The idea that literature might properly be regarded as embodying moral ideas, and the related idea that literary criticism might properly be an evaluative, even morally evaluative, enterprise, are likely these days to be met with little more than a dismissive smile. The need even to consider ideas so worded, let alone to meet them in argument, is widely thought to have dissolved. The reasons for this shift of view — or rather, the various doctrines which constitute the changed viewpoint — have a wide currency, and I do not propose to discuss them. This does not mean that I think there is nothing to be learned from (for example) deconstruction, at least in its Derridean form. But my present focus is elsewhere. The two related ideas I referred to are, as I stated them, skeletal. In this paper I want to indicate a way of fleshing them out, thus to try to help revive ( a version of) a traditional "humanist' conception of the nature and value of literature, and therefore of literary criticism.