What this means is that it is in the nature of literature to place examples before us—examples of virtue to emulate and vice to repudiate. In our day, this is stigmatized as “surely a very simplistic view of literature,” to which my comeback is, “Tough—this is demonstrably how literature works.” On the self-evident nature of this, I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s comment in regard to Sir Philip Sidney that “the assumption . . . that the ethical is the aesthetic par excellence is so basic to Sidney that he never argues it. He thought we would know.”
