Chapter 2. The Aesthetics of Imperial Fiction.
At a time in Victorian England when the romance and the adventure novel were still thought of as worthy of serious attention by both writers and critics in books, newspapers, joumals, periodicals and reviews, there arose a genre of fiction which would create for itself a brand new niche in the minds of ther eading public. In the late eighteen-seventies and eighties, in order to satisfy a demand by a newly voracious reading public created by rising standards of education, with new markets being formed to meet that demand, a genre of literature emerged which appealed to the thirst of the new mass of readers released into literacy by the 1870 Education Act arising from, in the main, the middle and university classes, for novels of adventure and romance. With new, vibrant media being established, partly due to the abolition of the stamp tax and of the duties on paper encouraging the development of the presses, the invention of the circulating libraries, and partly also as a result of the signifcant expansion of market forces, the requirements of, on the one hand, a group receiving higher education and, on the other, a commercially minded populace were now being attended to.
Writers such as Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang, Robert Louis Stevenson, and to some extent John Buchan, promoted a grossly deviant genre which, subsuming itself within the service of empire, fulfilled the needs of this reading public in a collaborative and commercialised form. A genre serving ideals of boyhood, misogynistic, focusing largely on heroism, heroics, chivalry, and on boys and the public school ethos, and dedicated to adventure, action and quest, quickly became the best selling fictional form available to the Victorian and Edwardian public.
It was a genre of epic style which Haggard and Lang and later, Stevenson were to abuse, in the sense that these stories were an abuse of an already established form. They were to be written about heroes of battle and empire, strongly political and historical images for an epoch which they thought Queen Victoria had feminised, if not desexualised. These authors set about producing new forms; the masculine novel of action and the romance genre which, harking back to Virgil's Aenid, the odes of Odysseus, The Iliad, full of classical illusions, ancient histories, and references to Greek, Roman, Phoenician, Sabean, Trojan and Egyptian heroes, battles, and stories, they wanted to be a recreation of a well established yet little remembered aesthetic to revitalise romance and rekindle the myths and legends that Lang, particularly, loved.
The manful and man-centred genre, with empire as a kind of kaleidoscopic Ruritania, emphasised the spiritual headiness of Imperial work which could be the trail of glory for younger, less mature readers to follow. With a love of African vistas, land, pampas, plains, jungles, countryside and open spaces on the edge of darkness, the genre was a focus for boys' imaginations starved, it might be said, by life in the Victorian cities, in a society increasingly less vital, free, and energetic, and more domesticated, female-dominated and hidebound, which became an unquestioned and righteous mission of freedom, defying rational explanation.
Its emotional focusing on boys in a fiction engaged in a rhetoric of male chauvinism and paternalism with romantic assertions of masculinity was a key feature of the genre. In a form in which writers such as Lang and Haggard, Haggard and Kipling, James and Stevenson, Stevenson and Osbome worked together, there was a sense of unreality between the events they depicted and what was being enacted in their imaginations. The passions behind these collaboratively and aggressively homoerotic bondings are a subject for intensive study, for it was at the hearth of British patriarchy that Haggard, Stevenson and Lang propounded the fictional aesthetic of the adventure genre - the clubland where the romance novels of action and quest were written.
The masculine novel of action and the romance form were anattempt by male writers to create a fictional form which would fully engage with reality, which Stevenson refers to in his essays as an idea; a reality that would be stronger and, arguably, more worthwhile than either the murder filled naturalism of the Zola school with its arguably pseudo-scientic programme or the specialised kind of higher class psychological realism to be found in James' short novels. It was a reaction, as well, against the heterosexual romance of courtship, manners and marriage written by women writers such as George Eliot, whom Stevenson called, "A high, but, may we not add? - a rather dry lady."
Andrew Lang, writing in the Contemporary Review in November, 1887, highlighted the double nature of fiction. He held it was "a shield with two sides, the silver and the golden, the study of manners and of character, on one hand; on the other the description of adventure, the delight of romantic narrative." l. In 1887 George Saintsbury, Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang issued manifestos on behalf of romance. Lang wrote a poem which hailed both Haggard and Stevenson, extolling them as saviours from South Africa and Scotland who brought the debilitated and exhausted King Romance back to life:
King Romance was wounded deep
All his knights were dead and gone
All his court was fallen on sleep.
In the vale of Avalon!
Then you came from south and north
From Tugela, from the Tweed;
Blazoned his achievements forth
King Romance is come indeed! 2.
Since Haggard and Stevenson were its chivalrous courtiers, King Romance could now be resuscitated and revived in a form of fiction written by two men which allowed it to achieve its orgasmic glory once again.
Andrew Lang, writing in the Contemporary Review, 3. under the title "Realism and Romance" explained that "any clever man or woman may elaborate a realistic novel according to the rules" but claimed rather dashingly, yet somewhat quaintly that "romance bloweth where she listeth". These intimidating and outspoken claims to restore romance to what was, after all, an established genre of fiction, whose content could be seen elsewhere, tend to illustrate the notion prevalent at that time - the late 1880s - of the hidebound nature of realism and the opportunities which romance offered for the presentation of the myths and fables of the Arthurian legends, and the homosocial "romance" of adventure and quest in a "new" form or genre of basically imperial fiction.
Lang's aesthetic was stimulated by an interest in commemorating the deeds of long dead heroes. He had what R Lancelyn Green calls "a reverence for noble deeds and heroic action". In Essays in Little in 1891, and Essays in Literature in 1892, he reserved praise for the kind of literature he described as "heroic, Viking-like, masterly, stoical or athletic". Small wonder Lang wrote stories of fable and myth based on the lives of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and Lady Morgan le Fay. The Arthurian figure of romanticism was one of many facets: warrior, king, wise man, leader and even more, perhaps he represents part of the British psyche - that of the terrible avenger. Significantly, he lies sleeping. If he did exist, as Lang appeared to believe, then it is likely that he was a British chieftain of the sixth century A D who had become Romanised. After the Romans left Britain, Arthur fought the native tribes along the length of Hadrian's Wall.
On a related theme, George Saintsbury wrote in the Fortnightly Review 4. an article entitled "The Present State of the Novel" that drew on the imagery of health and sport to claim that, " the current malaise will not be cured til we have bathed once more long and well in the romance of adventure and of passion."
W E Henley, who had recalled that "there were no more stories to be told, that romance was utterly dried up", 5. thought that Stevenson and Haggard with his "Zulu divinities" and "queens of beauty in the caves of Kor" had rescued literature from the arid "analysis of character" and made it alive again. Both in his own poetry and in editorials Henley supported the "romance of imperialism". His personal work is replete with heroism, chivalry, courage, and contains a sense of a shared symbolism between these notions and imperialism.
It was the imperial explorer or intrepid adventurer into the desert unknown who formed the heroic basis for the fictional form which became known as the romance, a term with a long history of a genre all of its own. This masculine form of the romance, its adherents believed, "tapped universal, deep rooted,' primitive' aspects of human nature which the realists could not approach" 6. These aspects, I would contend, were ones which included strong, covert, if not overt feelings of homoeroticism, in work conceming boyhood and the male myth of a work of art as a product of male bonding and inspiration quite independent of female assistance and participation.
Writing for boys meant not writing for girls. Stevenson's novels did not contain even the shadow of a lady in them. By holding aloft Henley's imperial sword of Romance he, arguably, held at bay the girl or woman reader, who had been induced to readership by such agencies as popular journalism and Mudie's circulating libraries. Women were, moreover, almost totally disqualified from being the critics of masculine romance, because as Andrew Lang wrote revealingly to Haggard about the reviews which had been published of King Solomon's Mines: "the dam(n) reviewers were never boys - most of them the Editors' nieces." 7. Furthermore, a female reviewer of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde expressed astonishment that "no woman's name occurs in the book, no romance is ever suggested in it". 8. Additionally, the critic Alice Brown wrote that, "Mr Stevenson is a boy who has no mind to play with girls." She was certainly correct in so far as the characterisation and plot of Treasure Island are concerned.9
The romance form as a new type of genre provided, in various ways, an escape route from a society which confined and constricted the Victorian male. It was a society rigidly classified in terms of gender roles, classes and races; there existed repression and excessive respectability - witness for example the antimacassars, starched collars and shirt fronts, the sexual hypocrisy and concealed emotions of the period. So often these writers sought an escape to a mythical place where men could be men, and essentially free. But it ought to be remembered that, because it was a hypocritical society, prostitution and crime were an outlet for such repressions, too. In the fabled city of Zimbabwe, on the endless plains of Afghanistan, or the Southern Africa or Congo Free State locales of these stories, the authors of Romance could explore their own libidos in a desert place such as the Heart of Darkness, the Lost Mines of Solomon or the Treasure Island. For the writers of Romance these locales represented an unexplored dark continent, or a mysterious Eastern land, or an imaginary island where they could escape the dreariness and oppression and, arguably, the domestication of life in Victorian England. Such destinations were a free space, a blank on an, as yet, undrawn (or, at least, uncompleted) map which is usually in Africa or Asia, on a limitless plain or plateau, or, at worst, an Eastern place uninhabited by white people because, after all, they were in search of mythical tribes, adventurous playgrounds and outlandish places in which to act out their inhibitions in a foreign setting.
The structures of the romances provided, according to Norman Etherington:
"a safe arena where late-Victorian readers could approach subjects that were ordinarily taboo."
and, as I shall argue, including homosociality. 10. Fearing that one day when "the ancient mystery of Africa will have vanished", Haggard enquires, concemed as to where the fate of the male imagination lies: "where will the romance writers of future generations find a safe and secret place... in which to lay their plots?" ll.
Another critic, J H Shorthouse, the author of John Inglesant, elaborated in its Introduction his ideal of a combination of philosophy with real life:
Human life, as revealed to most of us, does not arrange itself...in elaborate plot. ...If fiction, therefore, is allowed to select and condense from life, surely Philosophy may do so too... If we fail in combining real life and philosophy with sufficient vraisemblance, the failure be upon our own head.
Taking part in this debate, Shorthouse wanted to see a unity between fiction and philosophy so that etemal truths about mankind could be conveyed effectively to a philistine age. He wanted to see a literary hybrid which was not so much high comedy as a new development of historical fiction to be known as 'philosophical romance'. He was loosely in favour of the fundamental methods enshrined in realism so long as it was imbued with a romantic spirit:
"Yes, it is only a romance," he announced, "It is only the ivory gate falling back at the fairy touch. It is only the leaden sky breaking for a moment above the bowed and weary head, revealing the fathomless Infinite through the gloom.12. Such heightened rhetoric may only have served to emphasise what was, undoubtedly, the flighty and idealistic nature of romance.
In a wide-ranging survey of the genre by Peter Keating he noted four main types of romance stories which were in existence: the philosophical, the scientific, the detective, and the imperial adventure, but it is the latter with which this present study is concemed and, in particular, how the writers, in doubled roles, subsumed themselves to the service of empire and made fortunes from it. The contemporaneous and dominant type of historical romance was a rather nebulous genre of exciting episodes and quasi-historical events that descended at second hand from Stevenson, through Conan Doyle, despite his own claims to preeminence in historical portraiture, and through Rider Haggard. Keating's list ignores, however, the Gothic and he skips over very lightly the scientific romances of writers, such as H G Wells, with which we are concemed in a later chapter, which tackle the subjects of imperialism, gender, racism and evolution.
A theory of literary structures or modes has been established by Northrop Frye 13. which included the romantic as one of its'narrative categories'. In Frye's scheme there were three stages of romance which were: firstly, a joumey to a land waiting to be worked, a crucial struggle against superior odds, and, lastly, an exaltation of the hero. In terms of the masculine novel of action, the heroes would clearly encounter some civilisation or place remote from the domestic and the civilised, and in meeting this challenge they would perform a series of actions, which would not completely discountenance them, by which they would surmount all odds through the exhibition of courage, fortitude,strength, leadership and persistence.
Northrop Frye gives in his essay on "Rhetorical Criticism" n Anatomy of Criticism 14. an important definition of the difference between the novel and the romance form. He explains that:
the essential difference between novel and romance lies in the concept of characterization. The romance does not attempt to create "real people" so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung's libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively. That is why romance so often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping around its fringes.
Haggard's vision of romance was perhaps more prosaic, viewing it as a painstaking, stoic, workmanlike, and strictly money-making task:
It should, in my judgment, be swift, clear and direct, with as little padding and as few trappings as possible. The story is the thing, and every word in the book should be a brick to buildi ts edifice. Above all no obscurity should be allowed. Let the characters be definite, even at the cost of a little crudeness, and so with the meaning of each sentence. Tricks of "style" and dark allusions may please the superior critic; they do not please the average reader, and - though this seems to be a fact that many forget, or only remember to deplore - a book is written that it maybe read. 15.
So, too, is a catalogue or a directory, but such pronouncements on the romance style are typically colourless. His romance characters are frequently lacking it may be said in features, like a face without eyes, ears and a nose. If a book was to be no more than something which was read then the author was arguably doing little more than writing for the financial success- indeed Haggard became the highest paid writer in Edwardian times.
Stevenson called for a mixture of both realism and idealism in the narrative. Appealing to the need for incident and action in the new romance novel, and despite the demands of fashion in the marketplace for fiction on the one hand, and what were seen to be the claims of normal narratives being produced by traditional, historically acceptable forms on the other, he claimed that technical method was paramount in the production of a good work of fiction. 16
There were two kinds of fictional method, the Realist and the Symbolist, by which are meant firstly the representation of the truth and secondly and opposingly, the mimetic quality of art. Stevenson's call for a blend of realism and idealism was a way forward for the romance novel. Conrad, too, in an acute, exacting definition endorsed the approach of vraisemblage, for he maintained, Peter Keating's wide ranging study of the sociologyof the market informs us, that the novel was nothing if not:
"a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride ofdocumentary history.' ' 17.
In the context of patriarchy, patronage, patemalism and privilege as well as clubland and homosociality, a debate raged between romance and realism. The passions arising from this basic tension clouded the central issue in this debate, aspiring as it did, to higher aims and values, a debate marked by a heated element which we will attempt to show was a screen for activities involving bonding, collaborative aesthetic endeavour and erotic writing. 18. In this controversy, which had its debating chamber at the Savile club, Haggard associated romance with a fundamental human instinct which is incapable of alteration in either barbarian or civilised societies:
"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 its effects among every people, and those whoare 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 brats. In short, it is like the passions, an innate quality of mankind. In modern England this love is not by any means dying out, as must be clear, even to that class of our fellow-countrymen who, we are told, are interested in nothing but politics and religion." 19.
Haggard went on to suggest with untypical abandon that
"with the exception of perfect sculpture, really good romance writing is perhaps the most difficult art practised by the sons of men." 20.
Yet it could be maintained, he egotistically suggested that
"none but a great man or woman can produce a really great work of fiction. But greatmen are rare, and great works are rarer still, because all great men do not write. I f, however, a person is intellectually a head and shoulders above his or her fellows, that person is prima facie fit and able to write a good work. Even then he or she may not succeed because in addition to intellectual pre-eminence a certain literary quality is necessary for the perfect flowering of the brain in books." 21.
Haggard also put the converse of the argument which could appear as a self-serving statement of his own ideas of his pre-eminence and one which calls into question his ambitions for political power and love of the trappings of statesmanship:
"The writer who can produce a noble and lasting work of art is, of necessity, a great man, and one who, had fortune opened to him any of the doors that lead to material grandeur and to the busy pomp of power, would have shown the imagination, the quick sympathy, the insight, the depth of mind, and the sense of order and proportion which went to constitute the writer would have equally constituted the statesman or the general."22.
Stevenson, in responding to the debate, discussed in "A Gossip on Romance" the novel of action which he wished would bean epic form that would act as a counterweight to the aesthetic being propounded by James, and others at the Savile. In his letter he suggested that he incorporate some of the dynamism and energy of Fielding into what Stevenson thought were his too domestic interiors. 23.
For Stevenson it was the fundamental power of incident and action that made for a good romance novel. His epistolary work A Humble Remonstrance, which appeared in Longmans Magazine, was a declaration of artistic intent on the narrative and is the axis of his disagreement with Henry James. James' article, which was itself a rejoinder to Walter Besant's, stressed the need for the air of reality; "the solidity of specification". He described the romance novel's:
capacity to represent at the expense of the novel's conventionality, its formal devices, its pursuit of singleness and relevance, its need to omit for the sake of harmony and coherence. 24.
In the romance genre, which is the subject of this survey, men such as Haggard and Stevenson doubled with others to write the masculine novel of action or search. What this search consisted of is the crucial interrogation to be made in this study. In many ways it consists of a yeaming to escape from the constricting environment in which these men found themselves. Search romances all involved a penetration into the imaginary centre or core (perhaps the reason for the naming of the caves of Kor, or possibly we could gloss it as Cor Blimey! an euphemism which carries the meaning "God blind me!") of an exotic civilisation. Whether it was the Armahaggar, the Lovedu tribe or the Transvaal, the Tibetan civilisation, the lost cities of Zimbabwe, the dark continent, or the heart of darkness, a search was involved to find such peoples and places.
The physical immensity of Africa and Asia is always apparent. Distance, too, is overcome by placing these locales in a "Dark Continent" or "Heart of Darkness", where the characters, moreover, meet numerous 'dark ladies' who are equated, by Haggard certainly, with the erotic sexuality of 'the black', to bring into the discussion the contemporaneous mid-Victorian jargon. The association of negritude with the erotic is a commonplace in European fiction, and also in pornography. Haggard presented the erotic as a normal part of the adventures. The present writer well recalls when only a schoolboy the prurient reactions of boys in the serried rows of grammar class to the explicit definition of the dimensions of Queen Sheba's breasts. Also a case in point was their reaction to Da Silva's blood-soaked letter - ie perhaps what could be construed as a menstrual letter - which on deconstruction implied to that pre-Structuralist generation menstruation and menstruating. The letter exactly states that the road to the mines is to be reached by a man climbing "the snows of Sheba's left breast till he reaches the nipple." 26.
Romance, then, is characterised by a separation from reality in a literary form in which elan vital and a vivacity for life and freedom are paramount. There is a sense of the geographical immensity of the textual locales in which they operate and there is also a mood of Britain and Britons reacting against the restrictions of time and place and size. The reaction against time is often overcome by making the characters such as Ulysses in The World's Desire live again and Helen, the goddess, survive death by fire. Leo Vincey in She is a reincarnation of the ancient priest, Kallikrates. History and time are overcome by a plasticity which allows Haggard, and others, to surmount restrictions.
There is an anxiety inherent in the Victorian age which this fictional form attempts to alleviate. Not only was the Victorian age one of enormous social problems, but there were class, financial and imperial anxieties which permeated life between1830 and 1901. The adventure tales, committed as they were to action rather than analysis, were able, by virtue of their adventurousness, to overcome fears of safety, social standing and poverty.
There is always a tendency to myth and allegory in romance works which can be seen particularly in The Ancient Allen, Eric Brighteyes and When the World Shook. Icelandic men, according to Lang, were fearless and "the best of soldiers, laughing at death and torture like the Zulus who are a kind of black Vikings of Africa." 27. Haggard's reverence for the Zulus, whom he had fought in the Transvaal, was clear and is exemplied in the texts in many episodes where warrior-like men with a strong and independent culture had much to offer the west.
The sagas had come into Haggard's orbit aptly through Lang's encouragement, and also through Haggard's journey to Iceland. Haggard and Lang had researched these myths which had come into Anglo-Saxon literature by way of the Sacred Way, the amber routes of old. A favourite was the story of King Arthur whose mother, Ygeme, was reputed to be featured in a medieval comparison. Homer and Shakespeare are other sources for the tales recounted in the romance form. Menelaus features in the role of Paris, who won the love of Helen, and The Tempest is used, according to M Mannoni, as a springboard for the story of Prospero, Caliban and Ariel, whom Mannoni thinks are possibly the original precursors of imperial action and, positively the original characters for the embryo of the escape novel, Robinson Crusoe which recounts, says Mannoni "the long and difficult cure of a misanthropic neurosis". 28.
These island stories had their apogee in "The Tempest" and are adventure myths set in island places bounded only by the imagination, morality and unwritten law. They stand as symbols for the area of the imagination which a boy reader makes for himself - the isolation, the clear boundaries are part of the human limitation which the genre required. Their air is contrived, artificial, constrained: theirs the remoteness, imprisonment, convictdom of the unfree. Tools are their subject in hand, and this is their satisfaction. The Icelandic sagas had possibly survived in Iceland becauseof its remoteness and cultural integrity. Certain of these myths had been translated by William Morris who translated the Icelandic sagas in his own verse at the same time. He was part ofthe Bume-Jones circle of Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Mil-ais, President of the Royal Academy, whose well-known paintings of Bubbles and The Boyhood of Raleigh were a backdrop to the period. The Icelandic sagas had also been translated by Sweet whose Anglo-Saxon Primer was on the reading lists of undergraduates in recent years.
Another possible source of the sagas may have been the Ingoldsby Legends which Haggard refers to in Allan Quatermain. These were a spoof on other legends such as The Jackdaw ofReims, monologues which are sometimes recited today, by the Reverend R H Barnham, published in London in 1840.
Stevenson chided Haggard for his inaccurate reference to the Ingoldsby Legends in a letter to be seen in The Days of My Life. He scolds the reverend gentleman who was their author and demands to know:
"But how, in the name of literature, could you mistake some lines from Scott's 'Marmion' - ay, and, some of the best - for the slack-sided, clerical cob effusions of the Rev. Ingoldsby?" 29.
Replying Haggard pointed out that it was a 'literary joke' to have Allan Quatermain claim only to have known two works of literature - The Old Testament and the Ingoldsby Legends.
However, it was in character for Quatermain was neither erudite nor literary, although he did claim to have read 'a novel'.
It was the meeting of these myths and Science which Claude Levi=Strauss also discussed in his description of the "Meeting of Myth and Science". Claude Levi-Strauss tells how he turned his attention to myths and mythology. He made an interesting statement of the logic of mythology:
Mythical stories are, or seem, arbitrary, meaningless, absurd, yet nevertheless they seem to reappear all over the world. A 'fanciful' creation of the mind in one place would be unique - you would not find the same creation in a completely different place. My problem was trying to find out if there was some kind of order behind the apparent disorder. And I do not claim that there are conclusions to be drawn." 30
One conclusion might be that Haggard had a profound interest in mythology which stemmed right back to his visit to Egypt, and is a subject which might well be worthy of investigation in a separate study.
It may be opportune to consider the si