Meredith and James in the 1880's

234 2. Meredith and James in the 1880's Donald David Stone. Novelists in a. Changing World: Meredith, James, and the Trans forma tion"~of English Fiction in the 1880"' s (Cambridge, Mass« Harvard UP, 1972). One wonders about the publishing world that would support a book like Mr. Stone's in this age of financial difficulties and academic cut-backs. His is work that might better have been published as a series of more condensed articles. Mr. Stone, let me quickly add, has worthwhile points to offer, but he often lessens the forcibleness of his writing and the overall impression left by his book in adhering closely to the original thesis format of that book, with the resultant mechanical, repetitive, and pretentious features of such works. His book goes on and on and on; thus the most important sections - the analyses of One of Our Conquerors. The Portrait of a Lady, and The Princess Casamassima - are lost in a blunting morass of other details. Mr. Stone's preface states that he chooses Meredith and James for extended analyses because they 'are the two greatest novelists of the 1880's. The long introductory sections on the Victorian world and the novels highlighting the later part of it make one wonder, however, whether he is dealing with general literary history about the later nineteenth century rather than with Meredith and James most particularly. Some of the assertions are too confident, and they necessitate a wary approach to the book. Not everyone will agree that the 1880's alone are so emphatically the time "in which the dissolution of the Victorian world and the reorientation toward the modern sensibility can best be traced side by side." (p. 1) Stone continues by mentioning the deaths of "the great Victorian spokesmen," but Tennyson, Ruskin, Swinburne, and Hardy lived on past the eighties. Having scanned many an obituary of Hardy in which particularly Hardy the novelist was dubbed "the last of the great Victorians" (he lived on until 1928), I for one can not concur wholeheartedly with Stone's assumptions about the end of "Victorianism," a term never satisfactorily defined in this book - nor in others which more intensely concentrate on attempts to define it. The juxtaposition of Meredith and James is a fortuitous-one, particularly because it illuminates their literary affinities and relationships. It is also salutary to see James compared, for a change, with Pater rather than with the French or Russian fictionists of the century (or with George Eliot and Hawthorne). Much has been written on the awareness in both authors of a theory of fiction, but Stone has fairly deftly synthesized a vast body of material on that subject (though a forthcoming dissertation by Miss Sally Doughtery, of the University of Pennsylvania , will present a much more thorough view of James in this light). At times, however, Stone is led to turn over once more the all too familiar ground, and I submit that the very generality which results in the totality of his book is wearisome. Because Stone considers Meredith as essentially "Victorian" and 235 James essentially "Modern," the changes from one state to the other are not so sharply etched as they might be. One might also wish for further probings into James's relationships with Trollope (Mrs. Susan Hill, of West Chester State College, is presently examining James's riflings from Trollope's works). Further inquiry is needed into the exact relationships between The Egoist and The Portrait of a Lady, given Stone's tantalizing comments about the two novels (the present reviewer is engaged in such a study). James's noticeable reticence about Meredith leads to a suspicion that the "master" deliberately accorded his more witty laborer (and competitor?) in the field of then currently "new" fiction the silent treatment because of their affinities in psychological delineation of character. Meredith's impact upon Gissing is placed more intelligently than some earlier commentators have done (notably S. C. Chew, in the first edition of Baugh's Literary History of England), but again Stone only whets the appetite for deeper research into this subject. George Moore also hovers all too distantly about these pages, despite his important influence in...