Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

When, on the other hand, one opens an American daily paper to see what is said about the latest Haggard publication, one is likely to happen upon something like this: ‘We grudge it the few necessary lines . . . The illustrations are worthy of what they illustrate, and a second-rate imagination runs riot in pictures and text.’ Even this, perhaps, is giving too much space to the matter; but even if a London critic wished to say just this, he would say it on such a scale as if he were discussing a posthumous work by George Eliot. This difference is the more to be noticed because there was surely a time when the externals of good writing, at least, were held in high esteem at London; and the critics of that metropolis were wont to give but short shrift to any book which disregarded those conditions. But that which practically excludes Mr. Haggard from the ranks of serious and accredited writers is not that his sentiment is melodramatic, his fancy vulgar, and his situations absurd; the more elementary ground of exclusion is that he