Bellerophon on Pegasus dispatches the Chimaera, as Milo Winter saw it in A Wonder-Book. I fear that such an initiation into a larger world would be much condemned today. For these were all tales filled with cruelty and violence, mutilation and murder, magic and fantasy, streaked by what is now seen as classism, sexism, racism and superstition. Approved children's books today are by contrast didactic in intent, dealing with prosaic, everyday events and intended to improve relations among classes, sexes and races. Such books, it is argued, lead children to face reality rather than to flee into fantasy.
Childhood is finite.
So is the number of books one can read. The serious point of children's books is not to improve behavior but to expand imagination. Great children's literature creates new worlds that children enter with delight and perhaps with apprehension and from which they return with understandings that their own experience could not have produced and that give their lives new meaning. The classical tales have populated the common imagination of the west. They are voyages of discovery.