Haggard's She: Burke's Sublime in a Popular Romance (Essay) (H. Rider Haggard) (Critical Essay‪)‬

"Enchantment is just what this writer exercised; he fixed pictures in our minds that thirty years have been unable to wear away," Graham Greene confessed in "Rider Haggard's Secret" (Greene 209). J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis also affirmed the spell cast by She--Tolkien in Henry Resnick's 1966 interview ("I suppose as a boy She interested me as much as anything" [Resnick 40]), and Lewis in a review of a Haggard biography: "His openings--what story in the world opens better than She?--are full of alluring promise, and his catastrophes triumphantly keep it" (Lewis 97). Lewis perceived a problem for criticism as being posed by Haggard, in that the man's style is often bad and his would-be profundities embarrassing, and yet something fascinates readers, namely, Lewis said, "the myth." Lewis believed that the mythopoeic quality can transcend the defects of an author's words, so that a reader is moved, even so. In his remarks in "The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard," Lewis hastens to discuss the archetypal figure of Ayesha, She herself, the immortal queen. Ayesha appears, however, only in the twelfth chapter of a book of twenty-eight chapters, and thereafter is not always on stage. Readers are likely to be caught up in the book long before this great femme fatale takes the stage. But Haggard has surrounded her with plentiful images and events that have intrinsic power. They partake of the quality, productive of imaginative fascination, a "delightful horror" (Burke 73), which Edmund Burke (1729-1797) called the Sublime in a treatise published in 1756. So abundant are these images and events that one could fancy that Haggard wrote his romance as a deliberate attempt to include as many of them as feasible; however, so far as I know, Haggard had never heard of the book, which Jacques Barzun said marked "the new cultural direction from Neoclassicism to Romanticism" (356); Haggard's tale must surely be one of the greatest artifacts of popular Romanticism ever written.