A Life With Books and With Fine Print, the Review for the Arts of the Book; Oral History Tra... Book

I suppose it is unjust of me to imagine that people who criticize an obviously didactic work for children for being "too didactic" are really objecting to the lessons contained therein, but I nonetheless do. Perhaps it's merely projection, however, as I personally found myself less engaged when I disagreed with the moral of a particular story or rant.

This massive bestseller is a pretty fascinating look at a philosophy that is both Christian and christian and very, very English to boot. It is ostensibly about a rich boy whose father, troubled by the boy's spoiled nature, sends him to live with a pastor and a successful farmer's son in order to build character. Mostly this narrative serves as a launching point for other fables, which keep the prose from bogging down.

One thing that is more Christian than English (where those two things come into conflict) was an embrace of all humanity as brothers, as equals under God, and quite often an exaltation of "barbarian" cultures over the English. This is over-played, even, in the Rousseau-ian sense of failing to recognize that tribal cultures—while not without considerable merit in many ways—are also frequently brutal and unvirtuous. (This would be Rousseau over Christianity over Anglophilia, I guess.)

I found myself objecting to the puritanical views of arts and music. Now, granted, the Classical period (during which this was written) was inordinately fond of amazingly dull stuff, and the late Rococo was about to usher in a period of bloody revolution in France—well, maybe I'm undermining my own point here, but something about babies and bathwater seems relevant.

The other major issue, to my mind, was the idea that one could not help but be corrupted by wealth or refinement. This highly selective idea seems like a drive toward failure. In the end, when Lord Merton offers Farmer Sandford money for having taught his son how not to be a prat, and Sandford rejects this on the basis of the strife such money would cause him and the decadence it would bring to his wife and daughters. Merits of pushing an iron plough notwithstanding, farms are notoriously capricious about providing sustenance, and money could just as well be translated into items that improve survival as well as those that enervate.

Caveats aside, I liked it, not the least because I was personally engaged in a lot of physical labor at the time, and I found myself agreeing that there is tremendous merit in the same—whether one can afford to hire others to do the work or not.