raised by the
concept of evolution. His mother Ella wrote a beautifully worded plea for humility during the
period when science seemed to becoming the new religion, and the findings of Charles Darwin
were still being fiercely debated. She says that science can explain 'how' but not 'why'.
"Is
Nature God?
Are
gases reigning laws?
Atoms
fortuitous - the Great First Cause?"
In the last speech
he was to make, in November 1924, Haggard tried to come to terms with his
powerful imagination.
"Imagination
is power which comes from we know not where. Perhaps it is existent but ungrasped truth,
a gap in the curtain of the unseen which sometimes presses so nearly upon us. It means suffering, but
it also means vision, and is not light better than darkness? Who knows its object? No man: but it may
be that those who possess it are gates through which the forces of good and evil flow down in
strength upon the world: instruments innocent of their destiny. For it seems to me as I grow old that
the
spirit of man is like those great icebergs which float in Arctic seas - towering masses of glittering
blue-
green ice, which yet hide four fifths of their bulk beneath the water. It is the hidden power of the
spirit
which connects the visible and the invisible: which hears the still small voice calling from the infinite".
No doubt, under
the influence of her father, these notional appraisals of nature were continued
by Lilias Haggard, Haggard's youngest daughter. In a diary which she wrote for the local
newspaper, she added her own personal spiritual values to commonplace things in garden and
countryside around Ditchingham, and the Norfolk and Suffolk coastlands.
Lilias, describes
her notions on an Easter Sunday facing the imminent horrors of a world war.
"Easter Sunday
and the first day of real spring weather. The garden, held back by so much cold
sunlessness, gloried in the warmth, and the air was filled with the scent of the long lines of
heavy-headed hyacinths, pink and purple, blue, white and palest yellow. It was a day full of
those small things, forgotten through long weeks of winter, which come back to one with a little
shock of joyful surprise. The loveliness of the first brimstone butterfly, questing over purple
aubretias, and primroses just one clear pale shade lighter than its saffron wings. The queer
resonant croaking of a toad from the dyke, the deep hum of the velvet-bodied bumble bees,
working patiently in the lilac blossoms of the lowly ground-ivy, to fill their little waxen honey
pots against a rainy day. The swift double note of the chiff-chaff, earliest of all our warblers to
arrive, as he and his mate slipped along the branches of the wild cherry, once more breaking
into blossom, a white foam against the unleafed woods. As dusk fell I stood by the pool
watching the dace rising joyfully after fly-the steady plop-plop breaking the glassy surface of
the water for a moment only, for it was very still. A day full of the sacrament of common things,
those things which, in spite of unrest and anxiety-wars and rumours of wars, and all the fret and
fever with which man surrounds his little life-are always there if you pause to look for them.
Part of that secret
kingdom which, as Mary Webb, writing about her closed 19th century rural
world of Shropshire, says, 'Sends one man to the wilds, another to dig a garden, that sings in a
musician's brain, that inspires a pagan to build an alter, and the child to make a cowslip ball."
Haggard, SIR HENRY RIDER (1856-1925). British novelist.
He was born at Bradenham, Norfolk, June 22, l
1856, and educated at Ipswich grammar school. He held official posts in S. Africa, 1875-79, and was
then
called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. A first work, Cetewayo and His White Neighbours, was published in
1882.
South Africa figures prominently in his novels, the success of which is due to Haggard's exceptional
narrative and descriptive powers.
Haggard, who was knighted in 1912, became prominent
as a practical farmer and an agricultural economist.
His journeyings through England in 1896-98 to investigate rural conditions resulted in a valuable work,
Rural England, 1902. After the First Great War he visited every part of the British Empire in connection
with
settlement of ex- servicemen. He died May 14, 1925.
