The Continuity of the Spirit among all Living Things in the Philosophy and Literature of Henry Rider Haggard

Abstract

Henry Rider Haggard is a man of many contradictions, not least concerning his representation of hunting in Africa. He is often considered as an adventure novelist whose interests lay in the supposed excitement of big game hunting. His early and most famous novels are replete with the wholesale slaughter of African animals by colonial hunters intent on profit from a landscape filled with a never-ending supply of animals. However, even as a youth, Haggard was troubled by the killing of animals and never hunted anything he did not use himself. He took the philosophy a step further in the early twentieth century by exploring the idea that animals and humans share a common spiritual existence which manifested itself in psychic communication. This exploration is reflected in his work The
Mahatma and the Hare, which encompassed both a renunciation of hunting and an allegorical delineation of the author’s interest in animism. His biographers, for the most part, have neglected his appreciation of the importance of maintaining a spiritual equilibrium between man and nature which culminated in his public condemnation of commercial and sport hunting. In this he was well ahead of his time, more in line with the late twentieth-century environmental movement than with his Victorian counterparts.