It is always difficult to see the beginnings of things:  we know that stories form the raw material of morality, it is not easy to trace morality in Little Black Sambo, The Three Bears, Alice in Wonderland, or The Sleeping Beauty, but nevertheless morality is there if we recognise morality in everyday things.  It is not too much to say that everybody should have an ideal, even a burglar:  his ideal is to be a good and thorough burglar, and probably if he is a burglar of the finer sort, it is to play fair to the whole gang.  It is better to be a burglar with an ideal than a blameless person with very little soul or personality, who just slides through life accepting things:  it is better to have a coster’s ideal of a holiday than to be too indifferent or stupid to care or to know what you want.

Now ideals are supposed to be the essence of morality and morality comes to us through experience, and only experience tests its truth.  The story with a moral is generally neither literature nor morality, except such unique examples as The Pilgrim’s Progress or Everyman.  The kind of experience with which morality is concerned is experience of human life in various circumstances, and the way people behave under those circumstances.  The beginning of such experience is our own behaviour and the behaviour of other people we know, but this is too limited an experience to produce a satisfactory ideal; so we crave for something wider.  It is curious how strong is the craving for this kind of experience in all normal children, in whom one would suppose sense experiences and especially muscular experiences to be enough.  The need to know about people other than ourselves, and yet not too unlike, in circumstances other than our own, and yet not too strange, seems to be a necessary part of our education, and we interpret it in the light of our own personal conduct.  Out of this, as well as out of our direct experience, we build our ideal.  When one realises how an ideal may colour the whole outlook of a person, one begins to realise what literature means to a child.  The early ideal is crude; it may be Jack the Giant-Killer, or an engine-driver, Cinderella, or the step-cleaner; this may grow into Hiawatha or Robinson Crusoe, for boys, and a fairy tale Princess or one of the “Little Women” for girls.  In every hero a child half-unconsciously sees himself, and the ideal stimulates all that hidden life which is probably the most important part of his growth.  As indirect experiences grow, or in other words as he hears or reads more stories, his ideal widens, and his knowledge of the problems of life is enlarged.  This is the raw material of morality, for out of his answers to these problems he builds up standards of conduct and of judgement.  He projects himself into his own ideal, and he projects himself into the experiences of other people:  he lives in both:  this is imagination of the highest kind, it is often called sympathy, but the term is too limited, it is rather imaginative understanding.