Produced by John Bickers; Dagny; Emma Dudding
THE WORLD'S DESIRE
by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
To
W. B. RICHMOND, A.R.A.
PREFACE
The period in which the story of _The World's Desire_ is cast, was aperiod when, as Miss Braddon remarks of the age of the Plantagenets,"anything might happen." Recent discoveries, mainly by Dr. Schliemannand Mr. Flinders Petrie, have shown that there really was muchintercourse between Heroic Greece, the Greece of the Achaeans, and theEgypt of the Ramessids. This connection, rumoured of in Greek legends,is attested by Egyptian relics found in the graves of Mycenae, and byvery ancient Levantine pottery, found in contemporary sites in Egypt.Homer himself shows us Odysseus telling a feigned, but obviously notimprobable, tale of an Achaean raid on Egypt. Meanwhile the sojourn ofthe Israelites, with their Exodus from the land of bondage, though notyet found to be recorded on the Egyptian monuments, was probably part ofthe great contemporary stir among the peoples. These events, which areonly known through Hebrew texts, must have worn a very different aspectin the eyes of Egyptians, and of pre-historic Achaean observers, hostilein faith to the Children of Israel. The topic has since been treated infiction by Dr. Ebers, in his _Joshua_. In such a twilight age, fancy hasfree play, but it is a curious fact that, in this romance, modern fancyhas accidentally coincided with that of ancient Greece.
Most of the novel was written, and the apparently "un-Greek" marvelsattributed to Helen had been put on paper, when a part of Furtwaengler'srecent great lexicon of Mythology appeared, with the article on Helen.The authors of _The World's Desire_ read it with a feeling akin toamazement. Their wildest inventions about the Daughter of the Swan, itseemed, had parallels in the obscurer legends of Hellas. There actuallyis a tradition, preserved by Eustathius, that Paris beguiled Helenby magically putting on the aspect of Menelaus. There is a mediaevalparallel in the story of Uther and Ygerne, mother of Arthur, andthe classical case of Zeus and Amphitryon is familiar. Again, theblood-dripping ruby of Helen, in the tale, is mentioned by Servius inhis commentary on Virgil (it was pointed out to one of the authorsby Mr. Mackail). But we did not know that the Star of the story wasactually called the "Star-stone" in ancient Greek fable. The many voicesof Helen are alluded to by Homer in the _Odyssey_: she was also named_Echo_, in old tradition. To add that she could assume the aspect ofevery man's first love was easy. Goethe introduces the same qualityin the fair witch of his _Walpurgis Nacht_. A respectable portrait ofMeriamun's secret counsellor exists, in pottery, in the British Museum,though, as it chances, it was not discovered by us until after thepublication of this romance. The Laestrygonian of the Last Battle isintroduced as a pre-historic Norseman. Mr. Gladstone, we think, wasperhaps the first to point out that the Laestrygonians of the _Odyssey_,with their home on a fiord in the Land of the Midnight Sun, wereprobably derived from travellers' tales of the North, borne with theamber along the immemorial Sacred Way. The Magic of Meriamun is inaccordance with Egyptian ideas; her resuscitation of the dead woman,Hataska, has a singular parallel in Reginald Scot's _Discovery ofWitchcraft_ (1584), where the spell "by the silence of the Night" is notwithout poetry. The general conception of Helen as the World's Desire,Ideal Beauty, has been dealt with by M. Paul de St. Victor, and Mr. J.A. Symonds. For the rest, some details of battle, and of wounds, whichmust seem very "un-Greek" to critics ignorant of Greek literature, areborrowed from Homer.
H. R. H. A. L.