BOOKS.
THAT QUITE IMPOSSIBLE "SHE.".
MR. RIDER HAGGARD must have meditated on "that not impossible She" of whom young men are apt to dream, till he determined to write a tale about a quite impossible she, by way of driving the other out of his head. His tale is a very stirring and exciting one, and shows remarkable imaginative power, though the present writer admits a dislike to Mr. Rider Haggard's favourite literary method of infusing a great mass of real and vivid experience with a single preternatural element of an absolutely impossible order, by the lurid light of which the realism is thrown into strong relief, and brought out with a Rembrandt- like effect. We cannot help feeling that the author is almost laughing at us beneath his mask of dread, when he discloses • a.: a History of Adventist's. By H. Rider Haggard. London : Longman's, Green, and Co.
how his lovely heroine of two thousand years' experience dis- appears. To the present writer there is a sense of the ludicrous= inthe end of " She," that spoiled, instead of concluding with imaginative fitness, the thread of the impossible worked into the substance of this vivid and brilliantly told story. Mr. Haggard's method requires great tact in the use of marvel. If
you are telling a fairy-story or a tale of pure magic, such tact- is needless. But where an imaginative author uses the mar-
vellous within the strictest limits only to bring into relief the- most admirable realism, he should be careful so to use it as not to detract from the effect of the whole,—so as not to attenuate
the impression produced by the author's minute acquaintance- with the scenery and physiognomy of savage African life. Even allowing Mr. Haggard his chosen method, we hold that the finale put to the career of his aged though ever youthful
beauty is incongruous, and too sensational to blend easily with the main features of the story. To have represented her organisation as suddenly flaming up and burning out under the too great stimulus given to the vital force within her, might have been quite within the limits of the artistic purpose to which he has turned his use of preternaturalism. But to have closed her career as he has done, though it will certainly send a thrill through the more susceptible of his readers, seems to us a mis- take, because it places the focus of the story too distinctly in its preternatural as distinguished from its natural aspects_ However, a critic who does not really like Mr. Haggard's method is not, perhaps, the right man to pass judgment on so singular a tale as this.
For the rest, nothing can be more spirited than the plot from its opening to its close. The ingenuity of the story which gives rise to the search for Leo Vincy's supposed ancestor is as subtle as ever romancer invented, and from the day when he and his guardian or friend land on the coast of Africa, to the day when the revolving pillar of fire is revealed to him by the all but immortal " She who must be obeyed," the interest of the tale rises higher and higher with every new turn in its course,— while every such turn explains and verifies some enigmatic statement made in that original tradition which started the whole series of adventures. It would be difficult to imagine anything more frightfully graphic than the account of the scene in which the Amahagger try to celebrate their savage rite, without directly disobeying their queen, by putting a red-hot pot on the head of the Mahometan servant who accompanied the white men, except the account of the Amahagger night-dance, lighted by the burning corpses of embalmed ancestors, or the description of the last expedition to the revolving pillar of fire. At every stage of the story we feel persuaded that the author has exhausted his resources, and that the interest must begin to decline. As a matter of fact, this is not the case. At almost every page, the weird interest of the story rises till we come to what we cannot help regarding as the anti-climax of the close. As a specimen of Mr. Rider Haggard's power, we will quote the description of
the dance referred to, without quoting, however, its still more- ghastly sequel :— "The dance was to be held in the open air, on the smooth rocky plateau in front of the great cave, and thither we made our way. About fifteen paces from the mouth of the cave we found three chairs placed, and here we sat and waited, for as yet no dancers were to be seen. The night was almost, but not quite, dark, the moon not having risen as yet, which made us wonder how we should be able to see the dancing. Thou wilt presently understand,' said Ayesha, with a little laugh, when Leo asked her ; and we certainly did. Scarcely were the words out of her mouth when from every point we saw- dark forms rushing up, each bearing with him what we at first took to be an enormous flaming torch. Whatever they were they were burning furiously, for the flames stood out a yard or more behind each bearer. On they came, fifty or more of them, carrying their flaming burdens and looking like so many devils from hell. Leo was the first to discover what these burdens were. ' Great heaven !' he said, they are corpses on fire !' I stared and stared again—he was perfectly right—the torches that were to light our entertainment were human mummies from the caves ! On rushed the bearers of the flaming corpses, and, meeting at a spot about twenty paces in front of us, built their ghastly burdens crossways into a huge bonfire. Heavens ! how they roared and flared ! No tar barrel could have burnt as those mammies did. Nor was this all. Suddenly I saw one- great fellow seize a flaming human arm that had fallen from ite- parent frame, and rush off into the darkness. Presently he stopped, and a tall streak of fire shot up into the air, illumining the gloom, and also the lamp from which it sprang. That lamp was the mummy of a woman tied to a stout stake let into the rock, and he had fired her hair. On he went a few paces and touched a second, then a third, and a fourth, till at last we were surrounded on all three aides by a- great ring of bodies, flaring furiously, the material with which they were preserved having rendered them so inflammable that the flames- would literally spout out of the ears and month in tongues of fire a foot or more in length. Nero illuminated his gardens with live Christians soaked in tar, and we were now treated to a similar spectacle, probably for the first time since his day, only happily our lamps were not living ones. But although this element of horror was fortunately wanting, to describe the awful and hideous grandeur of the spectacle thus presented to us is, I feel, so absolutely beyond my poor powers, that I scarcely dare attempt it. To begin with, it appealed to the moral as well as the physical susceptibilities. There was something very terrible, and yet very fascinating, about the em- ployment of the remote dead to illumine the orgies of the living ; in itself the thing was a satire, both on the living and the dead. emsar's dust—or is it Alexander's ?—may stop a bunghole, but the functions of these dead Caesars of the past was to light up a savage fetish dance. To such base uses may we come, of so little account may we be in the minds of the eager multitudes that we shall breed ; many of whom, so far from revering our memory, will live to curse us for begetting them into such a world of woe. Then there was the physical side of the spectacle, and a weird and splendid one it was. Those old citizens of liar burnt as, to judge from their sculptures and inscriptions, they had lived, very fast, and with the utmost liberality. What is more, there were plenty of them. As soon as ever a mummy had burnt down to the ankles, which it did in about twenty minutes, the feet were kicked away, and another one put in its place. The bonfire was kept going on the same generous scale, and its flames shot up, with a hiss and a crackle, twenty or thirty feet into the air, throwing great flashes of light far out into the gloom, through which the dark forms of the Amabagger flitted to and fro like devils re- plenishing the infernal fires. We all stood and stared aghast—shocked, and yet fascinated at so strange a spectacle, and half-expecting to see the spirits those flaming forms had once enclosed come creeping from the shadows to work vengeance on their desecrators. I pro- mised thee a strange sight, my Holly,' laughed Ayesha, whose nerves alone did not seem to be affected ; and, behold, I have not failed thee. Also, it bath its lesson. Trust not to the future, for who knows what the future may bring ! Therefore, live for the day, and endeavour not to escape the dust which seems to be man's end. What thinkest thou those long-forgotten nobles and ladies would have felt had they known that they should one day flare to light the dance or boil the pot of savages ? But see, here come the dancers ; a merry crew—are they not ? The stage is lit—now for the play.' As she spoke, we perceived two lines of figures, one male and the other female, to the number of about a hundred, each advancing round the human bonfire, arrayed only in the usual leopard and buck skins. They formed up, in perfect silence, in two lines, facing each other between us and the fire, and then the dance—a sort of infernal and fiendish cancan—began. To describe it is quite impossible, but, though there was a good deal of tossing of legs and double-shuffiing, it seemed to our untutored minds to be more of a play than a dance, and, as usual with this dreadful people, whose minds seem to have taken their colour from the caves in which they live, and whose jokes and amusements are drawn from the inexhaustible stores of preserved mortality with which they share their homes, the subject appeared to be a most ghastly one. I know that it represented an attempted murder first of all, and then the burial alive of the victim and his struggling from the grave ; each act of the abominable drama, which was carried on in perfect silence, being rounded off and finished with a furious and most revolting dance round the supposed victim, who writhed upon the ground in the red light of the bonfire."
But the author's power is by no means limited to the painting of scenes which are weird or ghastly, greatly as he delights in this kind of effect. His description of the maiden who has accumulated experience for two thousand years while retaining still all the softness and beauty and love of admiration which belong chiefly to youth, is full of imaginative skill, so that we realise at once both the loveliness of what seems her youth, and the self-command and piercing insight which only the medita- tion and experience extending through scores of generations could give. Here is a graphic touch to make the reader realise what a life of two thousand years must mean :-
"As we hurried down the stair I observed that the steps were worn in the centre to such an extent that some of them had been reduced from seven and a half inches, at which I guessed their original height, to about three and a half. Now, all the other steps that I had seen in the caves had been practically unworn, as was to be expected, seeing that the only traffic which ever passed upon them was that of those who bore a fresh burden to the tomb. Therefore this fact struck my notice with that curious force with which little things do strike us when our minds are absolutely overwhelmed by a sudden rush of powerful sensation; beaten flat, as it were, like a sea beneath the first burst of a hurricane, so that every little object on the surface starts into an unnatural prominence. At the bottom of the staircase I stood and stared at the worn steps, and Ayesha, -turning, saw me. ' Wonderest thou whose are the feet that have worn away the rock, my Holly ?' she asked. They are mine—even -mine own light feet ! I can remember when these stairs were fresh and level, but for two thousand years and more have I gone down hither day by day, and see, my sandals have worn out the solid rock !' I made no answer, but I do not think that anything that I had heard or seen brought home to my limited understanding so clear a sense of this being's overwhelming antiquity as that hard rock hollowed out by her soft white feet. How many millions of times must she 'have passed up and down that stair to bring about such a result ?"
As a matter of fact, we may remark that Mr. Haggard does not seem to appreciate how long it takes to do anything a million times. " Many " millions of times would not have been involved in passing the same flight of stairs twice a day for two thousand years,; about a million and a half would include all the descents
and ascents that it is needful to suppose. So minute a realist as Mr. Rider Haggard would, we should have thought, been careful not to exaggerate his case.
The poetry which Mr. Haggard puts into the mouth of his strange heroine is hardly less effective than his account of the apparently cold accuracy of her calculations. But he is a little inconsistent, we think, when he makes her, in the last scene, do homage not only to the ecstasy of love, which she had evidently held worthy of worship all through life, but to the majesty of virtue. In every previous scene he had represented her as disbelieving in any absolute law of right and wrong, any fixed standard of virtue and sin ; and we see nothing in the happi- ness of gratified love to convert her to the view which her philo- sophy of two thousand years seems to have led her to reject. But, as we have said, Mr. Haggard seems to have lost sight to some extent of his own general conception in his picture of his heroine's departure from the scene. Except at that point, this story of imaginative adventure is as brilliant as it is unique. This type of romance is not one that we place very high in the literary scale, but in its kind it could hardly be rivalled.
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