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. 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."
