SOURCE: "Dorothy Canfield and the Moral Bent," in The Educational Forum, Vol. XV, No. 3, March, 1951, pp. 283-94.

In the following essay, Firebaugh investigates the moral component of Fisher's novel The Deepening Stream.

Two or three years ago I shocked an elder colleague in a Department of English by saying that I always taught introductory courses somewhat in the manner of a moralist. Because he had been trained by a severe linguistic doctorate, he evidently believed that I was introducing a dangerous subjectivism into literary study; that I was failing in my duty of teaching the weak student to read comprehendingly, and the good student to know something of linguistic and literary history. For my part, I was shocked to discover that anyone could consider those very desirable aims to be at all adequate.

If there is one quality which human beings have always had, it is the moral...