—It is strange what poverty has ground into my soul. I find myself reading such a book with but one feeling, one idea crying out in me. I discover that my whole being is reduced to the great elemental, primitive instinct of self-preservation. Love is dead in me, generosity, humanity, imagination is dead,—everything but one wild-beast passion; and I find myself panting as I read: “Get some money! Get some money! Hold on to it!”
—After a while I think suddenly: “And I am a poet!” That brings a moan from me and I sit shuddering.
March 7th.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most unconvincing books I ever read. I neither believed in it nor cared about it in the slightest.
I am shown a “pure woman,” and by and by I learn, to my perplexity, that she has been seduced; after which she continues the “pure woman” again, and I am asked to agonize over her troubles! But all the time I keep saying, “This is not a woman that you are showing me at all—a woman with a soul; it is a puppet figure that you suppose 'seduced' for the sake of the story.”
It is our absurd English ideas of “propriety” that make possible such things. If the author had had to show the seduction of “Tess” the weakness of the thing would have been plain in an instant. That he did not show it was his lack of conscience. There is no propriety in art but truth.