George Moore, George Gissing and Arthur Conan Doyle, who show the specializa-
tion of the age. An author who had intellectual prestige for fifty years was the versa-
tile and productive George Meredith (1828–1909), now remembered for The Egoist
(1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885). But the only novelists so substantial that
several of their works are still read are Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) of Upper
Bockhampton, Dorset, and Henry James(1843–1916) of New York.
In subject-matter and approach, they are worlds apart. James patronized ‘poor
little Thomas Hardy’, as later did T. S. Eliot, of St Louis, Missouri. InThe Great
Tradition (1948), the critic F. R. Leavis, weeding the garden of English fiction for
Cambridge students, kept George Eliot, James and Conrad, but threw out this
‘provincial manufacturer of gauche and heavy fictions that sometimes have corre-
sponding virtues’. But Hardy has proved to be a perennial. Seen from a Dorset
village, James’s field and approach must have looked very rarefied.
Hardy’s novels did not fit Leavis’s idea of fiction as moralized realism; they are
pastoral, romance or tragic drama, not studies of provincial life. James spent most
of his adult years in England, an observer, writing often about the islanders. He is a
great practitioner of the art to which he devoted his life, and he influenced the ways
in which that art was later analysed. An American who influenced the English novel,
he is treated more marginally than in a history of literature in English he would
deserve.
Henry James came from a family of speculative intellectuals, his father a theolo-
gian, his brother William a philosopher of religion and psychology. Educated in the
US and Europe, he set his scenes in New York, Boston, Paris, Switzerland, Florence,
Rome or London, settling in England in 1876. His people are sometimes artistic,
more often moneyed, people staying in villas or country houses: the floating society
ofa new inter national civilization, superior in tone rather than substance. The
ce ntral figure is often a young woman, the victim of subtle manoeuvres to do with
money. An urbane narrative voice focuses the subject, attending to exactly what each
character knows. The reader has to infer motive, and to wait. Despite the subtlety of
his narration, psychology and syntax – famously drawn out in his later work –
James’s fundamental interest is in innocence, and in those who exploit it.
Thomas Hardy’s father was a Dorset stonemason, his mother a domestic servant
who gave him for his twelfth birthday a copy of Dryden’s Virgil. His background
was tangled, and less respectable than he made out in The Life of Thomas Hardy, the
biography published posthumously over his second wife’s name, but written by
him. Leaving school early, he was apprenticed to architects in Dorchester, then in
London. He went on educating himself, much as George Eliot had. He married
above himself (so they both felt), the sister-in-law of the vicar of a church he was
restoring in Cornwall. She encouraged his writing, and they were happy at first, and
his success as a novelist allowed him to build a house outside Dorchester. James’s
major novels are listed above; Hardy’s are discussed later (see p. 317), and his poetry
on p. 337.
The gulf between Hardy and James indicates a trend. It is at this juncture, or
disjuncture, that a weakening assent to gospel truths in the literal forms offered by
the Protestant churches began to take effect in divergent and more partial ideals. In
her novels George Eliot had kept her agnosticism quiet behind a Christian morality.
Hardy,losing his simple high Anglican faith suddenly in the 1860s, proclaimed his
atheism, then his agnosticism. A churchgoer unable to forgive God for not existing,
he at other times blamed God for a lack of compassion. James, too well-bred to310 11 · LATE VICTORIAN LITERATURE: 1880–1900
Henry James A selection:
Roderick Hudson, The
Americans(1877), Daisy
Miller(1879), Portrait of a
Lady, Washington Square
(1881), The Bostonians
(1886), The Aspern Papers
(1888), What Maisie Knew
(1897), The Turn of the Screw
(1898), The Wings of the
Dove(1902), The
Ambassadors(1903), The
Golden Bowl(1904).