Articles From The Classical Teacher

     It doesn't take too terribly long to discover that, when it comes to books, the label "new" is usually not an indication of high literary quality.  Many homeschoolers have discovered this.  As a consequence, they have been among the most enthusiastic practitioners of the art of resurrecting old books. 

    One of the authors who has been the object of renewed interest among homeschoolers in the last few years is G.A. Henty.  This phenomenon has been interesting to me because I have been a Henty aficionado for some time.  It started for me when I read an article by Digby Anderson several years ago in National Review magazine.  Anderson was reviewing Bill Bennett's Book of Virtues, but most of the article wasn't about Bennett's book at all. 

     Anderson lamented that a book such as Bennett's suffered unavoidably from the limitation of having to include only short selections: short stories or short excerpts from longer stories.  What happened, he asked, to all the old books that he (Anderson) used to read as a boy--books which possessed all the same traditional assumptions about truth and morality as those in the Book of Virtues, but were usually aimed at an older audience, usually boys?  They were adventure books mostly, yet more than that.  While featuring suspenseful plots in sometimes fantastic places, their authors also assumed the traditional moral order as a matter of course, a feature that is increasingly absent among today's children's books. 

    I'll never forget the label Anderson applied to these books: "blood and morality" tales, he called them. Anderson mentioned many of these books and authors by name, some of which, he explained, he has since acquired as an adult.  They now grace the shelves of what he calls his "reactionary library."  Indeed, many of these books would be considered unacceptable under the current politically correct regime, which rules today's libraries and publishing houses in much the same way as Little Black Sambo or the Dr. Doolittle books (in their original versions) are frowned upon. 

    One of the "blood and morality" authors that Anderson mentioned was Henty.  In fact, I've wondered over the last couple of years, as I've seen Henty become increasingly popular, if Anderson's article wasn't partly responsible for the resurgence of interest.  Until several publishers began putting out the Henty books, they were difficult for some people to find.  Those of us who regularly scour the used bookstore shelves could find them, but the average consumer was out of luck. 

    Henty is popular, I think, for several reasons.  First, he wrote from a Christian perspective.  His books not only assume the Christian world view, but contain occasional passages where the hero, always a young boy (usually, as G.K. Chesterton once pointed out, the same boy, only with a different name living in a different historical period), openly discusses his Christianity as it bears on some issue he happens to be dealing with in the story.  His Christianity is definitely protestant in nature--a sort of broad pre-liberal conservative Anglicanism.  It is protestant enough, for example, to take the form, on occasion, of a potshot at Catholicism--or, as in Under Drake's Flag, a more exhaustive anti-Catholicism that has the characters fighting against the Spanish Inquisition itself.  But this (the anti-Catholicism) seems to be more a rarity than a common feature of his books, and, on the whole, even Catholics would find little to object to and much to applaud in Henty's books. 

    Henty is also popular because of the kind of books he wrote: historical fiction for young adults.  In fact, he thought of himself as writing for boys.  Each book contains a preface which begins: "My dear Lads..."  To homeschoolers, good historical fiction possesses a double benefit; with it, they can kill two birds (history and literature) with one stone. Good historical fiction is an ideal way to interest children in history.  It alleviates the necessity of textbooks, which often leave out the most important and interesting element of history--the story.  While many textbooks do a good job appealing to the intellect, few adequately appeal to the imagination as well.  Historical fiction does this; and good historical fiction does it well. 

    Another reason Henty is popular is because he is old.  Homeschoolers know what many of us have known for years: literature often improves with age (or seems to).  Whereas modern literature for young people must march to the tune of political correctness, the only song sung by the old books was that of old-fashioned morality--the kind that most homeschoolers are striving for anyway.  Michael Medved said recently (and others said it before him) that he doesn't let his children read any books that were published after about 1960.  Generally speaking, that's a pretty good rule. 

    Henty, however, isn't the only blood and morality author of bygone ages parents ought to be aware of.  In his National Review article, Anderson mentions a few other names.  These other authors, however, to my knowledge, haven't gained the renewed popularity Henty has.  They should. 

    On the shelves of his "reactionary library," said Anderson, are books by John Buchan, H. Rider Haggard, P.C. Wren, C.S. Forester, Anthony Hope, and Baroness Orczy.  When I first read Anderson's article, I made a photocopy of it and headed for the nearest used bookstore; I've been searching for these authors ever since.  The easiest to find is definitely Forester, thanks to the continuing popularity of the Horatio Hornblower novels.  In the case of most of these authors, there is usually one book for which they are best known.  Their other books, although they may be of even higher quality than those for which they are better known, are often much more difficult to find. 

    Probably the earliest of these writers (and my own favorite) is Haggard.  He is most widely known for King Solomon's Mines, an adventure book written on a bet with a friend who contested Haggard's assertion that he could write a more successful adventure book than Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.  Haggard's friend lost the bet, and for a time the popularity of King Solomon's Mines outshone that of Treasure Island.  Haggard's specialty was what used to be called "romance," but now goes by the name of "fantasy."  They are mostly historical in nature.  She (Who Must be Obeyed) is his most widely hailed work and is considered a fantasy classic.  In one of his letters to children, C.S. Lewis stated that this was his own favorite among Haggard's works.  My own favorite is Morning Star, a book Roger Lancelyn Green has called the greatest evocation of ancient Egypt ever written.  Egypt is also the setting for The World's Desire, co-written with Andrew Lang, of fairytale fame.  It is a fascinating sequel to Homer's Odyssey. 

    As fantasy writer Lin Carter has pointed out, Haggard was writing at the end of the Victorian era, when, through the work of adventurers and archeologists in Egypt, the wonders of a long dead ancient civilization were being revealed to an astounded European public.  A large part of the appeal of Haggard's stories was that they also purported to uncover the secrets of ancient civilizations, the difference being that the civilizations discovered in Haggard's stories were still there. 

    P.C. Wren, is most famous for Beau Geste.  Like Beau Geste, many of his books are about the French Foreign Legion.  In fact, his books are somewhat difficult to find because there are apparently collectors of legionary literature who scoop them up as soon as they find them.  John Buchan is best known for The 39 Steps, a mystery novel, but Greenmantle, a story of intrigue set in pre-World War I Europe, seems to be better thought of. The Prisoner of Zenda is Anthony Hope's best known book. 

    Baroness Orczy is the author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which has at least one sequel.  This story about an English noble who spirits aristocratic families out of France to avoid the guillotine is still an extremely popular story and has been put on film at least twice.  Tyrone Power played the Scarlet Pimpernel in the 1950s.  It was remade in the early 1980s into a made-for-TV movie with Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour.  The latter movie is quite simply one of the best things put on film in recent years and remains one of our family's favorites. 

    Of all the authors discussed by Anderson, C.S. Forester seems to have enjoyed the most long-lasting acclaim, a consequence mostly of his Horatio Hornblower books, although The African Queen still attracts plenty of attention because of the movie which starred Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.  Forester was also the author of The General, a book that former Secretary of the Navy, James Webb, calls one of the top two or three military books ever written. 

     The General is a book which, like most, if not all, of Forester's books, is about leadership (in the case of The General, it is leadership gone awry).  The Hornblower books are fascinating studies on how a young midshipman of the British Royal Navy moves through the ranks by virtue of his leadership skills to become Admiral.  Another book (relatively easy to find in used bookstores) is The Sky and the Forest, one of the greatest evocations of the primitive mind ever written. 

    These books are not without their problems as books for young Christian adults: Haggard's stories contain a sort of fatalistic mysticism and require a suspension of belief in the normal rules of physical reality;  Ayesha, the "She" in She, is 2,000 years old; the story in Morning Star proceeds, for purposes of the story, with the assumption that the ancient Egyptian religion is true (for example, the "Ka," the spirit of the person which can be separated from the body, is a major plot element in the story).  While the characters in a Henty book are really late 19th century English characters acting out historical dramas in various historical periods, Haggard's characters are the people as they might really have been. 

    If you want to see historical characters as you would like them to have been, thinking the thoughts you would like them to have thought, then read Henty. If you want to see them as they really might have been, thinking what they might really have thought, Haggard is the place to go; in the three books that make up his Zulu trilogy, for example, there is little doubt that you are living Zulu history. 

    While there is little in Forester that would raise an eyebrow (Hornblower, for example, is for the most part a model of honor and self-discipline), there is the rare lapse.  In Lord Hornblower, for example, the author allows the protagonist to commit adultery (it is handled with some discretion, but it is still disappointing), and so it is probably a book to stay away from, unless you (the parent) read the book first and, perhaps, use it as an example of how no hero, even someone as otherwise honorable as Hornblower, is perfect. 

    There are other authors not mentioned by Anderson who also deserve mention: Captain Marryat (Masterman Ready, Midshipman Easy), R.M. Ballantyne (The Coral Island), and W.G.B. Kingston (who authored numerous sea adventures), and, in a more modern vein, Alistair MacClean (Ice Station Zebra, etc.). 

    As with all great literature, there are elements that require explanation if read by a young adult; but what are the admirable elements in these "blood and morality" books that make them worth reading?  There is, first, an implicit acknowledgement of the existence of good and evil, that the two are different, and that the good is unquestionably superior; that honor is a real quality of human life which is admirable and that to be dishonorable is, well, dishonorable; that adversity is worth facing for a good cause and, when faced with courage and strength, can yield great reward. 

    Many of these books are out of print.  Some are harder to find than others, but if you keep your eyes peeled and make it a habit of visiting used bookstores, library booksales, and auctions, you, too, can have a well-stocked "reactionary library."