Tess of the D'urbervilles #219747

Some of these maintain a conscientious difference of sentiment concerning, among other things, subjects fit for art, and reveal an inability to associate the idea of the title adjective with any but the licensed and derivative meaning which has resulted to it from the ordinances of civilization. They thus ignore, not only all Nature's claims, all aesthetic claims on the word, but even the spiritual interpretation afiorded by the finest side of Christianity; and drag in, as a vital point, the acts of a woman in her last days of despera tion, when all her doings lie Outside her normal character. Others dissent on grounds which are intrinsically no more than an assertion that the novel embodies the views of life prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, and not those of an earlier and simpler generation — an assertion which I can only hope may be well founded. Let me repeat that a novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest; as one is reminded by a passage which occurs in the letters of Schiller to Goethe on judges of this class: They are those who seek only their own ideas in a representation, and prize that which should be as higher than what is. The cause of the dispute, therefore, lies in the very first principles, and it would be utterly im possible to come to an understanding with them. And again: As soon as I observe that any one, when judging of poetical representations, considers anything more im portant than the inner Necessity and Truth, I have done with him.