Now I do not mean that the great writer incessantly utters homilies. With Ben Jonson, he may “scourge the naked follies of the time,” but he does not often murmur, “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.” Rather, the man of letters teaches the norms of our existence through allegory, analogy, and holding up the mirror to nature. The writer may, like William Faulkner, write much more of what is evil than of what is good; and yet, exhibiting the depravity of human nature, he establishes in his reader’s mind the awareness that there exist enduring standards from which we fall away; and that fallen human nature is an ugly sight. Or the writer may deal, as did J. P. Marquand, chiefly with the triviality and emptiness of a society that has forgotten standards. Often, in his appeal of a conscience to a conscience, he may row with muffled oars; sometimes he may be aware only dimly of his normative function. The better the artist, one almost may say, the more subtle the preacher. Imaginative persuasion, not blunt exhortation, commonly is the method of the literary champion of norms.

One of the faults of the typical “life adjustment” or “permissive” curriculum in the schools—paralleled, commonly, by similarly indulgent attitudes in the family—has been the substitution of “real life situations” reading for the study of truly imaginative literature. This tendency has been especially noticeable in the lower grades of school, but it extends upward in some degree through high school. The “Dick and Jane” and “run, Spot, run” school of letters does not stir the imagination; and it imparts small apprehension of norms. Apologists for this aspect of life-adjustment schooling believe that they are inculcating respect for values by prescribing simple readings that commend tolerant, kindly, co-operative behavior. Yet this is no effective way to impart a knowledge of norms: direct moral didacticism, whether of the Victorian or the twentieth century variety, usually awakens resistance in the recipient, particularly if he has some natural intellectual power.The fulsome praise of goodness can alienate; it can whet the appetite for the cookie-jar on the top shelf. In Saki’s “The Story-Teller,” a mischievous bachelor tells three children on a train the tale of a wondrously good little girl, awarded medals for her propriety. But she met a wolf in the park; and though she ran, the jangling of her medals led the wolf straight to her, so that she was devoured utterly. Though the children were delighted with this unconventional narrative, their aunt protests, “A most improper story to tell to young children!” “Unhappy woman!” the departing bachelor murmurs. “For the next six months or so those children will assail her in public with demands for an improper story!”

Well, Greek and Norse myths, for instance, sometimes are not very proper; yet, stirring the imagination, they do more to bring about an early apprehension of norms than do any number of the dull and interminable doings of Dick and Jane. The story of Pandora, or of Thor’s adventure with the old woman and her cat, gives any child an insight into the conditions of existence—dimly grasped at the moment, perhaps, but gaining in power as the years pass—that no utilitarian “real-life situation” fiction can match. Because they are eternally valid, Hesiod and the saga-singers are modern. And versions of Hawthorne or of Andrew Lang are far better prose than the quasi-basic English thrust upon young people in many recent textbooks.

If we starve young people for imagination, adventure, and some sort of heroism—to turn now to a later level of learning—they are not likely to embrace Good Approved Real-Life Tales for Good Approved Real-Life Boys and Girls; on the contrary, they may resort to the dregs of letters, rather than be bored altogether. If they are not introduced to Stevenson and Conrad, say—and that fairly early—they will find the nearest and newest Grub Street pornographers. And the consequences will be felt not merely in their failure of taste, but in their misapprehension of human nature, lifelong; and eventually, in the whole tone of a nation. “On this scheme of things ... a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order.” The Naked Ape theory of human nature, the “reductionist” notion of man as a breathing automaton, is reinforced by ignorance of literature’s moral imagination.

Tentatively, I distinguished four levels of literature by which a normative consciousness is developed. The upper levels do not supplant the earlier, but rather supplement and blend with them; and the process of becoming familiar with these four levels or bodies of normative knowledge extends from the age of three or four to the studies of college and university. We may call these levels fantasy; narrative history and biography; reflective prose and poetic fiction; and philosophy and theology.

Fantasy. The fantastic and the fey, far from being unhealthy for small children, are precisely what a healthy child needs; under such stimulus a child’s moral imagination quickens. Out of the early tales of wonder come a sense of awe and the beginning of philosophy. All things begin and end in mystery. For that matter, a normative consciousness may be aroused by themes less striking than the Arthurian legends or the Norse tales. The second book I had read to me was Little Black Sambo (1899). Learning it by heart then, I can recite it still. (One symptom of the grossing silliness of our time was the demand a few years ago, that Little Black Sambo be banned as “racist.”) Though I risk falling into pathos, I cannot resist remarking that even Little Black Sambo touches upon norms. What child fails to reflect upon the hubris of the tigers, of the prudence of Sambo?

If children are to begin to understand themselves, and other people, and the laws that govern our nature, they ought to be encouraged to read Lang’s collection of fairy tales, and the Brothers Grimm (even at their grimmest), and Andersen, and the Arabian Nights, and all the rest; and presently the better romancers for young people, like Blackmore and Howard Pyle. Even the Bible, in the beginning, is fantasy for the young. The story of Jonah and the whale is accepted, initially, as a tale of the marvelous, and so sticks in the memory. Only in later years does one recognize the story as the symbol of the Jews’ exile in Babylon, and of how faith may preserve men and nations through the most terrible of trials.

Narrative History and Biography. My grandfather and I, during the long walks that we used to take when I was six or seven years old, would talk of the character of Richard II, and of Puritan domestic life, and of the ferocity of Assyrians. The intellectual partnership of an imaginative man of sixty and an

inquisitive boy of seven is an edifying thing. My preparation for these conversations came from books in my grandfather’s library: Dickens’s A Child’s History of England (1910), Hawthorne’s Grandfather’s Chair (1840), Ridpath’s four volume illustrated History of the World (1897). Later my grandfather gave me H. G. Wells’s Outline of History (1920). In the fullness of time, I came to disagree with Dickens’s and Wells’s interpretations of history; but that was all to the good, for it stimulated my critical faculties and led me to the proper studs of mankind—and to the great historians, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Tacitus, and all the rest; to the great biographies, also, like Plutarch’s Lives and Boswell’s Johnson (1791), and Lockhart’s Scott. Reading of great lives does something to make decent lives. 

Reflective Prose and Poetic Fiction. When I was seven, my mother gave me a set of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels; and about the same time I inherited from a great-uncle my set of Hawthorne. That launched me upon novel-reading, so that by the time I was ten I had read all of Hugo, Dickens, and Twain. Fiction is truer than fact: I mean that in great fiction we obtain the distilled wisdom of men of genius, understandings of human nature which we could attain—if at all—unaided by books, only at the end of life, after numberless painful experiences. I began to read Sir Walter Scott when I was twelve or thirteen; and I think I learnt from the Waverley novels, and from Shakespeare, more of the varieties of character than ever I have got since from the manuals of psychology. 

Such miscellaneous browsing in the realm of fiction rarely does mischief. When I was eleven or twelve, I was much influenced by Twain’s Mysterious Stranger (1916), an atheist tract disguised as a romance of medieval Austria . It did not turn me into a juvenile atheist; but it set me to inquiring after first causes—and in time, paradoxically, it led me to Dante, my mainstay ever since. In certain ways, the great novel and the great poem can teach more of norms than can philosophy and theology. 

Philosophy and Theology. For the crown of normative literary studies, we turn, about the age of nineteen or twenty, to abstraction and generalization, chastened by logic. It simply is not true that

One impulse from a vernal woodMay teach you more of man. Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

It is not from vegetal nature that one acquires some knowledge of human passions and longings. There exist, rather in Emerson’s phrase, law for man and law for thing. The law for man we learn from Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius; from the Hebrew prophets, St. Paul, St. Augustine, and so

many other Christian writers. Our petty private rationality is founded upon the wisdom of the men of dead ages; and if we endeavor to guide ourselves solely by our limited private insights, we tumble down into the ditch of unreason.

“Scientific” truth, or what is popularly taken to be scientific truth, alters from year to year with accelerating speed in our day. But poetic and moral truth changes little with the lapse of the centuries. To the unalterable in human existence, humane letters are a great guide.