Talk:The Wizard (Haggard)

Review from The Bookman March 1897
The days of miracles are not yet past. Mr. Rider Haggard has written a tract. "Is it still possible," he asks, in the beginning of the first chapter of The Wizard,

""

This is a rather leading question even for an archbishop to answer; when, therefore, a novelist of fire and thunder, such as Rider Haggard, intimates that he is about to prove that the promise uttered does hold good, the reader, confident that his answer will be as remarkable as his question, is mildly curious to see what is going to happen.

Thomas Owen, an English minister, with a good living, a cellar full of old wine and an incipient love-affair, having heard of the murder of a missionary in Central Africa, by the "Sons of Fire," a particularly ferocious tribe of heathen, finds that the Voice of Faith irresistibly impels him to convert them. So, abandoning his good living and his good wine, and leaving behind him the young lady who returns his affection, he sets out, with an admirable spirit of self-sacrifice, for the land of the Sons of Fire.

Two years have gone by, and from the rectory in a quiet English village we pass to a scene in Central Africa. And now how shall the savages be converted? That is simple. Our missionary has had it disclosed to him in a dream that the heathen king is about to be poisoned, and that an antidote for the poison to be used may be found growing on a certain tree; by means of which knowledge, so kindly and opportunely furnished him, because he has had sufficient faith in the "promise uttered by the Master," the king is saved and Christianity glorified. After this we are plunged into a whirlpool of fire and flood, thunder and lightning, howls of savages and clash of spears, bloodshed and poisoning ad nauseam, out of which Christianity somehow comes forth victorious over heathenism every time.

Then at last, as a final means of testing which of the two faiths is the more satisfactory, the missionary, with two converted Sons of Fire on the one side, and a small but select gathering of the heathen on the other, fares forth in an extremely severe thunderstorm to see which group will be struck by lightning. The missionary and his disciples stand beneath a cross which they have erected (having no lightning-rod, the reader is pleased to observe, for the missionary would not, he announces, be so distrustful as to put up one), while the heathen all around, arrayed in snakeskin dresses, perform magic incantations. The thunder mutters in the distance; it comes nearer; the storm breaks. ""

Meanwhile the poor savages are being played the very deuce with. "" And so at last some forty or fifty thousand savages are converted into devout Christians of the end of the nineteenth century; and Rider Haggard complacently concludes that "thus through the power of faith, that now, as of old, is the only true and efficient magic, was accomplished the mission of the saint, Thomas Owen, to the Sons of Fire."

That this tale is, as its author declares, in the dedication, a "tale of faith triumphant over savagery and death" is apparent. That it is not a tale triumphant over the minds of modern readers admits of no less doubt.

But aside from the mock and maudlin sentiment which this book expounds, in regarding Christianity as a religion of mere marvels, and making its triumphs mere frauds of supernatural legerdemain, and in describing its ideal exponent as "the Wizard"—aside from all this (for, after all, Rider Haggard is not a bishop of Central Africa) the tale itself, as a narrative of adventure, is quite as sad a failure as it is in what must be regarded as its religious aims (for the author evidently means to be serious) by the very obviousness with which every incident is directed towards this absurd effort to prove that the promise uttered still holds good.

Whether or not savages are such poor, easily-to-be-fooled creatures as they are made out to be in The Wizard we neither know nor care. But to make their credulity a means of proving the power of Christianity is an argument as fatuous as it is uncalled for. Certainly the missionary did succeed in converting the savages in this tale. But we all know that the missionary was a sham missionary, the savages sham savages, the thunder and lightning the rattle of tin sheets and flash of limelight behind painted scenery, and the faith that the sham missionary taught a sham Christianity. In She we knew equally well that the savages and the scenery were mere imitations. There, finding what we sought—entertainment—we did not care; for a good melodrama justifies itself. But when the melodrama is a sham plea for a misrepresented faith, such as The Wizard is, we are compelled to believe one of three things, either Rider Haggard regards us as savages, or regards us as sham, or is himself a sham. And if the reader must choose which it shall be, can he hesitate?
 * J N. Rosenberg