SOURCE: "Popular Literature and Children's Literature," in Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1979, pp. 203-34.

[In the following extract, Green examines the different forms of heroism represented in popular boys' fiction during the nineteenth century.]

Tolstoy gives us the sense—proper to high culture and especially to art—that he is questioning and testing whatever he describes; both the modern system, and the adventures of its expansion. Now we must look to narratives and discussions which seem not to test but to advertise their values, which work at a lower artistic and cultural level.

Turning to popular literature will bring out the importance of the how-to-do-it strain of adventure, the Defoe/merchant-caste strain, which gets overshadowed by the chivalric romance when we restrict our attention to works of literary value (serious art being reactionary, and often allied to the aristocracy) but which was very powerful at the popular level. That strain of feeling was also more powerful in nonfiction than in even "democratic" fiction, because art at its purest recoils from predominant truisms, and perhaps especially from mercantile ones. It is in popular biographies and advice books that Defoe's adventurer lived on and inspired others, not in brilliant novels.

Books of this kind had been appearing ever since Defoe's time, though they are meagerly represented in the histories of literature. I have mentioned one or two eighteenth-century writers like Dilworth; there were the stories of the sea and sailors; and of course there was the unending sequence of reissues and adaptations of Robinson Crusoe. But in the nineteenth century, this literature changed its character somewhat, as did more serious literature, in response to changing cultural forces, and also found new forms of expression. In the first half of this chapter, then, I shall not be tracing the development of fictional motifs, or evoking the historical background that gave those motifs resonance, but categorizing the culture heroes of the time—those that were in effect variants on the adventurer theme, and reinforcements of that idea. In the second half I shall describe motifs in the children's and popular literature of the time, or that part of it that was adventurous.

My discussion in the other chapters is restricted to writers of first-class intelligence and sensibility. Even Cooper, though far from being a great novelist, a man of great intelligence. Since we are dealing with a cultural image as it got expressed in literature, and dealing with it in a literary way, it was necessary to choose material one can respect from that point of view. But it is necessary also to remember the other expressions of that image, less respectable and substantial from that point of view, but as effective or more so as a cultural influence. (For evidence of that effectiveness I rely on sales figures; no one seems to know what happens to books once bought—what they do inside the reading audience's heads.)

First of all, the work of Samuel Smiles, who was born in 1812, and became famous in 1859 with a book called Self-Help, which sold 25,000 copies in its year of publication, and 250,000 by 1900. It was translated into nearly every European language, and several Indian ones, plus Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish. In Italy there was an edition which substituted examples of self-help from Italian history for those British anecdotes which Smiles had chosen—anecdotes which made up nine-tenths of his book. This book was subtitled "Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance," and it promised in effect to explain the secret of the superior energy and success of the Anglo-Saxons, their superior adaptation to the modern system. The Revue des Deux Mondes review took it as that, and only feared that Frenchmen's chauvinist prejudice might deny them access to this new source of moral energy. In his Autobiography, Smiles said that he wrote it to illustrate PERSEVERANCE, the great word of George Stephenson, the railway engineer.

Smiles was a Scotsman, a Utilitarian, and something of a radical in early life. Not an adventurer, then, but something of a Puritan. (He was a friend of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer of Sheffield.) And what this book teaches is how to acquire, by making a cult of these examples of great men and great actions, the standard virtues of Victorian England. What those are is perhaps sufficiently indicated by the titles of his later books: Character, 1871, Thrift, 1875, and Duty, 1880. They contain much warning against drink, and praise of savings banks; but basically these are collections of anecdotes about great men, noble boys, and Mothers (no need for an honorific for them). Some of the men most often cited are Washington, Wallerstein, Wellington, and Scott—a list somewhat equivalent to Defoe's list of Protestant heroes. Cobbett is described as the typical Englishman in character, and contrasted with Herder and Fichte; he was coarse and vulgar, compared with such Continental intellectuals, but had a strong undercurrent of poetry in his nature, and the tenderest regard for the character of women; though anything but refined, he was a true Englishman—pure, temperate, self-denying, industrious, vigorous, and energetic.

In the intellectual line, the greatest man who ever lived was Newton. (This is what Defoe and the Encyclopaedists said, but it's worth recalling that Swift dismissed Newton as a mechanic; Smiles is clearly on Defoe's side—the Encyclopaedists' side—in the Swift-Defoe battle.) More controversial choices of exemplars of virtue, but characteristic of Smiles, are Savonarola and Grace Darling, the lifeboat heroine. Both of these are puritan, and in their different ways, modernist figures. On the other side, Goethe, though a great poet, is not a man to copy, because he was amoral and an aesthete. Smiles has his suspicions of art, and warns us against certain kinds of literature—the leprous book, the scrofulous book, and even the giggling book. (Petronius? Pope? Nabokov?)

Considerably more interesting are his Lives of the Engineers, which began with The Life of George Stephenson, the great railway pioneer, who lived from 1781 to 1848. Smiles complained that history had been monopolized by kings and warriors and war, and claimed attention for engineers, the heroes of peace. Some phrases from the English reviews will indicate the kind of interest this biography has. "Few romances possess so strong an interest as this life, so brave, so simple, so strenuous in its faith . . . the true history of a working man." Stephenson was a true Victorian hero, and his rise from poverty to fame and fortune was felt to be adventure in the best sense—something in competition with, though not in hostility to, literal adventure in the Crusoe sense. "We see the vast achievements and the epic story of this age of ours more than half comprised in the feats of its strongest and most successful worker . . . we may designate him a hero . . . To young men faltering, it gives lessons which should supply fresh vigour. The continuous effort, the persistent valour, the daring ingenuity, and ever-active intellect of this collier boy . . ." Crusoe's virtues are seen at work in a somewhat different setting.

Smiles's importance is that he was so typical of nineteenth-century opinion. It is easy to recognize in his idea of manliness a vulgarized version of Emerson's, and indeed of other Victorian moralists. Stephenson was a man; he hated foppery and frippery above all things; he didn't drink, but ran and wrestled, and above all, worked. Emerson in fact, as Smiles tells us, said it was worth crossing the Atlantic just to meet Stephenson, he had such native force of character and intellect.

Smiles connects the cult of manliness, again in no unique way, with the cult of machinery. The ideas of work and workman subsume both. "There is indeed a peculiar fascination about an engine, to the intelligent workman who watches and feeds it. It is almost sublime in its untiring industry and quiet power; capable of performing the most gigantic work, yet so docile that a child's hand may guide it" (p. 28). Such a workman often speaks of his machine "with glowing admiration." All the improvements to machinery have come from workmen, not from scientists or philosophers. "This daily contemplation of the steam engine, and the sight of its steady action, is an education of itself to the ingenious and thoughtful workman." Defoe, I want to suggest, would have assented, would almost certainly have come to some such judgment, had he lived in the nineteenth century. It is a suggestive crystallization of the technocratic idea, which was powerful all through the century, though it rarely reached high levels of expression, literarily.

It figured largely in Mark Twain's life, however (his experience with the Paige type-setting machine constitutes a sardonic comment on the last sentence quoted), and he developed it literarily in Connecticut Yankee and other stories. It was also quite brilliantly expressed in fiction by Kipling and Wells; and commented on by Henry Adams, in "The Virgin and the Dynamo." The cult of the engineer may be said to have replaced in the nineteenth century Defoe's eighteenth-century cult of the merchant, as the former came to seem more the hero of peace, constructiveness, and the modern system.

Smiles's later Lives of the Engineers are particularly interesting for us because, alongside the biographies, they include histories of particular cities from a point of view very close to Defoe's, and continue the imaginative work he did in The Tour. We are shown England from a modern system point of view. Thus, in the Introduction we are told that England is not fertile—it has been made fertile by its industry, its canals, and other works of its engineers and improvers (p. 74). This work is moreover quite new. Not long ago, our wool was made into cloth in Flanders, our mines dug by Germans, our windmills built by the Dutch, and so on. Our apparent luck is based on our self-help—and will last only as long as our virtue does. This is exactly the approach Defoe took in his Tour, and his Essay on Projects, and Smiles emphasizes exactly what Defoe emphasized. He tells us for instance that the roads recently built in the Highlands of Scotland have had a moral influence. Telford, the engineer in charge, called the road-building a Working Academy, which turned out eight hundred improved workmen every year, and he meant improved as citizens too. (The image, and the tone, are very close to Twain's "factory of men" in Connecticut Yankee.) The change this road-building has made to Scotland can be measured in the fact that back in the 1745 Rebellion, when the district of Balmoral was remote from civilization, a whole regiment of Jacobite rebels was raised there, in a district "where now our Queen is so beloved."

Volume I is mostly about James Brindley, who built his first canal in 1761, but it also gives an account of Manchester in 1740. Volume II is mostly about Rennie and Smeaton—the latter built his first lighthouse in 1759—but it also gives a history of docks and bridges, and of the pirates who flourished before these modernizations. Volume III is mostly about Telford and Scotland; and it is notable how many of these men were Scots. Volume IV is about Watt and Boulton—Watt's first steam engine was built in 1766, and Arkwright's spinning jenny was built three years later; but also about Birmingham. Thus these four volumes are a history of England during its Industrial Revolution, complete with exempla and heroes, exactly what Defoe wanted, and very like what Defoe produced in that line.

In Self-Help Smiles also took many examples of heroism from the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, which had only just occurred; and in Duty he praised Sir Charles Napier, John and Henry Lawrence, and Outram, as military heroes of the Indian Service. This gives us the cue to put that kind of Victorian hero beside Smiles's engineers; such kinds of men surround and support figures like Stanley—perhaps the most famous Victorian adventurer—in a cultural pantheon. The Indian soldiers are not Cortes or Clive types, military conquerors on the grand scale. They are suitable heroes for merchants, and their allies in the modern world system. But they assimilate as much of the conquistador material as could be assimilated into a Crusoe form.

As our example of the Indian hero let us take the Lawrence brothers, and their work in the Punjab in the mid-nineteenth century. They administered this province, after England took it away from the Sikhs in 1848, and made it the showpiece of British India. It was 74,000 square miles, of which the population was only one-fifth Sikh, though they were dominant. The British built the Grand Canal of the Punjab, nearly 250 miles long; and in four years built 3,000 miles of road, and surveyed 5,000 more, that was to be the Grand Trunk Road which Kipling celebrated.

The Lawrences were a Scots-Irish military family, very poor and in most senses underprivileged. John was the sixth son and eighth child, and said that at school "I was flogged every day of my life, except one, and then I was flogged twice" (Bosworth-Smith, Life of Lord Lawrence, p. 15). But it must have been a ruling-caste training place, for there were other boys at the school who were to become Indian heroes—besides the Lawrence brothers themselves. There was, for instance, Lord Gough, later to be the victor of Chillianwallah and conqueror of Gujerat. It was a school like Kipling's United Services College, in effect. These poor but ruling-caste Ulstermen (like but unlike the Ulstermen prominent on the American frontier) provided much of England's imperialist strength.

Bosworth-Smith's characterization of John Lawrence in his official biography is particularly interesting. Of Herculean physique, we are told, he had the cut of the Jats he ruled, with their handsome prominent features and tall bony frames; and the Jats are said to be descended from the ancient Goths. There was no ounce of superfluous fat upon John Lawrence, and he could hold a cannonball at arm's length. His friends, we are told, called him Oliver, after Cromwell, "the greatest and most downright and God-fearing of Englishmen" (p. 100). It was of course Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship essay on Cromwell that they and Bosworth-Smith were thinking of. And the latter's whole account draws heavily on Carlyle's value-images.¹

Lawrence was brave and strong and rough as a giant, but tender as a woman and simple as a child. He was heroically simple; he had the rough humor, the boisterous pranks, the wild spirit of adventure we associate with the Norwegian troll. When the rugged lineaments and deep furrows of his grand countenance are described, Bosworth-Smith quotes Milton's lines describing Satan. But the Satanic associations could be misleading. Lawrence was above all things a moral hero. Smiles says, in Self-Help, that Delhi was taken and India saved during the Mutiny by the personal character of Sir John Lawrence. His eye glared terribly when he saw anything mean or cowardly or wrong. They called him King John on the frontier. He was made Viceroy in 1864, and came home a peer in 1869, one of the great Victorian heroes.

Comparing the Lawrence brothers, Bosworth-Smith (a schoolmaster at Harrow) categorized John as Scots in character, Henry as Irish. The latter was, it seems, the more imaginative, the gentler, the more literary. He married a rather literary woman, his second cousin Honoria, a governess who had been a great friend of his sister Letitia, who herself was an Evangelical in the circle of Wilberforce and Thornton. (This illustrates the range of ruling-class types, and the alliance between them.) John, we are told, was passionately fond of Scott, but otherwise seems to have been aesthetically philistine. Henry and Honoria were more imaginative. The brothers quarreled over the administration of the Punjab, though with great dignity and mutual respect. Henry went into semiretirement, but he emerged again to be Resident at Lucknow, where he died, a martyr, during the Mutiny.

Henry gathered around him a number of young men, who were destined to have remarkable careers in India. There were, for instance, William Hodson, famous for the corps he formed, Hodson's Foot; John Nicholson, famous for the relief of Delhi during the Mutiny; and James Abbott, who was, we are told, accepted as prophet, priest, and king, by the fierce Yusupzais of the Hozara country. This phrasing I take from Maud Diver's biography of Honoria Lawrence, and it reminds us of Kipling, but more importantly it reminds us of the enormous imaginative charge of these Indian careers, where it seemed that everyone English was a Man Who Could Be King. Another of Henry Lawrence's young men was Herbert Edwardes, who was sent to Jummu to be, as he said, a Lieutenant of Foot advising the King of the Mountains. Edwardes, who wrote remarkably well, again and again in his letters names that kind of excitement. "I found five countries oppressed by one tyrant—and I removed him. I found three chiefs in exile—and I restored them. Those countries and those chiefs rallied round me in the hour of need. When I held up my hand for soldiers, they came. When I left the province, during an imperial war, peace reigned behind me" (Maud Diver, Honoria Lawrence, p. 319). John Nicholson was literally worshiped by a sect, the Nikkulseynites, whom he cursed and flogged for doing so. Edwardes's obituary comment on Henry was as Carlylean as Bosworth-Smith's on John: "How much of the man there was in him. How unsubdued he was. How his great purposes, his fierce will, generous impulses, and strong passions raged within him, making him the fine, genuine character we knew. . . ."

One final quotation from Edwardes will make clear the moral and imaginative tone of the Victorian cult of Empire itself. In a letter of 1846, after a satirical description of some Sikhs, he continues, "These barbarous phases of society, into which an educated man descends as into a pit of lions, have, after all, a wild, almost terrible interest. There is something noble in putting the hand of civilization on the mane of a nation like the Punjab (if I may borrow Spenser's allegory) and looking down brute passions. What a victory! to bind a bullying people with a garland—to impose security of life, good order, and law as fine, upon a whole nation." The military impulse and military pride were sanctified and subdued to other caste values.²

There we have a kind of Victorian hero, obviously carrying a very potent image, who might have seemed quite unrelatable to the engineer and the merchant. In fact, India was a theater of empire where the military caste provided the leading actors, and even quite displaced the merchants from public view. But administrative civilians were heroes in India; their tasks more constructive, but their powers still exhilarating. I take as an example H. M. Kisch, whose letters were published as A Young Victorian in India in 1957. Mr. Kisch, who was born in 1850, arrived in India in 1873, and immediately found him self in charge of "198 square miles of famine" (p. 24). He wrote home that he gave employment to 5000 people every day, and fed another 3000 a day free. He had an establishment of 300 and ruled a population of 100,000. In 1874 he recalled with pride that when he arrived he couldn't dig a tank, build a grain store, or anything else. And a little later he wrote, "Since I last wrote, I have dammed several of the rivers in my circle. . . ." (p. 45). In 1876, his subdivision was 782 square miles, and contained a population of 154,000—mostly of an aboriginal tribe, "far superior to Bengalis." (That prejudice against the Hindus, and particularly the Bengalis, was a large feature of English rule in India; an imperial power prefers to deal with a primitive or aboriginal tribe.) They treated even his music box as a god.

It was in India that the institution of Guides originated; although guides and scouts were obviously famous long before, in the American colonies; perhaps I should say, it was in India that something was instituted on the British side which was called Guides. In 1839 Henry Lawrence proposed such a corps, trained to work in forest and jungle (to discover enemy positions) where regular troops could not operate. In 1845-1846 Harry Lumsden created the Queen's Corps of Guides (he himself being only twenty-five) and Hodson was his second in command.

The institution much struck the general imagination; Kipling for instance always found such irregular troops much more exciting than the regulars. (This excitement was a fraction of that attaching to the Cossacks in Russia, for the Cossacks were irregulars.) And after the Boer War Colonel Baden-Powell, with Kipling's advice, set out to create such an institution for boys, to save England from the softness and degeneracy threatening it. Baden-Powell designed the Boy Scouts to foster specifically English-boy qualities. He wrote, "Your Englishman . . . is endowed by nature with a spirit of practical discipline. . . . Whether it has been instilled into him by his public school training, by his football and his fagging, or whether it is inbred from previous generations of stern though kindly parents, one cannot say" (Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun, p. 105). That practical discipline was what the Empire required of its administrators, and the public schools supplied. He set out to develop that English quality by means of simulated and controlled adventures. The Boy Scouts and the public schools are examples of those institutions of large cultural effectiveness which did not operate through books, and which were hardly at all expressed or reflected in serious literature.

One final hero-type in the Victorian constellation is the missionary. In Self-Help Smiles tells, for instance, the story of John Williams, a London Society missionary, who died a martyr on Erromanga, a South Seas island. And a book-length version of that sort of narrative is James Paton's The Story of John G. Paton: or 30 Years Among South Seas Cannibals. The hero was born in 1824, and after a very severe and pious Scots Presbyterian childhood, set off as a missionary for the New Hebrides in 1858. There he engaged in a thirty-year-long and more or less fruitless struggle with naked savages, who practiced horrid heathen rites, including cannibalism. And the whites he encountered were nearly all rough, swearing traders, who mocked and jostled him. It is an intensely grim life that is described, but it is offered as a call to imitation; John G. Paton is a Christian hero of Christian adventure.

But in Smiles's book there is also much about Livingstone, which gives quite a different image of missionary work; stressing how Livingstone dug canals, built houses, cultivated fields, as he labored among the Bechuanas; he taught them to work as well as to worship. It was by using this stress on the missionaries' work that a man like Smiles could best assimilate it to the work of the explorers and administrators—the work of civilization. And this was a stress by no means foreign to the missionaries themselves; they sometimes took copies of Robinson Crusoe with them as well as Bibles. The practice, and later theory, was that the missionary should be a trustee for Western civilization. He taught his tribe habits of work, of justice, of reason, and collected information about their language, culture, natural habitat.

Seen as such, he was first cousin to the heroes of adventure stories; and in fact R. M. Ballantyne blended both images. In his very popular boys' stories, including Coral Island itself, he included a strong strain of missionary feeling, quite like that of The Story of John G. Paton.

Beside the missionary stood the colporteur, of whom the most famous and the most literary was George Borrow. His The Bible in Spain, 1842, told the adventures of an Englishman, attempting to circulate the Scriptures in Spain; but it was also full of picaresque adventures, romantic settings, and chauvinist opinions. "Yes, notwithstanding the misrule of the brutal and sensual Austrian, the doting Bourbon, and above all, the spiritual tyranny of the court of Rome, Spain can still maintain her own. . . ." And it might be Defoe himself who tells us that for two hundred years Spain was the she-butcher of malignant Rome.

Borrow learned to read on Robinson Crusoe, and maintained a kind of cult of it. For months, he tells us, "the wondrous volume was my only and principal source of amusement. For hours together I would sit poring over a page till I had become acquainted with the import of every line. . . ." (Lavengro, p. 10). Borrow was described as an Elizabethan born out of his time, and in fact illustrates that revival of primitive WASP energies in Victorian England. He traveled far and riskily with his Bibles; he went to Russia in 1823 for the London Missionary Society, and to Spain in 1835, where he told everyone that the Pope was Satan's prime minister, and that they weren't Christians, for they were ignorant of Christ and his teaching. It can give one a valuable insight into the imperialist aspect of the Victorian temperament to remember that Borrow was a pupil at grammar school together with James Brooke, who became Rajah Brooke of Sarawak.

Moreover, people in the nineteenth century continued to read the travel literature of earlier times, which made the explorer one of the great heroes of nineteenth-century culture. One reader we happen to know about is Thoreau, thanks to the researches of J. A. Christie, reported in his Thoreau as World Traveller. Thoreau read the collections of Hakluyt, Purchas, and Drake; but also the works of the Spaniards, like Columbus, Balboa, and Ponce de Leon; and also Frobisher, de Soto, Cartier, Hudson. But three-quarters of his travel-reading was written after 1800, and half of that was contemporary—written between 1832 and 1865. This meant books about travels in Japan, the Arctic and Antarctic, the West and South America, and, more latterly, Africa and Asia. He read, Mr. Christie calculates, about twelve such books a year.

One favorite was Alexander Henry, whose Travels in Canada 1760-76, Thoreau said, was "like the argument to a great poem on the primitive state of the country and its inhabitants." This—the relation to legend and myth—was Thoreau's main interest in such reading. In his Journal for March 16, 1852, he writes, "The volumes of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, which lie so near us on the shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgotten and not implied by our literature and newspapers. When I looked into Purchas's Pilgrims, it affected me like looking into an impassable swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses, and stretched out along the ground, were making haste to become peat. These old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literature to spring in." His language implies fertility even when it asserts decay. And indeed a new literature did spring up—that of Kingsley and Kipling. Whether Thoreau would have approved of that literature we cannot say; but it is clear that he was concerned for the tradition of thought we are following. (We should note a certain likeness between life at Waiden and life on Crusoe's island; and a certain fondness in Thoreau for guns and hunting.) He read even the boys' books of the period; notably those of Captain Mayne Reid, whom we shall come to. He read each Reid tale, Desert Home, Boy Hunters, and Forest Exiles, as they came out in the '50s. (The last is a Swiss Family Robinson set in Peru.) He read and reread Reid's Young Voyagers; The Boy Hunters in the North.

Thus the engineer, the explorer, the missionary, and the Indian soldier, all in different ways continued and developed the Crusoe image of heroism. Nineteenth-century readers, at many levels of literacy, made a cult of those heroes. And at the end of the century, boys were urged to do the same, by a variety of institutional means.

If we turn now to fiction, we can begin with Captain Marryat, who wrote very popular books, first for men and then for boys, in the first half of the nineteenth century. He and Cooper together invented the genre of sea fiction at a significant level of intelligence and taste. Marryat was often said to be the best recruiting officer the British Navy had. His Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836) is an adventure tale of the kind we have studied, but set on shipboard. The hero's father had been mad about equality and other French Revolutionary ideas, so Jack has some hard lessons in discipline to learn when he joins a ship of the Royal Navy, but he is fundamentally good-natured—being a typical adventure hero. Thus in the course of many adventures he acquires a Black Prince, Mesty, who has tales to tell of savage despotism; a devoted friend and comrade, Gascoigne; and an exotic bride, Donna Agnes, whom he rescues from the clutches of wicked priests. Marryat used several of the motifs that Cooper used (in The Prairie, for instance) and which Defoe or Scott had used before him. He modified rather than transformed the energizing myth of the system.

But Mr. Midshipman Easy had something of Regency jauntiness, and in 1841 Marryat showed his alertness to the new Victorian mood by writing a more serious, an Evangelical adventure tale for children, Masterman Ready. This is the story of the Seagrave family who are shipwrecked on to a desert island while on their way to Australia. They learn to survive there in Robinson Crusoe fashion, their adventures rising to a climax with a battle against savages and a last-minute rescue. The differences from Defoe's book largely arise from the fact that the central figure is not an individual but a family. This change was introduced by Wyss in Swiss Family Robinson and Marryat consciously set out to improve on Wyss. The change brought with it not only a domestic life-style in the wilderness, but a narrative change, in the more moralistic differentiation of roles played by the different children (and the adults, but they are less important). Here William is definitively a good boy, while Tommy is naughty, and precipitates the catastrophe. By letting the water out of the drinking cask the family relies on while it is besieged by savages, he creates a critical emergency; Masterman Ready saves them by crawling out of the stockade to get water for Mrs. Seagrave and the babies, but is killed.

Ready is Marryat's crucial invention, and one that opened the way for many Victorian adaptations of the adventure tale. He is a common seaman, who has been fifty years at sea, and attaches himself to the genteel Seagrave family, and especially to William, even before the wreck; after the wreck he is their instructor in the practical arts of survival. He is a Natty Bumppo figure, except that he has a wild past to repent—which he narrates serially and edifyingly to William—and that he holds by a more Evangelical morality. His function is indicated by the name "Masterman"; he introduces the principle of social hierarchy even into the wilderness and adventure setting.

The book's Victorian prudence is indicated by its teaching about Empire and about discipline. Ready tells William, ". . . there is more work got out of men in a well-conducted man-of-war than there can in the merchant service in double the time . . . I should never have known what could be done by order and arrangement, if I had not been pressed on board a man-of-war. . . . I found that everything was done in silence" (p. 120). And William is even taught that all empires grow old and decay, that the British Empire will, too, and one day it may be the turn of black races to be great. This, then, is a highly moralized version of modernist adventure. The balance between Brahmin and merchant has shifted in favor of the former, and aristomilitary values are largely repudiated.

That story reflected the early Victorian mood, full of the vigor of English Puritanism, but at odds with the imperial situation. It was replaced in the second half of the century by something almost opposite. English readers soon passed from semi-Defoe adventure to ultra-Scott romance; to, for instance, Charles Kingsley, another extremely popular Victorian writer, and with higher intellectual claims.³ His Elizabethan adventure tale, Westward Ho! was published in 1855, but reprinted very often. It was, for instance, officially distributed to English troops in the Crimean War, and after a new edition in 1857, it was reprinted three times in the '60s, twelve times in the '70s, eight times in the '80s, and altogether thirty-eight times by 1897. It was dedicated to two men, Rajah Brooke of Sarawak, and Bishop Selwyn of New Zealand, both of whom possessed "a virtue even purer and more heroic than the Elizabethan." That suggests Kingsley's key contribution to Victorianism and to the adventure tale—the idea of recapturing Elizabethan vigor (in somewhat purified form)—of assimilating the two ages to each other.

The hero is a "glorious lad," Amyas Leigh, who is much closer to the fiery hero of chivalric romance than to the prudent Crusoe-type, but who represents a new stress, derived from the sagas, on primitive and simple-minded strength. Kingsley describes him as a savage but simple-hearted giant, but also "a symbol of brave young England longing to wing its way out of its island prison, to discover and to traffic, to colonize and to civilize, until no wind can sweep the earth which does not bear the echoes of an English voice" (p. 10). The shout that greeted Amyas's victory was, we are told, "the birth-paean of North America, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Isles, of free commerce and free colonization over the whole earth." He is contrasted with his clever consumptive brother, Frank, and his hysterical Catholic cousin Eustace, who has been corrupted by Jesuit teachers, and whose face often writhes with envy, malice, and revenge. Amyas has been brought up by his widowed and martyred mother, and by stately Sir Richard Grenville. There is a lot of North Devon scenery and legend, and many historical characters, with elaborately Elizabethan language, verse, pageants, etc. (Kingsley's method is derived from Scott at his most "historical.") Defoe-virtues are represented only in the merchant, Mr. Salterne, a minor character and not much favored by the author. Romantic chivalry is the keynote of the author's values, and Spenser, Raleigh, and Sidney are his historical heroes.

Unlike Scott, Kingsley is very Protestant and even anti-Catholic. This, like the saga influence, derives from Carlyle, and reflects a recharging of the modern world system with moral righteousness of a more imperialist and military kind. Rose Salterne is the beauty of North Devon, and Amyas and five other glorious lads who love her form a chivalric Brotherhood of the Rose, and take an oath to all go away for three years and not court her, for fear that mutual competition may injure their mutual brotherhood. (This curious way to express their love is to be explained by the author's covert malevolence against Rose, and women, and sex.) While they are away, Rose is seduced by a Spaniard, Don Guzman, and elopes with him to Spain, and subsequently to South America, where Don Guzman is associated with the rape of Peru. Amyas sets off in pursuit of her, but she has been abandoned by Don Guzman and fallen a prey to the Inquisition, in whose hands she dies. Amyas then pursues Don Guzman, finally kills him in the battle that defeated the Armada, and—having been blinded in that battle, and so reduced to a status for which marriage is not inappropriate—marries Ayancora. She is a new and much-to-be repeated motif—adapted from Cortes's Marina; Ayancora is an Indian princess Amyas picked up in his travels, but is really an English girl abandoned in the jungle as a baby and worshiped by the savages because she is white. Marrying her, Amyas incorporates—without any real miscegenation—primitive powers. Westward Ho! tells the story of the ousting of Spain by England from the leadership of the modern system, one of the key episodes in the history of that system. But morally and aesthetically it is a lurid fantasy of power and revenge and hatred, on quite a different, and lower, level, from the other adventure tales.

It is worth taking a brief look at some nonfiction by Kingsley, because he was a central figure in the Victorian propaganda for empire and adventure. In The Heroes or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children (1868) he says that "heroes" used to mean (when nations were young) men who dared more than other men. Then it came to mean men who helped their countries. And now it means men who suffer pain and grief. (This idea is linked, paradoxically, to the atavistic worship of animal vigor in Amyas Leigh; Kingsley's moral imagination accords the primacy to pain and grief—to passivity—and as a result his historical and political imagination has no effective moral component.)

And his The Roman and the Teuton (1864) warns England against the fate of Rome and other empires. In the early years of Christendom, the Teutons were "Forest Children," a young and strong race, like English sailors and navies now, while the Romans were subtle and sophisticated. (William Morris took up this story in his late romance, The House of the Wolfings.) The Roman palace was "a sink of corruption," where eunuchs, concubines, spies abounded. Kingsley warns his listeners, who were the undergraduates at Cambridge, where he was Professor of History, to beware of a similar corruption at home. "Forget for a few minutes that you are Englishmen, the freest and bravest nation upon earth, strong in all that gives real strength, and with a volunteer army which is now formidable by numbers and courage. . . ." (p. 32). It can happen in England, too. Unbridled indulgence of the passions produces frivolity and effeminacy, as we see in the French noblesse of the ancien régime, in the Spaniards in America, and in the Italians in their once-great cities. National life is grounded in morality, that is, on the life of the family. "The muscle of the Teuton" was always combined with moral purity, and this gave him, "as it may give you, gentlemen, a calm and steady brain, and a free and loyal heart; the energy which springs from health; the self-respect which comes from self-restraint" . . . and so on (p. 38). Here we see the late Victorian version of the WASP hero, containing recognizable elements of Defoe and Scott, but also something else. That hero now embodies racist and atavistic energies.

Kingsley draws several contrasts between the Roman Empire and the British Empire in India, where the moral roles of imperial power and native population are reversed. "The Goth was very English; and the overcivilized, learned, false, profligate Roman was the very counterpart of the modern Brahmin" (p. 114). Only the English among the Goths' descendants preserved the Gothic heritage of freedom, and so they are anti-imperialist even in India. Kingsley's main hero in this book is Dietrich of Bern, who "went adventures." Dietrich, he says, has been criticized on the grounds that his civilized qualities only went skin-deep; that if you scratched him you'd find a barbarian. But this is really a high compliment, he argues. For Kingsley's message is always to cultivate the barbaric qualities in the individual and the nation; and that is one of the messages of most nineteenth-century adventure tales after him.⁴

That call sounds loud and clear in Kipling and Haggard, who form the climax to this chapter, but there are several other writers who modified or extended the range of the adventure-myth, before I come to them. For instance, there is Alexandre Dumas, one of the adventure tellers with the most international and long-lasting audiences. He will remind us of the pan-European character of modernist imperialism. Dumas was born in 1803, the son of one of Napoleon's generals, and though he lost his father at the age of three, he grew up on the tales of his father's exploits, and on the tales of adventure and bloodshed which the Napoleonic era left behind. His work is a literary equivalent to his father's career. Hippolyte Parigot said, "If Danton and Napoleon were exemplars of Gallic energy, Dumas, in The Three Musketeers, is the national novelist who puts it into words."

Having read Scott, and seen Shakespeare performed in Paris, Dumas wrote Henri III et sa Cour (staged in 1830), and set out to do for French history what the English writers were doing for English, and the American writers for America. (In 1838 he adapted Cooper's The Pilot as a serial for Le Siècle, and it attracted five thousand new subscribers in three weeks.) In 1844 he produced The Three Musketeers, also as a serial; drawing his historical material, incidentally, from Courtilz, the French Defoe.⁵ The confrontation at the heart of that book, between Cardinal Richelieu, compact of oldman wisdom—cold, inhuman, unhealthy—and the four healthy young men, who are a composite representation of France's young-man vitality, is an important new motif of adventure. It reconstitutes the framework of the story of the brothers. That motif was to be repeated again and again, notably by Kipling, in the Puck of Pook's Hill stories.

Then Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo (1846) made triumphant use of that romantic revenge motif which was employed by later adventure writers, like Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. And Dumas himself was another example of the writer as entrepreneur, on the largest possible scale. From the beginning he planned to put all French history into fiction; he made a fortune, built himself a great house (called Monte Cristo) like Scott and Twain; and went bankrupt, like Scott and Twain. He translated into literary terms (though terms which literature-as-a-system rejected) the energies of nineteenth-century France. And he distilled a version for child-reader—the new class of readers.

The Critical History of Children's Literature says "During the years from 1840 onward, boys were exploring remote regions, sailing the high seas, escaping from cannibals or redskins in the company of heroes . . ." (p. 237). This was something radically new. The genre of children's literature had been invented, we may roughly say, by the Puritans; in verse quite explicitly by Bunyan and Watts; Bunyan's Book for Boys and Girls, 1686, and Watts's Divine and Moral Songs for Children, 1715, which was influenced by Bunyan's example; in prose, more accidentally, by Bunyan and Defoe, with Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, not written for children, but soon given to them to read. The only Tory who contributed was Swift, in Gulliver's Travels, and that was read as if Defoe had written it. Later in the eighteenth century there were big successes like Giles Gingerbread and Goody Two-Shoes, but the message and the myth remained the same. Prudence and piety were the values recommended. The new nineteenth-century development (apart from Alice in Wonderland, which stands by itself) was in stories which operated on almost opposite values.

The middle of the nineteenth century saw a very striking and very significant change in the culture's idea of children. Their literature was in effect captured by the aristomilitary caste. Adventure took the place of fable; and the adventure took on the characteristics of romance. Children's literature became boys' literature; it focused its attention on the Empire and the Frontier; and the virtues it taught were dash, pluck, and lionheartedness, not obedience, duty, and piety. For instance, "Oliver Optic" in America (where children's literature had been very pious), wrote a Starry Flag series 1867-1869, and an Army and Navy series 1865-1894. Another dominant interest was science and invention, and that was only slightly indirect in its support of the same values. Edward Stratemeyer wrote a long series about Tom Swift, boy adventurer, full of grit and ginger, who goes up in balloons, drives an electric car, fires an electric rifle, and so on. Stratemeyer started a syndicate of writers to use his name in 1903, because he was so successful. In 1926, 98 percent of the children questioned in a survey listed a Stratemeyer title as a favorite and in the '20s and '30s the Tom Swift series sold fifteen million.

Kingsley, and for that matter Scott, were read also by children, but some authors were read only by them, and these authors too were aristomilitary by affiliation. Among English writers of boys' adventure books, one of the most notable was George Alfred Henty. He wrote nearly eighty such books, with titles like With Clive in India, With Roberts to Pretoria, and so on, stories of the achievements of the British army in colonial settings. Henty borrowed a good deal from standard histories and geographies, so his books were also educational. They rely on Anglo-Saxon racism, assigning stereotype identities to Latins, Easterners, and "natives." By Sheer Pluck describes Africans as being "just like children. . . . They are always laughing or quarrelling. They are good-natured, and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time, clever upto a point, densely stupid beyond."⁶ (It is the idea implicit in Defoe's Four Year Voyage of Captain Roberts.)

Most of Henty's books begin with a letter addressed to "My dear lads," and teaching some homely truth. He had himself been a puny and sickly boy, who spent most of his childhood in bed, and was bullied at school. Then he took up boxing and yachting, became a man and a war correspondent; and as a writer, became a preacher of manliness. His biography by G. Manville Fenn (published in 1910) says, "There was nothing namby-pamby in Henty's writings. . . . 'No,' he said, 'I never touch on love interest.'" His study was full of pipe-smoke and native weapons, and he had a "Johnsonian" manner with the effete and impudent. When met in the Strand, he had always just returned from wide open spaces, and was sternly silent about subjects of mere chatter. Fenn says his books are "essentially manly, and he used to say that he wanted his boys to be bold, straightforward, and ready to play a young man's part, not to be milksops. He had a horror of a lad who displayed any weak emotion and shrank from shedding blood, or winced at any encounter" (p. 334). He contributed stories to boys' magazines like Captain, Chums, Great Thoughts, Young England, and Union Jack.

In The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell says that the soldiers in that war had learned the language of patriotic duty from Henty and Rider Haggard among the novelists, and from Robert Bridges and Henry Newbolt among the poets. Newbolt was famous for "Lampaida Vitae," with the famous refrain, "Play up, play up, and play the game." He will remind us of the important part played in this manliness propaganda by the public schools. In that poem, and many others, the subject moves from a public school to a colonial battle, and the first is shown to be essentially a preparation for the second. Newbolt was the poet of Clifton College, and wrote a famous poem, "Clifton Chapel," which begins with the stanza,

This is the Chapel: here, my son,
Your father thought the thoughts of youth,
And heard the words that one by one
The touch of life has turned to truth.
Here in a day that is not far,
You, too, may speak with noble ghosts
Of manhood and the vows of war
You made before the Lord of Hosts.

(We should not take this school militarism for granted. It was something new, and Thomas Arnold would have been shocked by it.)

At the end Newbolt added a note, "Thirty-seven Old Cliftonian officers served in the campaign of 1887 on the Indian frontier, of whom twenty-two were mentioned in dispatches and six recommended for the D.S.O. Of the 300 Cliftonians who served in the war in South Africa, 30 were killed in action and 14 died of wounds or fever." Then he added a supplementary stanza.

Clifton remember thy sons who fell
Fighting far oversea,
For they in a dark hour remembered well
Their warfare learned of thee.

Fussell tells us that General Haig, Commander in Chief during the Great War, was a lifelong friend of Newbolt's, and that the latter sneered at Wilfred Owen and poets of that kind as "broken men."

Literature of this kind was spread largely by means of the boys' magazines to which Henty contributed so much. The most famous of these was G. A. Hutchinson's Boys' Own Paper, which brought Henty, Ballantyne, Michael Fenn, and W. H. G. Kingston to a large audience, and, as The Literature and Art of the Empire says, made patriots of its readers. It began in 1879, belonged to the Religious Tract Society, but was above all patriotic, though it printed foreigners like Jules Verne as well as all the famous English ones. A typical title from Volume I is Kingston's From Powder-Monkey to Admiral; the navy had a whole chapel to itself in the cathedral of British patriotism. There were also publishing projects like a series of biographies, edited by Sir Harry Wilson, called "The Builders of Greater Britain" and another edited by Sir William Hunter, called "The Rulers of India." (This is the background against which to see Kipling.) There was, this volume says, a literary empire, consisting of Kipling's India, Haggard's South Africa, Gilbert Parker's Canada, and inspired by the songs of Tennyson, Henley, Newbolt, and Masefield.

Comparable with Henty in popularity, and even more popular internationally, was Captain Mayne Reid, 1818-1883, for a time the most popular English author in Russia, for instance; also translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish. He was born in Ireland of Presbyterian parents, and left for America in 1839. Reid was a militant and indeed military liberal. He fought in the Mexican War, and was the first man in the U.S. force to enter Mexico City. In 1848 he published The Rifle Rangers, his first romance, read and admired by Dumas and Lamartine. In 1849, stirred by the news of the revolutions in Europe, he organized a legion to go to Kossuth's support in the revolt of Hungary against Austria. Then his romance The Scalp Hunters sold a million copies in England, and was translated into as many languages as Pilgrim's Progress. Another book of his published that year, The Desert House or The English Family Robinson, began a series.

But he also continued his political activities, and it is important to note their anti-imperialist character. He had become Kossuth's friend, and in 1852 they planned to go together to Milan to fight against the Austrians for Italian freedom. In Reid the connection between book adventure and real-life adventure was especially close. But though he was a Liberal, and Kipling a Tory, both men established rifle clubs, so that young Englishmen should get some military training; and there is no real discontinuity between them culturally, despite the political difference. Like Henty's, Reid's books care as much about geography and history as about moral ideas or narrative—The Castaways, 1870, for instance, quotes Wallace and Livingstone for a page at a time, and has a trivial plot that seems not seriously meant. Indeed, because of the predominance of the killer albatross and the hammerhead shark over the human characters, the book produces an effect quite like those of Crane and Conrad.

A very important development in the boys' books of the second half of the century was the synthetic, framework story, like The Three Musketeers. One very popular example was W. H. G. Kingston's The Three Midshipmen. Kingston (1814-1880) wrote 150 books for children. This one begins at a school, and puts together an English, a Scots, and an Irish boy, who were to appear again and again in a whole series of books. The English boy, Jack Rogers, takes the lead; he is a squire's son, solid and pugnacious; Alick Murray is serious, clever, and cautious; while Paddy Adair is full of fun, lovable, but thoughtless. This trio is the United Kingdom in literary form, and they act out the same function—of dominating the rest of the empire.

At school the boys have to deal with a soft, fat sneak called Bully Pigeon, who embodies the least attractive aspects of Englishness and turns up later in their lives as a cowardly civilian in the Mediterranean, and then as a would-be sophisticate on their ship to China. Bully Pigeon boasts himself an atheist, but whines when he gets into trouble, and soon dies. Aboard ship, Honest Dick Needham, of the lower classes, comes to the help of the young gentlemen time and time again. In the Mediterranean, the three chase Greek pirates and smash Mehmet Ali on the Sultan of Turkey's behalf. Their adventures frequently lead to explosions, in which human limbs mingle with fragments of stone and iron. Then they go to Sierra Leone, where they chase slavers, and first meet the Portuguese villain, Dom Diogo, whom they pursue through several episodes. (England had gained great moral prestige by suppressing the slave trade in its own dominions, and Portugal great infamy by not doing so.) They meet a Black Prince and acquire a faithful Friday-style Negro, Wasser. Later they go to Singapore and Hong Kong, where they chase opium clippers. Thus they cover the whole empire, and make it, by their adventures, vivid and glorious to their readers.

Rather similar in synthetic form is R. M. Ballantyne's Coral Island. In this adventure three boys are wrecked on an island; Jack Martin is eighteen and a natural leader; Ralph, who tells the story, is fifteen and serious and "old-fashioned," and Peterkin Gay is thirteen or fourteen, little and quick and mischievous.⁷ Like Crusoe, they land with an axe, an oar, an iron hoop, a telescope, some whipcord and a broken penknife, and have to make do. But Ballantyne puts much more stress than Defoe does on the Paradisal beauty of both land and sea, and the heroes are seen more romantically and chivalrically than Crusoe. (Ballantyne was much influenced by Scott.) Jack is lion-like; tall, strapping, broad-shouldered, handsome, good-humored; Peterkin expects him to become king of a native population. When cannibals arrive (looking more like demons than human beings) Jack goes berserk while fighting them. (The idea of an Englishman going berserk, when pushed too far, was a much-repeated device, derived from the sagas.) Later they get to Fiji, where the natives, being pagans, feed their eels with babies, and fill their temple with human bones. The story contains some Evangelical teaching, but puts more stress on the related secular virtues, for instance, cold bathing and training in observation. (This is the book which William Golding transvalued to write Lord of the Flies, one of the clearest cases of post-1945 reversal of sentiment.)

Another major force in fiction and ideas at the popular level in the nineteenth century was Jules Verne, and his followers. Though Verne imitated Dumas to begin with, he had more in common with Defoe than with Scott, while Dumas's affinity was the reverse. Verne's work is thought of usually as science fiction, but it is just as much adventure fiction, and his heroes are adventurers. And his case is an interesting one for us because there have been some studies of his work, in French, which are not too far removed from ours in point of view.

Jules Verne was born in 1828, and though he trained in law, always wanted to write. He met Dumas in 1849, sat in his box for the first stage performance of Three Musketeers, and became a sort of secretary to him. But he also made friends with Jacques Arago, a blind explorer, whose brother was an astronomer. Verne had always loved science, and also the sea and ships. In 1862 he wrote Cinq Semaines en Ballon, the story of a British eccentric, Dr. Ferguson, who floats across Africa in a balloon. He took this novel to a publisher, Jules Hetzel, a liberal who had been Lamartine's Chef de Cabinet in his Ministry in 1848, and thereafter for a time exiled by Napoleon III. (This liberal connection expresses an important tendency in the books.)

Hetzel gradually saw the immense potential in Verne's work. In 1866 the latter produced Les Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, about an English explorer, who races against his American rival, Altamont, to discover the North Pole; and for this book Hetzel wrote an advertising explanation of Verne's work in general: "Son but est, en effet, de résumer toutes les connaissances géographiques, géologiques, physiques, astronomiques, amassées par la science moderne, et de faire, sous la forme attrayante et pittoresque qui lui est propre, l'histoire de l'univers" (M-H. Huet, in L'Histoire des Voyages Extraordinaires, p. 20).

He used as models for his heroes mostly explorers like Livingstone, Stanley, Burton, De Brazza, the heroes of the nineteenth century. It is notable how many of his leading figures were Anglo-Saxon; Huet counts ninety Americans, eighty English, thirty Russians, and so on. The French tend to appear as comic savants, like Paganel, or comic servants, like Passepartout. But Verne had in fact strong anti-English prejudices; though he admired their tunnels and bridges, and their energy, sense, and progress, he hated their cruelty and love of profit.⁸ But still he judged them only by their own, modern system standards.

So it is not surprising that Verne wrote several Robinsonaden: L'Oncle Robinson, L'Ecole des Robinsons, La Seconde Patrie (an avowed continuation of The Swiss Family Robinson), and Deux Ans de Vacances. And his work is largely an energizing myth of the modern system. It is similar to Defoe's in emotional character. His works cannot be said to be novels, someone says, because they do not deal with love. He always declared he couldn't handle that subject; on the other hand he was proud of and conscientious about the science he included. Michel Corday says (quoted by Jean Jules-Verne) that he helped young readers to escape their "stupid jail. . . . He inspired in us a desire to know about the universe, a taste for science, a dedication to masculine forms of energy."

When Chesneaux says that Verne is a Utopian Socialist, he is thinking of the Saint-Simonian brand of socialism; and in particular of the technocrats. The Saint-Simonian, Enfantin, became administrator of the French railways under the Third Empire, and other Saint-Simonians were employed in big projects like the Suez Canal and the plan for a Channel tunnel. Verne's friend Nadar, who is depicted in some of the novels, was de Lesseps's secretary. He often describes possible engineering projects, like a giant lighthouse on Cape Horn, or a canal to irrigate the Sahara. Many of his friends were polytechnicians, and he assigned that status to some of his favorite characters. "Paganel" was an avowed Saint-Simonian, and Indes Noires is a technocratic fantasy.

This line of imagination, which runs through much science fiction, is one we can only assume that Defoe would have found very congenial, as did H. G. Wells, the modern Defoe. Chesneaux says that Verne was, like Wells, an author of politics fiction as much as of science fiction. And though Wells had a much more literary imagination than Verne, it is fair to bracket them together. What strikes one about The War of the Worlds is the vivid way England is imagined—and imagined as vulnerable; Wells evokes the anxiety of riches and a panic at the rout of civilization. He presents London as an enormous magnificent city, about to be destroyed, and England as an entirely tamed country, at the mercy of fierce invaders. This is of course the vision of much imperialist fiction—a soft, rich, splendid mother country, inviting rape by the hardy savage tribes outside. It is Kipling's vision; while on the other hand the narrative structure of Wells's book is that of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.

An interesting book which connects Verne with Defoe is Emile Cammaerts's Discoveries in England, of 1930. Cammaerts was a Frenchman long resident in England. He says he was struck as a child by the number of Englishmen who played leading roles in Verne's stories, and finally realized that his hero, Phileas Fogg (in Around the World in 80 Days), was just another version of Robinson Crusoe, whom he had been in love with a long time. Crusoe was for him as a child "the ideal type of adventurer—courageous, patient, as well as wise and just in his relations with the savages"; whereas Cammaerts knew that temperamentally he couldn't emulate d'Artagnan's bravado, or the military dash of French adventure heroes in general. (He was pointing to a contrast between mercantile and military heroes as well as between English and French.) Crusoe was a settler, and carried, "in a kind of frog, instead of a sword and dagger, a little saw and a hatchet, one on one side, one on the other." This is a highly significant contrast, for Cammaerts. The English adventure novel, he says, is geographical, where the French is historical; the English dream is in a sense outside history—at least the history of militarism and domination.

Cammaerts mentions Robert Louis Stevenson's voyages as an example of the compulsion felt by every English author to live out something of an adventure himself; and Stevenson was a symbolic figure as man as well as author to many readers of adventure at the turn of the century. His family were famous consulting engineers, who had built lighthouses all around Scotland, and harbors all around the world. They were examples of Defoe's and Smiles's engineer-heroes. He had difficulty in reconciling his parents to his vocation to be a writer, but in fact he turned their engineering work to fictional images as much as Dumas turned his father's military exploits into fiction.

Stevenson finished Treasure Island in 1882, and it was a tremendous success, both accepting and changing the conventions of adventure. In "How This Book Came To Be," he shows how much it was a composite of earlier books in that tradition. The parrot came from Robinson Crusoe, the stockade from Masterman Ready, the chest from Washington Irving, and so on. There is much reference to Scott, whom Stevenson was very conscious of rivaling, and in fact there is much more of him than of Defoe. Stevenson's is historical expertise rather than practical. He said that the story began with the drawing of a map and that it was told to his stepson, with his father's collaboration. It is palpably the fantasy of men-being-boys. There is no real interest in large historical forces. What is strikingly new about it in a generic way is that a boy plays the leading part and tells the story; and that the violence is much more open and important.

The end of this sort of adventure romance was announced by another Scots writer whom it is suitable to connect with Stevenson in many ways, J. M. Barrie. The servitor imperialism of the Scots writers from Scott on has played an important part in the reinforcement of modernist values in England, as we have seen.⁹ (John Buchan, another Scot, was the last of the old-style adventure writers.) Barrie was no conscious or intentional rebel against tradition. As a boy, he read Defoe, Cooper, Stevenson, and at the end of his life, when he was guardian of the boys for and about whom he wrote Peter Pan, he was, they tell us, always eager for them to be involved in sports and athletics, and reluctant to see them concerned with the arts. He wanted Kims and Hucks about him, not Little Lord Fauntleroys.

But his own temperament, which was expressed in Peter Pan, was purely whimsical and playful, and deeply averse from serious adventure or violence of any kind. Peter Pan, 1904, is about a Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, and though it uses all the devices of the boys' adventure story, the Indians, the hollow tree, the underground house, the lost boys, the pirates, it treats them all as conscious fantasy, and so denies their connection with the real world, a connection which is the life line of any energizing myth. But of course a work so purely playful has a thousand faces, and this one was not what most people, or Barrie himself, saw. To them Peter Pan seemed like a continuation of Treasure Island, the same themes transposed into another key. But the end of Empire was at hand, as far as England was concerned, and that feeling is transmitted, all innocently, through Barrie's work.

Treasure Island had been a very great success of the old kind; W. E. Henley called it the best boys' book since Robinson Crusoe, and Andrew Lang said, "Except for Tom Sawyer and The Odyssey, I never liked a romance so much." (Implicitly that comment conjures up a whole scheme of literary tradition, which would relate literature closely to imperialism, and relegate the serious domestic novel to the periphery of the system.) It prompted, amongst other things, King Solomon's Mines, which Rider Haggard published in 1885. This too was very popular; it sold 31,000 copies in twelve months, was praised by literary men, and read aloud in public schools. And though Haggard didn't have Stevenson's finished artistry, nor anything like Kipling's talent and taste, still some parts of his work have some literary importance.

Haggard was born in 1856, and went out to Natal with Sir Henry Bulwer, when the latter became Lieutenant Governor in 1875. When England annexed the Transvaal in 1877, it was Haggard who ran up the Union Jack there. Then he went back to England in 1881, published Cetewayo and His White Neighbors (which urged the Government to be aggressive in South Africa) and King Solomon's Mines in 1885 and She in 1889. She is a curiosity from our point of view, because the myth is implicitly erotic and in some sense feminist—the major character being an immortal incarnation of femininity; it is the sort of idea D. H. Lawrence played with, and The Plumed Serpent is not totally dissimilar from She; and yet Haggard employs many of the traditional adventure motifs, which are so tied to opposite values. (The result is to embarrass the characterization of the young man hero, whom the story keeps turning into Chéri, despite the story-teller's determination to make him stay Tom Brown.) This is the only time when one of these adventure romances is told—in part—in the service of the Mother Goddess.

King Solomon's Mines is not very interesting, though one should note the treasure motif, taken over from Stevenson, and from now on standard; and the introduction of the old-hunter narrator, Allan Quatermaine. There is no striking similarity between him and Natty Bumppo. His literal model is probably African hunters like Frederick Courtney Selous, who advised Rhodes, and planted the Union Jack in Mashonaland in 1891—"the king of the white hunters." In literary effect, the important thing about Quatermaine is a certain almost-Cockney tone, a self-deprecating and antiromantic humor which proved an effective literary crystallization of the modern man's self-awareness in the presence of primitive grandeur and savagery. It combined intimations given by both Defoe and Scott, and was developed further by Kipling and Edgar Wallace.

Haggard was deeply impressed with both the grandeur and the savagery of tribal life, and felt them to be in some sense truer than the civilized ideas of Victorian England. "Nineteen parts of our nature are savage, the twentieth civilized, but the last is spread over the rest like the blacking over a boot, or the veneer over a table; it is on the savage that we fall back in emergencies" (Allan Quatermaine, p. 16). The deeper philosophic note of Haggard's romances is thus quite strongly stoic and melancholy. King Solomon's Mines introduced, as well as an old hunter, a Black Prince, Umslopogaas (modeled, Haggard tells us, on a Swazi aide-de-camp he knew in 1860). In Allan Quatermaine, in which the main characters of the earlier novel return, Umslopogaas says, "Man is born to kill. He who kills not when his blood is hot is a woman and no man." And in tendency the story endorses this.

For instance, even in King Solomon's Mines, Sir Henry Curtis, who is usually described as an Arthurian knight in Victorian dress, in battle turns back into a Viking and a Berserker. And on page 108 of Allan Quatermaine we are told, "The Englishmen are adventurers to the backbone; the colonies which will in time become a great nation, will testify to the value of this spirit of adventure, which seems at first sight mere luxury." Like Kingsley, Haggard saw the value of savagery, especially for a ruling race.

Like Kipling, Haggard was deeply impressed by Rhodes, his achievements and his ideas; Haggard's fiction is in effect propaganda in Rhodes's service. Allan Quatermaine, published in 1887, begins in England, and the narrator's picture of the country is charged with anxiety and indeed anger. "This prim English country, with its prim hedgerows and cultivated fields . . . now for several years I have lived here in England, and have in my own stupid manner done my best to learn the ways of the children of light . . . and found civilization is only savagery silver-gilt. . . . It is on the savage that we fall back in emergencies. . . . Civilization should wipe away our tears, and yet we weep and cannot be comforted. Warfare is abhorrent to her, and yet we strike out for hearth and home, for honour and fair fame, and can glory in the blow" (p. 16).

Haggard's most impressive book is Nada the Lily, which came out in 1892, and was inspired by the story of Chaka the Zulu king, who ruled from 1800 to 1828, and is said to have caused the deaths of over a million people. This subject also inspired Bertram Mitford's The King's Assegai, which was published in 1894, and has a similar epic grandeur and ferocity. The translations of Homer taught in the public schools, and even more the Norse and Germanic sagas that aroused so much interest in the nineteenth century, provided a literary model for which these African subjects were perfect.

Haggard compares Chaka to Napoleon and Tiberius, and then dedicates his book, in Zulu style, to "Sompsen, my father," the white man who had 3000 black warriors shouting for his blood, but calmly replied that for every drop of blood they shed of his, a hundred avengers should rise from the sea; so that they gave him the Bayete and said that the spirit of Chaka dwelt in him. This is a key idea—to show natives that white heroes have as savage a splendor as they.

In his Preface Haggard says that his intention is to convey "the remarkable spirit that animated these kings and their subjects." The Zulu military organization, "perhaps the most wonderful thing the world has seen," is already a thing of the past. He says he has learned to think and speak like a Zulu, in order to tell this story. The story is told to a white man by Chaka's witch doctor, Mopo, who has known Chaka from childhood. Mopo has some of Quatermaine's antiheroic realism. Umslopogaas is Chaka's son, but is brought up as Mopo's, and consequently as Nada's brother, since Chaka always has his children killed. Umslopogaas wins a comrade, Galazi the Wolf, who has won a great club by passing the night in a cave inside Ghost Mountain, where the Stone Witch sits forever, waiting for the world to die. In the cleft between her breasts are the bones of human sacrifice. Umslopogaas also wins a great weapon, an axe, but to get it has to marry, which spoils their comradeship. "Galazi was also great among the people, but dwelt with them little, for best he loved the wild woods and the mountain's breast, and often, as of old, he swept at night across the forest and the plains, and the howling of the ghost wolves went with him" (p. 153). (Galazi was the inspiration for Mowgli, Kipling said.) When disaster finally comes, and the comrades know they must die, Umslopogaas says, "May we one day find a land where there are no women, and war only, for in that land we shall grow great. But now, at the least, we will make a good end to this fellowship and the Grey People shall fight their fill, and the old stone witch who sits aloft, waiting for the world to die, shall smile to see that fight, if she never smiled before" (p. 285). This is not in the spirit of Defoe or Scott; but it takes something from Kingsley, Morris, and Carlyle.

The most impressive passages are those describing battle, or meditating on it. Their stychomythic dialogues and ritual and rhythmic formulas are not original, but they have some power.

Ah, the battle!—the battle! In those days we knew how to fight, my father! All night our fires shone out across the valley; all night the songs of soldiers echoed down the hills. Then the grey dawning came, the oxen lowed to the light, the regiments arose from their bed of spears; they sprang up and shook the dew from their hair and shields—yes! they arose! The glad to die! . . . The morning breeze came up and found them, their plumes bent in the breeze; like a plain of seeding grass they bent, the plumes of soldiers ripe for the assegai. Up over the shoulder of the hill came the sun of Slaughter; it glowed red upon the red shields; red grew the place of killing; the white plumes of chiefs were dipped in the blood of heaven. They knew it; they saw the omen of death, and, ah! they laughed in the joy of the waking of battle. What was death? Was it not well to die on the spear? What was death? Was it not well to die for the king? Death was the arms of Victory. Victory should be their bride that night, and ah! her breast is fair. (pp. 48-49)

The feeling that passage expresses—and there is much of it in Nada the Lily and Haggard's other books—is rare in English literature. That literature on the whole, and certainly in the nineteenth century, had been in the keeping of what Haggard called "the children of light"; let us say George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and the novelists Tolstoy approved in What is Art? What Haggard introduced was a lyrical or threnodic militarism, better fitting an army-focused culture like Prussia or Russia; and in King Solomon's Mines there is also a new emphasis upon regiments—their organization and training, but also their pride and glory.

There was to be something of this in Kipling, too; it was the two together who demonstrated in literary terms what Hannah Arendt called the Boomerang effect. The values by which the English on their frontier lived and imagined life, though the opposite of those which they proclaimed at home, crept home in novel form. The liberal values of the modern system, productivity and enlightened self-interest, etc., are undermined. The oppositeness itself took its toll, as we see in Quatermaine's alienation from England. The two effects together produced a kind of pessimism echoed in Mopo's remark, "Nothing matters, except being born. That is a mistake, my father!" (p. 39). The story of the Zulus made a particularly strong impression on the English imagination; they seemed terrible but noble, above all "worthy adversaries." They so appear, for instance, in one of Lady Butler's most famous battle pictures, "The Defence of Rourke's Drift"; and Cetewayo, who paid a visit to England, became a figure in the popular vocabulary—in music-hall jokes, for instance.

Haggard's friend, Andrew Lang, spoke in 1901 of a new "exotic" literature, "whose writers have at least seen new worlds for themselves; have gone out of the streets of the overpopulated lands into the open air; have sailed and ridden, walked and hunted; have escaped from the smoke and fog of towns. New strength has come from fresher air into their brains and blood . . ." (Brian Street's The Savage in Literature, p. 11). And it is significant that Lang was an anthropologist. There was a strong racist interest in anthropology then. The Anthropological Society itself declared in 1864 that black children develop only up to the age of twelve—an idea you can find in both Henty and Kipling. To such ideas Darwin's influence added others, of man's nearness to the apes, the struggle for survival, the persistence or sudden development of monstrous specimens, and so on. This made "primitive man" seem very horrifying but very exciting. It has been proposed to call a whole group of novels that arose in the 1870s with Henty's book on the Ashanti, "the ethnographic novel." And there is also the "anthropological romance" genre which Leo J. Henkin discusses in Darwinism and the English Novel; these are novels written between 1890 and 1940 about fossil races of men or near-men. And then there is the whole Tarzan oeuvre. These all expressed and reinforced the trepidation of the imperialist race at the height of its powers. The anxiety of possession we noted in Defoe was an individual thing; by the time of Wells and Haggard it was national.

¹ According to Smith, scores of newspaper articles and periodicals and sermons also pointed out the likeness between Lawrence and Cromwell; both men cared naught for appearances, spoke freely, swept obstacles from their paths, worked like heroes, and made others work.

² Two more examples of this kind of adventure tale are Michael Scott's Tom Cringle's Log (Paris, 1836) and E. H. Trelawney's Adventures of a Younger Son (London, 1831). The first, though vigorous and stirring, is formally enchained to Smollett. The second is Romantic; as Byron said, Trelawney was "the personification of my Corsair. He sleeps with the poem under his pillow and all his past adventures and present manners aim at his personification" (Quoted in the Introduction to the Oxford English Novels edition of Adventures.). One point of interest is Trelawney's masculinism; in this, as in many other ways, he usefully exaggerates tendencies implicit in the adventure and romance forms. He wanted to call the book A Man's Life, and when Mary Shelley told him that women would not read the manuscript he showed her, he replied, "My life . . . is not written for the amusement of women . . . it is to men I write, and my first three volumes are principally adapted to sailors. England is a nautical nation . . ." (Introduction, Adventures).

³ Max Müller, in his memorial Preface to The Roman and The Teuton, described Kingsley as the ideal man. He recalled those ". . . features which Death had rendered calm, grand, sublime . . . How children delighted in him! How young, wild men believed in him, and obeyed him too! How women were captivated by his chivalry!" His funeral in 1875 collected men of all sorts, gypsies and farm-laborers, sailors, bishops, and governors. He will be missed "wherever Saxon speech and Saxon thought is understood."

⁴ In that message Kingsley was of course very unlike Macaulay and James Mill and the Utilitarians. But his view of India was not so remote from theirs. James Mill's History of British India gives a very Hobbesian idea of the state's origin, says J. W. Burrow, in his Evolution and Society. The state is seen as a machine, and the civil philosophy is as demonstrable as geometry is. His Books II and III try to determine the stage of civilization reached by native India. His criterion is as follows: "Exactly in proportion as Utility is the object of every pursuit may we regard a nation as civilized." (Quoted in Burrows, p. 45.) In India, of course, he found that many pursuits did not have Utility as their object. So Mill blamed the Orientalist scholars (like Sir William Jones) for inducing the West to overrate Indian culture, which was really very backward. "By conversing with the Hindus of today we in some manner converse with the Chaldeans and Babylonians." Mill, Macaulay, and the Whigs of the Edinburgh Review, were very rough in their judgments on the East in general—in conscious dissent from the eighteenth-century high-culture fondness for the exotic. Their line of thought may be associated with merchant-caste low culture—the cultural tendency to which Defoe belonged.

⁵ Indeed, Dumas's portrait of Richelieu is like Defoe's. Both portraits are composed of phrases like "exquisite subtlety" and "finished art." In the second issue of his Review, Defoe described Richelieu as "the most exquisite master of politics, Cardinal Richelieu, whose life and management may hereafter take up a considerable part of these papers . . . the most refined statesman in the world." And writing to Harley, Defoe recommended to the English statesman Richelieu's arrangement of having a series of three offices, each one more secret than the one before, and the third so private that no one was admitted except in the dark (Defoe, The Letters, p. 39). Another letter to Harley makes it clear how personally fascinated Defoe was; for he compares himself in Edinburgh, hiring people to betray their friends, with Richelieu. Richelieu was for Defoe what Macchiavelli was for the Elizabethans; and the fascination continued throughout the life of the modern system, as Dumas's success makes plain.

⁶ That book is credited with beginning the "ethnographic novels" which filled the penny dreadfuls after 1874. (See .) It is also the book in which Henty describes his trip up river with Stanley.

⁷ Ballantyne is an interesting figure, in a number of ways. He was son and nephew to the Ballantyne brothers who were close friends of Scott. They printed The Waverley Novels, and even copied the manuscripts out so that their employees should not see and recognize Scott's handwriting. Thus he was brought up in the Waverley cult, and was much influenced by it. But at sixteen he was sent out to work in the Hudson's Bay Company, and stayed there six years, 1841-1847. His first book, published in 1848, was entitled Hudson's Bay; while his first fiction, published in 1856, The Young Fur Traders, had the same setting. Thus he embodied two of the major ideas of Scotland, from our point of view; and from 1856 to 1894 he poured out a stream of very popular boys' fiction, which combined the two, and carried the message of adventure.

⁸ And this became stronger during his second period, according to Huet's classification. Between 1878 and 1879 his stories were mostly about colonization, and not about the adventures of colonizers but about native rebellions against them. He wrote about the Greek insurrection of 1826, the French-Canadian insurrection of 1837, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Bulgarian independence movement, and so on. His work became more literary, and made more reference to Scott. According to Jean Chesneaux (Une Lecture Politique de Jules Verne), there are three main strands to Verne's liberalism. He was in the tradition of 1848; that shows itself in Captain Nemo's gallery of heroes, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which included Kosciusko, Botzaris, O'Connell, Washington, Lincoln and Brown. (Compare Defoe's list of Protestant heroes, and Smiles's.) But he was also a Utopian socialist, whose heroes work for a scientific and fraternal exploitation of the earth. And he was finally an anarchic libertarian—against the police and for outlaws in general; his books show a strong interest in mutinies, and in islands which are milieux libres—alternatives to society.

In the third period, 1898 to 1905, according to Huet, he returned to the subject of voyages, but the mood of his work was much grimmer. L'Etonnante Aventure de la Mission Barsac, not published until 1914, tells of Henry Killer's wonderfully efficient settlement in Africa called Blackland, which makes use of ingenious ideas devised by the scientist Marcel Camaret, but works by slave labor. This is a dystopia, and all the enthusiasm for science of the earlier books has gone sour.

Of these three periods, the most important from our point of view is the first. Besides the titles already cited, it is worth mentioning Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, 1867-1868, a three-volume Odyssey about those children in search of their captain-father, who was shipwrecked while founding a Scots colony in Patagonia. The theme must remind us of Defoe, and it is worth nothing also the fondness of Verne for captains. After Captain Singleton and Captain Roberts, we have to wait until Verne began writing to meet such a concentration on this figure in fiction. The story of Captain Nemo, 1870, owes more to Dumas in the revenge motif, and is more politically motivated. Nemo is an Indian prince in disguise, and he sinks a British cruiser as part of his revenge. But L'Ile Mystérieuse (1873) is closer to the Crusoe pattern; an engineer, a journalist, a seaman, and a child are wrecked together, and are saved by the expertise of the engineer. He is an American called Cyrus Smith, who has as much skill of hand as ingenuity of mind, and they name the place Lincoln Island. It is, Chesneaux says, an Anglo-Saxon parable, a hymn to work.

⁹ Take for instance Andrew Lang, who played a large literary role, as the friend of Twain, Kipling, and Haggard, and who edited the Border Edition of Scott. In his introduction to Ivanhoe, 1894, Lang defended Scott thus—against Ruskin: "Perhaps Mr. Ruskin was never a boy. Scott, like Thackeray, had been a boy, and never forgot that happy company of knights, ladies, dragons, enchanters, all the world of Ariosto . . ." Lang's identification of boyhood with chivalry was of the first importance in the history of children's literature. So was his identification of romance with self-indulgence, in opposition to intelligence and criticism. He continues, "We cannot all be old and melancholy . . . There shall be cakes and ale, though all the critics be virtuous, and recommend stuff 'rich in heart-break'. Still shall the greenwood trees be green . . ." That pouting whimsy was so often employed by Scots writers that it comes to seem inherently Scottish.