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Writer's pictureLinda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
Aug 110 min read

Excerpted Inspirations #140


[In this week’s inspiration, two noted authors comment on the same topic:] Many people have wondered why it is that children’s stories are so full of moralizing. The reason is perfectly simple: it is that children like moralizing more than anything else, and eat it up as if it were so much jam. The reason why we, who are grown up, dislike moralizing is equally clear: it is that we have discovered how much perversion and hypocrisy can be mixed with it; we have grown to dislike morality not because morality is moral, but because morality is so often immoral. But the child has never seen the virtues twisted into vices; the child does not know that men are not only bad from good motives, but also often good from bad motive. [...] Therefore the child has a hearty, healthy, unspoiled, and insatiable appetite for mere morality; for the mere difference between a good little girl and a bad little girl. -G. K. Chesterton, Daily News (1901-1911), quoted in Chesterton Day by Day: the Wit and Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton (1912, revised 2002, ed. Michael W. Perry), p. 89 [Tolkien agrees with Andrew Lang that children do indeed ask whether stories are true, but adds:] Far more often they have asked me, “Was he good? Was he wicked?” That is, they were more concerned to get the Right side and the Wrong side clear. For that is a question equally important in history and in Faërie. -J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tree and Leaf (1964), footnote p. 62 “Good and Evil” artwork by Linda Simonetti Odhner, based on M.C. Escher’s symmetry drawing, “Angels and Devils.”

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