DIY History | Transcribe | Scholarship at Iowa | The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897 | The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897, Page 34

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The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897

The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897, Page 34

best be gauged by intensity of purpose. Keats himself when judged by this standard is really purposive; for in a world too dead to the worth of pure beauty, he revived the Greek ideal of the simply beautiful. With Tennyson, his highest work is surely that which strives to realize some aspect of the philosophic and religious thought of the epoch he mirrored. Thus it is clearly seen that the greatest poems are those which mark time for humanity. A work of art, I admit, is not a pamphlet, or a proposition in Euclid, but it must enclose a truth, and a new truth, if it is to find a place permanently in the front rank of its own order. Even of other arts than literature, this is essentially true - Painting, Sculpture, Music to be truly great must crest the wave of this own Epoch. In literature, however, no work can be considered as
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best be gauged by intensity of purpose. Keats himself when judged by this standard is really purposive; for in a world too dead to the worth of pure beauty, he revived the Greek ideal of the simply beautiful. With Tennyson, his highest work is surely that which strives to realize some aspect of the philosophic and religious thought of the epoch he mirrored. Thus it is clearly seen that the greatest poems are those which mark time for humanity. A work of art, I admit, is not a pamphlet, or a proposition in Euclid, but it must enclose a truth, and a new truth, if it is to find a place permanently in the front rank of its own order. Even of other arts than literature, this is essentially true - Painting, Sculpture, Music to be truly great must crest the wave of this own Epoch. In literature, however, no work can be considered as 31