H.P. Lovecraft to Kliener, February 1920…
“McD. has just sent me a card calling my attention to an article on him [H. Rider Haggard] in The Living Age.
The Living Age 1844-1941 is being newly uploaded to Archive.org from microfilm, and has just reached 1921 complete. Thus this perceptive and poetic article can be located in the March 1920 issue. It notes a cosmic touch in Haggard…
He has, indeed, an epic sense which would transcend the limits of our mundane vision and open out perspectives of some super-terrestrial landscape. There is about it a curious, indefinable quality, something of the twilight, more perhaps of the night: a night when summer lightning is abroad, when the stars seem alternately to approach and to recede from the atmosphere of earth. For it conveys, to me at least, a peculiar sense of the Infinite.
The Living Age was presumably a title Lovecraft had access to via the Providence Public Library, but at time of writing he had not yet browsed the very latest issue there.
In the same month Lovecraft’s friend…
Cook has also been kind, outlining a reading course in Haggard. I shall not tackle the gentleman in question till I am through with Algernon Blackwood, whose rather mediocre fantasies I am absorbing one after another. When I do read [Haggard’s] “She”, I will report my critical impressions in detail. (February 1920)
He is not known to have actually got around to reading the famous She until 1926, in order to write his survey Supernatural Literature. It might be interesting to speculate why, with all this prompting, Lovecraft did not read Haggard’s central work at that time. Was Cook’s tour of Haggard so arduous and roundabout, such a tall stack of books, that Lovecraft never got around to She? Or did he, and we simply don’t have a record of the matter until 1926?