Explanatory Note to the First Edition
The main portion of the following story appeared—with slight
modifications—in the Graphic newspaper; other chapters, more
especially addressed to adult readers, in the Fortnightly Review and
the National Observer, as episodic sketches. My thanks are tendered
to the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for enabling me now
to piece the trunk and limbs of the novel together, and print it
complete, as originally written two years ago.
I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose,
as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and
in respect of the book’s opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too
genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays
thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome’s: If
an offense come out of the truth, better it is that the offense come
than that the truth be concealed.
T.H.
November 1891.
Author’s Preface to the Fifth and Later Editions
This novel being one wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins
after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as
fatal to her part of protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of
her enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions
that the public should welcome the book and agree with me in holding
that there was something more to be said in fiction than had been said
about the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe. But the responsive
spirit in which Tess of the d’Urbervilles has been received by the
readers of England and America would seem to prove that the plan of
laying down a story on the lines of tacit opinion, instead of making it
to square with the merely vocal formulae of society, is not altogether
a wrong one, even when exemplified in so unequal and partial an
achievement as the present. For this responsiveness I cannot refrain
from expressing my thanks; and my regret is that, in a world where one
so often hungers in vain for friendship, where even not to be wilfully
misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never meet in person these
appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them by the hand.
I include amongst them the reviewers—by far the majority—who have so
generously welcomed the tale. Their words show that they, like the
others, have only too largely repaired my defects of narration by their
own imaginative intuition.
Nevertheless, though the novel was intended to be neither didactic nor
aggressive, but in the scenic parts to be representative simply and in
the contemplative to be oftener charged with impressions than with
convictions, there have been objectors both to the matter and to the
rendering.
The more austere of these maintain a conscientious difference of
opinion concerning, among other things, subjects fit for art, and
reveal an inability to associate the idea of the sub-title adjective
with any but the artificial and derivative meaning which has resulted
to it from the ordinances of civilization. They ignore the meaning of
the word in Nature, together with all aesthetic claims upon it, not to
mention the spiritual interpretation afforded by the finest side of
their own Christianity. 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 impossible 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
important than the inner Necessity and Truth, I have done with him.”
In the introductory words to the first edition I suggested the possible
advent of the genteel person who would not be able to endure something
or other in these pages. That person duly appeared among the aforesaid
objectors. In one case he felt upset that it was not possible for him
to read the book through three times, owing to my not having made that
critical effort which “alone can prove the salvation of such an one.”
In another, he objected to such vulgar articles as the Devil’s
pitchfork, a lodging-house carving-knife, and a shame-bought parasol,
appearing in a respectable story. In another place he was a gentleman
who turned Christian for half-an-hour the better to express his grief
that a disrespectful phrase about the Immortals should have been used;
though the same innate gentility compelled him to excuse the author in
words of pity that one cannot be too thankful for: “He does but give us
of his best.” I can assure this great critic that to exclaim
illogically against the gods, singular or plural, is not such an
original sin of mine as he seems to imagine. True, it may have some
local originality; though if Shakespeare were an authority on history,
which perhaps he is not, I could show that the sin was introduced into
Wessex as early as the Heptarchy itself. Says Glo’ster in Lear,
otherwise Ina, king of that country:
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
The remaining two or three manipulators of Tess were of the
predetermined sort whom most writers and readers would gladly forget;
professed literary boxers, who put on their convictions for the
occasion; modern “Hammers of Heretics”; sworn Discouragers, ever on the
watch to prevent the tentative half-success from becoming the whole
success later on; who pervert plain meanings, and grow personal under
the name of practising the great historical method. However, they may
have causes to advance, privileges to guard, traditions to keep going;
some of which a mere tale-teller, who writes down how the things of the
world strike him, without any ulterior intentions whatever, has
overlooked, and may by pure inadvertence have run foul of when in the
least aggressive mood. Perhaps some passing perception, the outcome of
a dream hour, would, if generally acted on, cause such an assailant
considerable inconvenience with respect to position, interests, family,
servant, ox, ass, neighbour, or neighbour’s wife. He therefore
valiantly hides his personality behind a publisher’s shutters, and
cries “Shame!” So densely is the world with any shifting of positions,
even the best warranted advance, galls somebody’s kibe. Such shiftings
often begin in sentiment, and such sentiment sometimes begins in a
novel.
July 1892.
The foregoing remarks were written during the early career of this
story, when a spirited public and private criticism of its points was
still fresh to the feelings. The pages are allowed to stand for what
they are worth, as something once said; but probably they would not
have been written now. Even in the first short time which has elapsed
since the book was first published, some of the critics who have
provoked the reply have “gone down into silence,” as if to remind one
of the infinite unimportance of both their say and mine.
January 1895.
The present edition of this novel contains a few pages that have never
appeared in any previous edition. When the detached episodes were
collected as stated in the preface of 1891, these pages were
overlooked, though they were in the original manuscript. They occur in