The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 15, 1993 by Digby Anderson

The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, edited, with commentary by William J. Bennett (Simon & Schuster, 873 pp., $27.50)

SOME ten years ago I noticed a copy of Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel in a second-hand bookshop. As I picked it up and leafed through it, I remembered just how much I had enjoyed it at the age of ten. What I had enjoyed was not just the adventure but adventure infused with morality. I bought it and read it again expecting to find it nonsense. It is not nonsense. In fact it is all the better today since its genre is so rare. Slowly the names started coming back: not just Baroness Orczy but Rider Haggard, Anthony Hope, Rafael Sabatini, G.A. Henty, Harrison Ainsworth, Conan Doyle, C.S. Forester, John Buchan, P. C. Wren, Percy Westerman, and a dozen others. What had happened to all those books? I suppose I must have thrown them away. Some I never owned but borrowed from libraries or other boys--"You can have my Henty, if you lend me your Buchan."

Anyway, I started to look for replacement copies. And the first point of this personal note is that re-collecting them was hard. There are surprisingly few about. Of course, you can find them if you are prepared to visit countless bookshops and sift through the filth and inanity that fill them--and the unpleasant people one finds in bookshops these days. Of course, you can find them if you are content to wait. But you are not content to wait. Read Greenmantle or She and it's so good you want more now, and not just the well-known ones such as Prester John and King Solomon's Mines, but the many more less well known: The Courts of the Morning and The Prince of the Captivity, Nada the Lily and Moon of Israel. Ten years later I have them--most of them in a tall Victorian bookcase, eight shelves entirely filled with reactionary novels.

Suppose you wanted to do something similar. Suppose you wanted to collect the books that gave you so much pleasure as a child and did so much for your moral formation--not perhaps quite my stories but shorter stories suitable for younger children. Suppose you wanted to do this not for yourself but for your own children. You would face a long and a daunting task to find them. Or you would have done till now. For William Bennett has done all your work for you. In one volume he has collected a wealth of short moral tales and poems suitable for young children. There are 873 pages of them.

They are ordered under the virtues they illustrate and encourage: self-discipline, compassion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty, and faith. Each section starts with stories suitable for adults to read to young children or for the young children to read for themselves, then goes on to ones suitable for older children. For instance, "Responsibility" starts with Olive Wadsworth's Mother Toad, the Three Little Kittens, and Orphan Annie, proceeds through St. George and the dragon and Alfred's burnt cakes, through Damocles and "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and goes on to Thucydides, Plato, and Jefferson.

Mr. Bennett has created a treasury no conservative parent would want to be without. For conservative parents know the role such stories can play in moral education. The early building of character depends heavily on examples, both in this world and in literature. Children--and adults to some degree-emulate people, net ideas. Modern societies are going through a period of grave social disorder shown in crime, marriage collapse, gender confrontation, community disintegration, and drug abuse. The way back is through the rediscovery of the good, of the virtues. Virtues are taught by good laws, by stern punishments, and by moral tales. What Mr. Bennett has provided, then, is not just a source of enjoyment and literary education, but a contribution to moral literacy and a path back to social order for future generations.

One can always find fault with particular collections. I would have liked sections on courtesy, hope, and service, for instance. The token non-Christian readings are a mistake. This is overwhelmingly a Christian book, and Mr. Bennett should not be afraid to say so. But there are two more general drawbacks--both minor. I was struck by how little it resembles my own reactionary library. This is largely because mine are mostly full-length novels and many are English. But there are few tales in the Bennett collection that have the spirit found in Buchan, Hope, and the others in the Victorian bookcase. The blood-and-morality novels have a moral energy some of his tales lack. I was going to say his are more suitable for little girls than little boys but it is not quite that. There is a slight tendency to preciousness in the new collection. Here's a revealing test. Both sorts of books would infuriate progressive persons, but while Mr. Bennett's would make them retch, the Hopes and Haggards would make them explode.

That is related to the other tendency. The longer stories are edited to bring out their moral parts, the punch line. Each story is preceded by a little introduction which explains its moral point. This plus the collection of so much morality in one volume does make for a sort of earnestness. I can't see how this could be got round but it is unfortunate, because morality should not be earnest. It can be carried, if not lightly, apparently lightly. That is why Sir Richard Hannay, Sir Percy Blakeney, Allan Quatermain, and the other swashbucklers make such good moral heroes: they are good and attractive. And if morality mixed with adventure makes for easier reading, so does morality mixed with humor. Two poems about truth show this well. One shows the rewards of honesty, the other, the fate of liars. But the difference is that the first is flat and earnest, the second, teasing and amusing. The little boy with a curly head and pleasant eye who never never told a lie and therefore had lots of friends (p. 601) is a rather repulsive prig. Belloc does much better with Matilda (pp. 607-8). She, of course, told dreadful lies and called the fire brigade when there wasn't a fire, and so when there was one the fire brigade wouldn't come. "For every time she shouted 'Fire!'/They only answered 'Little liar!'/And therefore when her aunt returned, /Matilda and her house were burned."