



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 a
period when, as Miss Braddon remarks of the age of the Plantagenets,
"anything might happen." Recent discoveries, mainly by Dr. Schliemann
and Mr. Flinders Petrie, have shown that there really was much
intercourse between Heroic Greece, the Greece of the Achaeans, and the
Egypt of the Ramessids. This connection, rumoured of in Greek legends,
is attested by Egyptian relics found in the graves of Mycenae, and by
very ancient Levantine pottery, found in contemporary sites in Egypt.
Homer himself shows us Odysseus telling a feigned, but obviously not
improbable, tale of an Achaean raid on Egypt. Meanwhile the sojourn of
the Israelites, with their Exodus from the land of bondage, though not
yet found to be recorded on the Egyptian monuments, was probably part of
the great contemporary stir among the peoples. These events, which are
only known through Hebrew texts, must have worn a very different aspect
in the eyes of Egyptians, and of pre-historic Achaean observers, hostile
in faith to the Children of Israel. The topic has since been treated in
fiction by Dr. Ebers, in his _Joshua_. In such a twilight age, fancy has
free play, but it is a curious fact that, in this romance, modern fancy
has accidentally coincided with that of ancient Greece.

Most of the novel was written, and the apparently "un-Greek" marvels
attributed to Helen had been put on paper, when a part of Furtwaengler's
recent great lexicon of Mythology appeared, with the article on Helen.
The authors of _The World's Desire_ read it with a feeling akin to
amazement. Their wildest inventions about the Daughter of the Swan, it
seemed, had parallels in the obscurer legends of Hellas. There actually
is a tradition, preserved by Eustathius, that Paris beguiled Helen
by magically putting on the aspect of Menelaus. There is a mediaeval
parallel in the story of Uther and Ygerne, mother of Arthur, and
the classical case of Zeus and Amphitryon is familiar. Again, the
blood-dripping ruby of Helen, in the tale, is mentioned by Servius in
his commentary on Virgil (it was pointed out to one of the authors
by Mr. Mackail). But we did not know that the Star of the story was
actually called the "Star-stone" in ancient Greek fable. The many voices
of 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 of
every man's first love was easy. Goethe introduces the same quality
in the fair witch of his _Walpurgis Nacht_. A respectable portrait of
Meriamun's secret counsellor exists, in pottery, in the British Museum,
though, as it chances, it was not discovered by us until after the
publication of this romance. The Laestrygonian of the Last Battle is
introduced as a pre-historic Norseman. Mr. Gladstone, we think, was
perhaps the first to point out that the Laestrygonians of the _Odyssey_,
with their home on a fiord in the Land of the Midnight Sun, were
probably derived from travellers' tales of the North, borne with the
amber along the immemorial Sacred Way. The Magic of Meriamun is in
accordance with Egyptian ideas; her resuscitation of the dead woman,
Hataska, has a singular parallel in Reginald Scot's _Discovery of
Witchcraft_ (1584), where the spell "by the silence of the Night" is not
without 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, which
must seem very "un-Greek" to critics ignorant of Greek literature, are
borrowed from Homer.

H. R. H. A. L.





THE WORLD'S DESIRE

by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

     Come with us, ye whose hearts are set
     On this, the Present to forget;
     Come read the things whereof ye know
     _They were not, and could not be so!_
     The murmur of the fallen creeds,
     Like winds among wind-shaken reeds
     Along the banks of holy Nile,
     Shall echo in your ears the while;
     The fables of the North and South
     Shall mingle in a modern mouth;
     The fancies of the West and