Trying to fill in some literary corners has led me to pick up Athony Hope's "Prisoner of Zenda" and Baroness Orczy's "The Scarlet Pimpernel." Both novels are from the turn of the last century and serve as a nice compliment to other early twentieth century reading from this summer such as "The Ball and the Cross," and "The Worm Ouruboros."
Hope and Orczy's books are both firmly in the adventure fiction genre. Like Edgar Rice-Burrows' "A Princess of Mars," they are first and foremost ripping good yarns intednded to dazzle and entertain. This is not to say that each novel doesn't make a moral point, however. The moral of each can be summed up rather quickly. For Hope it is: "duty before desire." For Orczy, it is "balance passion and reason." Both are good morals, but may seem more than a little quaint or threadbare to the modern reader -and that is precisely why we need to hear them.
C.S. Lewis sums up our need for reading old books best by reminding us that prior ages usually get right some virtue that we neglect while having vices that we, because of our culture and temperment, are unlikely to fall into. In our time, the imperial and aristocratic impulses are flatly out of favor in their traditional forms, but a sense of duty of balance is severly lacking. If you doubt the need for a sense of duty and a sense of balance, just look at the shinanigans that caused all the trouble on Wallstreet. As Hanson (and Lewis) points out, we mock things like duty and moderation at our univerisities and then are shocked when we find the best and brightest in our financial world putting personal gain above national safety.
"The Prisoner of Zenda" and "The Scarlet Pimpernel" are not Milton, nor were they ever meant to be. Their priamry purpose is to provide light entertainemnt. Hope's work has been all but forgotten by the general reader, and Orczy's rellegated to "high school reading." While these may, arguably, be their appropriate places, that doesn't mean that they have nothing to offer the contemporary reader. In our current age of "chronological snobbery" it is good to have the morals of a prior age presented to us plainly and winsomely from time to time.
Comments
I especially enjoyed this entry of yours, Jim, because "entertaining read" is what I'm going for as I write. It's good to be reminded that the entertaining read has a noble (if lesser) tradition, and isn't necessarily devoid of moral good.
"El Dorado" by Orczy is next on my reading list, after I finish "To Trade the Stars." :)
it also seems like the "entertaining read" is often where the big ideas of culture get broken down into a form that's easy to understand. So a pulp novelist actually plays a key role in disseminating important ideas to the masses. That's a lot of what Sayers, Lewis, and Williams were doing. Or, on the other side of things, Heinlein, Herbert, and Asmov.
I think there's been at least two film adaptations of "Zenda;" I wonder why no one's tried again recently. Then again, maybe that's a good thing. They'd probably butcher the ending.