Earlier today, I posted about William Dean Howells and his twisted jihad against any fiction containing a hint of adventurous fun or overt heroism. One of Howells’ screeds against good literature appeared in 1886. This was soon after H. Rider Haggard had published his classic novel, She. Ol' Willie took an oblique potshot—as in, he didn’t name the book, but readers would know—at Haggard’s new bestseller while attacking the legitimacy of the entire idea of adventure fiction. Haggard quickly penned a rebuttal essay titled simply, “On Fiction”.

Appearing in the February, 1887 issue of The Contemporary Review, "On Fiction" was the result of some vigorous urging from HRH's literary friends. Howells had not only insulted exotic adventure in general and She specifically, he had also taken aim at England and Englishmen. Who better to answer such various insults than the young lion who had arisen in such might with the publication of King Solomon's Mines in 1885?

Howells--hailed as the "Dean of American Letters"--had spent most of his decades-long literary career writing literary criticism. As near as I can tell, Haggard's total output up to 1887 was some newspaper articles and four novels, with no published literary criticism of any kind. Nonetheless, HRH rose to the challenge. “On Fiction” is one of the earliest--if not the earliest--essays specifically written in defense of the exotic adventure/fantasy genre.

The essay is a long one. For the purposes of this blog entry, I'll be excerpting Haggard's highlights and commenting on them. For the full essay, feel free to check it out at the most excellent Roy Glashan's Library website. Also, I must note that HRH uses 'romance' as a term synonymous with 'adventure fiction' or 'exotic adventure'. Michael Moorcock used the term in the same way in his book, Wizardry and Wild Romance. The word has become corrupted within the last century; a shortening of 'Gothic Romance'. Haggard employed it in the same sense as medieval/Renaissance troubadours used it.

Without further ado, let's get started.

"The love of romance is probably coeval with the existence of humanity. So far as we can follow the history of the world we find traces of it and its effects among every people, and those who are acquainted with the habits and ways of thought of savage races will know that it flourishes as strongly in the barbarian as in the cultured breast. In short, it is like the passions, an innate quality of mankind."

A perfectly good argument. Howells, on the other hand, seemed to think that humans were blank slates with no inborn yearnings. If only humans could be re-educated, then they would no longer need heroes and adventures.

"More and more, as what we call culture spreads, do men and women crave to be taken out of themselves. More and more do they long to be brought face to face with Beauty, and stretch out their arms towards that vision of the Perfect, which we only see in books and dreams. The fact that we, in these latter days, have as it were macadamized all the roads of life does not make the world softer to the feet of those who travel through it. There are now royal roads to everything, lined with staring placards, whereon he who runs may learn the sweet uses of advertisement; but it is dusty work to follow them, and some may think that our ancestors on the whole found their voyaging a shadier and fresher business. However this may be, a weary public calls continually for books, new books to make them forget, to refresh them, to occupy minds jaded with the toil and emptiness and vexation of our competitive existence."

Some insightful stuff here. Already, in the 'primitive' Victorian Age, Haggard saw people becoming tired and jaded with the industrial grind. Novels of adventure allowed such people to forget their daily toils and refresh their minds. Haggard fans like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard both saw this need--which had grown since Haggard's day--and wrote tales to scratch that itch.

"In some ways this demand [for fiction] is no doubt a healthy sign. The intellect of the world must be awakening when it thus cries aloud to be satisfied. Perhaps it is not a good thing to read nothing but three-volumed novels of an inferior order, but it, at any rate, shows the possession of a certain degree of intelligence. For there still exists among us a class of educated people, or rather of people who have had a certain sum of money spent upon their education, who are absolutely incapable of reading anything, and who never do read anything, except, perhaps, the reports of famous divorce cases and the spiciest paragraphs in Society papers.

It is not their fault; they are very often good people enough in their way; and as they go to church on Sundays, and pay their rates and taxes, the world has no right to complain of them. They are born without intellects, and with undeveloped souls, that is all, and on the whole they find themselves very comfortable in that condition. But this class is getting smaller, and all writers have cause to congratulate themselves on the fact, for the dead wall of its crass stupidity is a dreadful thing to face. Those, too, who begin by reading novels may end by reading Milton and Shakespeare. Day by day the mental area open to the operations of the English-speaking writer grows larger."

Haggard is quite right in this. Experience, history and scientific studies demonstrate that some people, despite an education, simply do not enjoy reading fiction. In the past century, that void has been filled by movies and, later, television. Publishers chasing this demographic are doomed to failure.

“Those, too, who begin by reading novels may end by reading Milton and Shakespeare.”

Quite true. I began reading Edgar Rice Burroughs by the age of eight. By the time I was eighteen, I was also reading—and enjoying—Shakespeare.

“In the face of this constant and ever-growing demand [for fiction] at home and abroad writers of romance must often find themselves questioning their inner consciousness as to what style of art it is best for them to adopt, not only with the view of pleasing their readers, but in the interests of art itself. There are several schools from which they may choose. For instance, there is that followed by the American novelists. These gentlemen, as we know, declare that there are no stories left to be told, and certainly, if it may be said without disrespect to a clever and laborious body of writers, their works go far towards supporting the statement. They have developed a new style of romance. Their heroines are things of silk and cambric, who soliloquize and dissect their petty feelings, and elaborately review the feeble promptings which serve them for passions. Their men—well, they are emasculated specimens of an overwrought age, and, with culture on their lips, and emptiness in their hearts, they dangle round the heroines till their three-volumed fate is accomplished. About their work is an atmosphere like that of the boudoir of a luxurious woman, faint and delicate, and suggesting the essence of white rose.

How different is all this to the swiftness, and strength, and directness of the great English writers of the past. Why, "The surge and thunder of the Odyssey" is not more widely separated from the tinkling of modern society verses, than the laboured nothingness of this new American school of fiction from the giant life and vigour of Swift and Fielding, and Thackeray and Hawthorne. Perhaps, however, it is the art of the future, in which case we may hazard a shrewd guess that the literature of past ages will be more largely studied in days to come than it is at present.”

Howells took a stab at English authors and Haggard returned it with his own riposte. That said, HRH also praised the American, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Howells had no such grace in him. Haggard was right that, in the quarter-century or so which was kicked off by Stevenson’s Treasure Island, there was no notable adventure fiction from America beyond Wallace’s Ben-Hur.

I love the phrase, “emasculated specimens of an overwrought age, and, with culture on their lips, and emptiness in their hearts.”

“Then to go from Pole to Pole, there is the Naturalistic school, of which Zola is the high priest. Here things are all the other way. Here the chosen function of the writer is to "Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of art."

Here are no silks and satins to impede our vision of the flesh and blood beneath, and here the scent is patchouli. Lewd, and bold, and bare, living for lust and lusting for this life—and its good things, and naught beyond, the heroines of realism dance, with Bacchanalian revellings, across the astonished stage of literature. Whatever there is brutal in humanity—and God knows that there is plenty—whatever there is that is carnal and filthy, is here brought into prominence, and thrust before the reader's eyes. But what becomes of the things that are pure and high—of the great aspirations and the lofty hopes and longings, which do, after all, play their part in our human economy, and which it is surely the duty of a writer to call attention to and nourish according to his gifts?”

Haggard, being a Victorian, had a low threshold for prurience. That said, there has always been the question of balance. Just how much is ‘too much’? When does depicting various carnal subjects cross over the line and detract from the overall work?

By the way, the ‘lewdness’ that HRH refers to is mostly found in French Naturalism and far less so in American Literary Realism—which was even more tedious thereby.

“The press, too—the same press that is so active in printing ‘full and special’ reports—is very vigilant in this matter, having the Young Person continually before its eyes. Some time ago one of the London dailies reviewed a batch of eight or nine books. Of these reviews nearly every one was in the main an inquiry into the moral character of the work, judged from the standpoint of the unknown reviewer. Of their literary merits little or nothing was said. Now, the question that naturally arose in the mind of the reader of these notices was—Is the novelist bound to inculcate any particular set of doctrines that may at the moment be favoured by authority? If that is the aim and end of his art, then why is he not paid by the State like any other official?”

A good question. Like some of the other issues raised by this Howells-Haggard debate, there are echoes of the same sort of thing here in the twenty-first century. Certain kinds of ‘correctness’, shadow-bans and questions regarding the motives of the press.

“This age is not a romantic age. Doubtless under the surface human nature is the same to-day as it was in the time of Rameses. Probably, too, the respective volumes of vice and virtue are, taking the altered circumstances into consideration, much as they were then or at any other time. But neither our good nor our evil doing is of an heroic nature, and it is things heroic and their kin and not petty things that best lend themselves to the purposes of the novelist, for by their aid he produces his strongest effects.”

I love this line: “But neither our good nor our evil doing is of an heroic nature, and it is things heroic and their kin and not petty things that best lend themselves to the purposes of the novelist, for by their aid he produces his strongest effects.”

Go big or go home.

As it is, almost a century and a half later, our own trials and tribulations look even more shallow and tawdry.

“Genius, of course, can always find materials wherewith to weave its glowing web. But these remarks, it is scarcely necessary to explain, are not made from that point of view, for only genius can talk of genius with authority, but rather from the humbler standing-ground of the ordinary conscientious labourer in the field of letters, who, loving his art for her own sake, yet earns living by following her, and is anxious to continue to do so with credit to himself. Let genius, if genius there be, come forward and speak on its own behalf!”

Here we see Haggard, a certified literary genius who would go on to inspire everyone from Tolkien to Howard to Moorcock, renouncing any claim to genius. Once again, William Dean Howells could not find that same grace within himself. He was quite convinced that he knew the best way for people to read and the best way for them to live their lives. Did I also mention that reading Howells is like watching paint dry?

“There is indeed a refuge for the less ambitious among us [writers of fiction], and it lies in the paths and calm retreats of pure imagination. Here we may weave our humble tale, and point our harmless moral without being mercilessly bound down to the prose of a somewhat dreary age. Here we may even—if we feel that our wings are strong enough to bear us in that thin air—cross the bounds of the Known, and, hanging between earth and heaven, gaze with curious eyes into the great profound Beyond. There are still subjects that may be handled there if the man can be found bold enough to handle them.”

Great stuff. Haggard was, indeed, “bold enough to handle them”, taking us with him as he soared beyond the bounds of the Known.

“And, although some there be who consider this a lower walk in the realms of fiction, and who would probably scorn to become a "mere writer of romances," it may be urged in defence of the school that many of the most lasting triumphs of literary art belong to the producers of purely romantic fiction, witness the ‘Arabian Nights,’ ‘Gulliver's Travels,’ ‘The Pilgrim's Progress,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and other immortal works. If the present writer may be allowed to hazard an opinion, it is that, when Naturalism has had its day, when Mr. Howells ceases to charm, and the Society novel is utterly played out, the kindly race of men in their latter as in their earlier developments will still take pleasure in those works of fancy which appeal, not to a class, or a nation, or even to an age, but to all time and humanity at large.”

An excellent finish by Sir Henry, I must say. Regarding his closing hopes, Naturalism/Realism and their mutant spawn still plague the modern reader. This is mainly due to the purely artificial prestige conferred upon that style by the decadent adherents of the Realism cult who infest the ivied ruins of Western Academia, where they inculcate new acolytes with a hatred of truly worthy literature. Also, the modern incarnation of the ‘Society Novel’ is still thriving in various forms. On a more hopeful note, the only people who now read William Dean Howells are schoolchildren forced to do so by literary commissars and by women who seek to appear ‘well read’. Howells ‘ceased to charm’ long, long ago.

For further reading about Haggard and his profound influence on sword-and-sorcery and adventure fiction in general, I recommend this DMR post:

Forefathers of Sword and Sorcery: H. Rider Haggard

By the way, today, the 14th, is the anniversary of HRH’s passing. Raise a glass to his titanic shade.