Bloviating about stuff I know little about.

(This is me pretending I know stuff. Don't take it too seriously.)

“A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.”
—Umberto Eco

So if a story forces an interpretation of itself to the reader, it's not a story, it's a really long pamphlet. This is why stories have subtlety (in bringing across messages, that is), because subtlety allows for ambiguity of interpretation--it allows one person to read a story and see one thing, while another sees something else entirely.

This may be why I have such difficulty with earlier literature (in this case, the History of Eliza Wharton, which is about as subtle as a brick to the face). It's not their fault, they were writing prototypes and lacked the refinement of the art and codified tropes present today (I imagine in the future someone will say the same about the current generation, should be amusing. :P) But it doesn't change the crudeness inherent in many earlier works of literature.
Oh well.

It's also why we'll probably never replace the classics--they were first (from a standpoint of recorded history and known literature that is). How well they're written is only part of it; they just existed first and espoused relevant ideals, and so naturally have the most prominence.