there the facts are”: Andrew Lang, Facts and Fantasy’

摘要

In an article on Andrew Lang from 1901, G.K. Chesterton wrote in glowing terms of the breadth and scope of Lang's works, of his interest in matters from golf to Homer, from cricket to mythology. It was the nature of Lang's interests, though, that drew Chesterton's warmest praise. Lang, he says, collects "blue china because it is blue" and catches "fish because they are fishy" (481). Chesterton ended his article on Lang with the assertion that it was Lang's peculiar focus on the specifics of each interest that created in his work the sense that "more real facts are neglected in this practical world than we shall ever know" (481). What he called Lang's "overwhelming confluence of specialities" (481) led in the end for Chesterton back to the individual fact, and the individual fact whose reality challenged and upset the dominant view of the world. This reading of Lang as obsessed with facts across disparate subjects appears in most assessments of him, both before and after his death, but for most this "confluence of specialities" indicated his weakness rather than his strength. When Lang died in 1912, and for some time after, even the most sympathetic commentators remarked on the disappointment inherent in his now completed oeuvre. Lang's great friend, the novelist Henry Rider Haggard, quotes in his autobiography, The Days of My Life (1926), a charge that his fellow novelist Mrs Eliza Lynn Linton made to him that "Andrew would be the greatest writer in the language if only he had something to write about." While seeing this as "rather sharp," Haggard admits that Lang "like the amorous Frenchman [. . .] has ever been wont to éparpiller son coeur over a hundred subjects" (1: 229). This assessment of Lang, and a consequent sidelining of his work, has been continued by more recent scholarship, despite the fact that Lang's huge body of work covers many of the areas that have been of most interest to recent scholars of the fin de siècle, particularly literary and cultural historians exploring the intersections of science and culture during the period. Lang wrote a number of books of anthropology; he wrote on folklore and fairy stories; he wrote on and translated the classics; he wrote poetry, novels and short stories; he wrote histories, literary criticism and hundreds of columns in journals and magazines on a vast range of subjects. Despite this, Lang has remained a very minor figure, a footnote. Where he is mentioned, it is often to assert his marginal position; in her history of the British tradition in early anthropology, Henrika Kuklick mentions Lang only to call him an "intellectual gadfly" (56).