Foreword
In this foreword I have set myself the task of previewing the three things that readers most need to know as they begin to read the book that follows. These three things touch upon the context, the content, and the achievement of the book.
It would be possible for a contemporary reader to revel in this book while being ignorant of the age-old tradition of literary criticism that it represents and also the debate over that tradition in the modern era. The premises that literature makes moral statements, that these statements can strengthen the moral life of a reader, and that literary criticism should explore the moral dimension of literary texts began in classical antiquity and held sway until the twentieth century. For Aristotle, a mark of good literature is that it “satisfies the moral sense.”1
The Christianized version of this classical tradition reached its climax in the Renaissance author Sir Philip Sidney’s treatise A Defense of Poetry. Sidney claimed that the very purpose of literature is the “winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue” and inflaming a reader with a “desire to be worthy.”2
With the Enlightenment and modernity came the collapse of a unified sense of moral standards in the West. Consequently, the idea that literature has moral implications and can influence readers to be virtuous became passé. Morality itself became reduced to Ernest Hemingway’s dictum that “what is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”3 This echoed Oscar Wilde’s earlier statement that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”4
Reacting against this rejection of moral criteria for literature, a towering literary scholar named F. R. Leavis wrote a famous book entitled The Great Tradition (1948). What is this “great tradition” championed by Leavis? It is both a literary tradition, represented by great authors and works that portray the moral life, and a type of literary criticism that explores the moral dimension of literature. Karen Swallow Prior’s book is squarely within this great tradition.
I have already hinted at the content of this book. There is a theoretic side in which Prior explains the ethical and literary nature of her enterprise. A pleasant bonus is the primer on ethical theory and moral thinking included in the discussion. Mainly, though, this is a book of literary criticism. It is based on what I call “good old-fashioned example theory,” which was particularly prominent in the English Renaissance. 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.”5
In On Reading Well, Prior chooses monuments of Western literature and explores a single virtue embodied in each work. No claim is made that this is all that a reader would wish to do with these works. The result of Prior’s moral analysis is that our understanding of virtue is increased and our desire to practice it enhanced. Today in the secular literary guild and public school classroom there is a sustained assault on Christian morality. On Reading Well offers a revisionist agenda, which is, of course, nothing less than a return to the great tradition.
As for the achievement of On Reading Well, it is of the highest order. The book is a monument to scholarship. Assertions are buttressed with copious research. All of the right sources are incorporated. A particular gift of Prior’s is precision of thought and expression. The goal of the book—to enhance both literary appreciation and the moral life of the reader—is a noble one, meeting Sir Philip Sidney’s goal of leading a reader to desire to be worthy.
I will confess that as a literary scholar I have always been somewhat resistant to moral criticism of literature because I fear that it will be moralistic. But right from the start, Karen Swallow Prior puts these fears to rest. The moral dimension of literature is only one dimension of literature, she assures us, and it does not exist separate from the aesthetic form of a work. The moral viewpoint of a work is not stated abstractly but embodied in the particulars of the text, especially the characters. And so forth.
It is the nature of scholars to be critical when reading books in their discipline, and it is relatively rare that they end a book feeling that the subject could not have been handled better than it was. I did end On Reading Well feeling that nothing was lacking in Prior’s treatment of the subject of virtue in literature and that everything essential had been beautifully stated.