Why Should We Read Old Books?

It was not until relatively recently - the century of the two golden ages of children’s literature (1870-1970) - that beautiful myth, legend, adventure and faerie books were created intentionally for children's hands, primarily meant as stepping stones to the older and more difficult Great Books. 

Still, they are old. Myth and legend emerged together from the sands of time, and faery perhaps from dark, primaeval forests, and these predate many of the Great Books themselves. Many of the earliest novels written for children draw deeply from these wells of traditional storytelling, and like the great classics, they enchant children’s imaginations, educating and drawing out the soul of the child so they may recognize Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Just as Plato suggests that philosophers use images to guide the common people, so students' paths to the Great Books must first be furrowed and fertilised by the Good Books.

As preparation for an encounter with reality, myths, legends, and fairy tales are in a sense more real than crass realism because they convey to the imagination transcendent truths not grasped through conventional means. Lewis says, “the value of a myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores them to rich significance which has been hidden by the ‘veil of familiarity’...As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. ”* In an attempt to be relevant, modern 'kids' lit' most often does the opposite, and in stark physicalist realism displaces the transcendent altogether in an effort to appeal to the child’s basest instincts.

But how does this Transcendent Reality serve to educate the minds and imaginations of our children? 

First, this literary reality is contingent on the existence of actual Truth. Classic children's literature, the best of which was written in a time when at least the existence of Truth was acknowledged, if not the substance of that Truth entirely agreed upon, assumes this existence and man's ability to learn Truth in its pages, and along with it, the necessity for and practice of Virtue, and the exercise of Reason. As Tolkien has Aragorn say, "Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them…"

Second, the best children's books assume that all created beings (and even objects - perhaps especially objects in the case of fairy tales!) have a purpose, and in order to attain it, in order to exemplify Goodness, in order to fulfil the quest, slay the dragon, live happily ever after, we must practise and grow in Virtue. The best books provide children with living, breathing examples of courage, fortitude, prudence, and charity, and the truest stories require some kind of sacrifice of its characters. Indeed, sometimes there is even a little bit of sacrifice necessary to read the Good Books, or if not exactly sacrifice, then effort; our purpose on earth is not merely to be entertained. Children's books of the Golden Ages expected and required the child to engage intentionally with their sophisticated vocabulary and syntax and detailed plots that unfolded over many pages, rather than stooping to do the work of engaging their readers with irreverent, goofy content and sparkly, flashy illustrations. 

Third, old children's books operate from an old fashioned idea that Beauty is definable and that we ought to surround ourselves with it. The attitude towards Beauty is obvious not only in the storyline of a vintage children's book, but also in its physical attributes.  Picture books of the Golden Ages of Children's Literature were regularly illustrated by talented artists, in varying styles and using skilled techniques, with detailed images that brought the author's imaginings to exquisite life and cultivated wonder in the reader's soul. Publishers chose heavy, creamy paper, set the print in fonts pleasing to the eye, and balanced the text on the page with generous use of white space and margins, making the book easier and more enticing to read. A vintage book feels substantial in the hand, with durable cloth boards and bindings sewn to last a lifetime.  

The true genius of a fairy tale lies in its ability to imprint a desire for virtue, a desire to slay the dragon or furnish the dying with the water of life, in the child's heart. No moralising is necessary - "fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what" and the best children's books illustrate the object of this longing, without spelling it out in tiresome words.** Frye suggests that all stories reflect our longing to return to a world that in our fallen nature we have lost, and perhaps it is in stories that we will discover how to regain it.*** When the last lamp post has been uprooted from our modern cities, Lewis' will still guide the way back to the far land of Spare Oom and the bright city of War Drobe. Chivalry will never die so long as Camelot lives on; we know that it is the glass slipper that will help us find the real princess and you never know, she just may be living in the attic next door. Eeyore's house is the most beautiful, because his friends built it for him, and Owl's the homiest because it was sacrificially given. Is there a child who does not feel a twinge of conscience when he sees the Toad dressed as a washerwoman, or walks past 'thirty yards of board fence'? And does the boy whose finger in the dike holds back the cold Atlantic not remind him what it means to "do his duty"? Mafatu, confronting Moana, the Sea God, is the very soul of courage for every child, no finer badge of honour exists than the scars Mara wears on her shoulders, and has there been a friend more loyal than the horse boy, Agba? If we dissolve into sea foam but have a hitherto unattainable opportunity to earn an immortal soul - it is worth it.  Both water and love help us find our gravity - even if physics disagrees, we know this to be true - and the garden grows because of the Magic, and it is the Magic too, that will make us live forever and ever and ever.

Our most serious work is to replenish the soil of our children's hearts and minds, to nurture "an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes and adventures," in order that our children be prepared for the planting of the Great Books.

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*C. S. Lewis, "Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings".

**C.S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children".

***Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination.

****John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture (appendix).