peaks as a background for her characters, any more than she treats of man in his relation to his environment. In other words, she has no poetry; she avoids the heroic, the romantic, and the ideal.

She does not prove the human soul for motives, nor does she seek to illuminate or display them as later novelists have done; as Mr. Warre Cornish says, she has no need to construct her characters, for they are there before her, like Mozart's music, only waiting to be written down.

She does not use her narrative power as Fielding did to tell a story and create situations, but simply as a means to an end, the unfolding of character. That is, she belongs to the school of Richardson rather than to any other of her predecessors, the school which has received such an impetus in our own day in the work of Arnold Bennett.

She paints in every detail with meticulous care; with the true artistic temperament she refuses to pass any tendency to the slovenly, but with deliberation and exactitude sketches in every trait which will help to make the portrait lifelike.

Like all geniuses she recognized both where her true métier lay and how she achieved her self-imposed task. Everyone remembers her phrase about "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labor."

Her pellucid vision gave her two eminent characteristics which at first sight would seem to be contradictory: her capability for seeing through all pretentiousness led her to denounce all false romanticism, as we see in her counterblast to The Mysteries of Udolpho. Northanger Abbey gave the death-blow to the hysteria caused by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe; her irony seems almost at times to descend to acerbity

and yet at the same time her collateral sense of humor made her kindly disposed and magnanimous in her sympathies to creatures whom other artists would have condemned without mercy. That is, she seems to combine, as Andrew Lang said, gentleness with a certain hardness of heart, which are difficult to reconcile until we have made a close study of her methods.

No greater mistake could possibly be made than to imagine her as a soured old maid, though the bust erected to her memory in the Pump Room at Bath goes a long way to give that impression.

On the contrary, she was distinctly pretty, sunny natured, gay even to frivolity, an accomplished conversationalist, a singer and a musician, possessed of a natural aptitude for and skill in games, extraordinarily well-balanced and sane in her outlook . . . an ideal wife, one would suppose, for any cultured man of the world. It is only by understanding these facts about her that we realize the meaning of what Professor Saintsbury calls the "livingness" of her work. She writes as one who has, as Lady Ritchie puts it, "a natural genius for life." That she enjoyed her forty-two years to the full we cannot doubt. She was no Shelley, a genius of moods, alternately in heaven or hell; she pursued an even path of placidity and content, not troubling herself overmuch with the perplexities that obsess the mind of the social reformer, nor harassed with religious doubts.

Suffering does not make her suicidal, nor has she any of that divine discontent which we usually associate with our best writers. How many of our famous men of letters were able to work in the midst of domestic interruption and make no sign of impatience? It is a small point, but quite an illuminating one.

She had no private study. As she worked with the others in the common sitting-room she would sometimes burst out laughing, go to her desk and write something down, and then go back to her work again and say nothing.

It is worthy of notice that her geniality was not of that vapid sort that proceeds from ignorance or wilful blindness to human fatuity and vice, that sings to the shallow, optimistic tune that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." It is to her everlasting credit that although she was under no delusions as to the state of humanity, she neither condemned it nor sneered at it; she had nothing of the cynic in her temperament. There have, of course, been critics who have appended that libelous label to her, but they belong to the same category which stigmatizes Thackeray and Swift as possessing the same trait. How anyone with her genius for laughter and affection, her interest in mankind or her clearsightedness could be accused of cynicism, which is a property of the owl and bat and donkey in humanity, I do not understand. She is a master of irony and satire, it is true; but these are incompatible with misanthropy, the touchstone of cynicism; of this she had not a trace. She is not of those who were disillusioned by the fever and the weariness and the fret of life. She was no pessimistic Teuton philosopher; she was too busy taking notes on the people with whom she came into contact to spend time in moralizing. She was essentially of a happy nature, and kept a strong curb on her emotions; that she felt deeply is probable, that she ever gave full vent to her feelings we instinctively know to be untrue. Her love tragedy, if she had one, was not allowed to spoil her life; she may very well have passed through the depths, but she

emerged from the conflict victorious, having battered down the forces of darkness, and continued to irradiate sweetness and light in her books and her life.

Other authors might easily have been discomfited by the reception given to their work by publishers if a first manuscript had been rejected by return of post as hers was in the case of Pride and Prejudice. Not so Jane Austen; she continued to write until almost the day of her death, sure of the verdict of posterity, the only judgment upon which genius really relies. She knew that her appeal was universal and not liable to grow dim with the passage of years. Her satire and humor are as fresh today as ever they were, and as an antidote to the horrors of our time no other author can compare with her.

II.

We commonly find that if we want to test the truth about an author, a perusal of his or her correspondence is of the greatest value to enable us to decide how far the judgments we have formed from their serious work are accurate. In their letters we take them off their guard; they are in undress, no longer the mouthpieces of divine inspiration, but flesh and blood like ourselves.

Jane Austen's almost racy letters to her sister shed a flood of light on her character and help us still further to dot the "i's" and cross the "t's" of criticism.

They are for the most part compositions of a quite light and trivial nature, dwelling on topics such as might interest any country-bred girl. Dress looms large, and so does small-talk about the everyday round of work and amusement, people met, dances, and the like. But all through them we see the same shrewd, Puck-like spirit darting hither and thither, we

hear the silvery laughter of the girl who painted Mr. Collins and Mrs. Jennings; they are obviously written by a girl who cannot help seeing the funny side of everything, who is vividly interested in people and their idiosyncrasies; the deeper things in life are not discussed, not because she was shallow, but because there are some things which language is incapable of expressing, where silence is the only true speech. Those traces of bitterness which occasionally disturb us in her novels appear again here.

"Only think of Mrs. Holder being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her," may stand as a typical example out of many; but no one could contend that such phrases are deliberately cynical; at the worst they are but thoughtless witticisms, and really hurt no one. Jane Austen was entirely devoid of malice. She suffered fools more or less gladly; she would try the barb of irony to laugh them out of their folly, but they were not like those others, at the opposite end of the scale, "pictures of perfection," which she confesses made her sick and wicked.

The puzzle is that so highly gifted and all-seeing a genius should have adopted such a detached, tolerant attitude towards humanity. There have been many who have found fault with her for not waxing indignant at the follies of society. These assert that she has no moral sense, but surely to instil into us the necessity for mutual tolerance and unfailing humor in our dealings with our neighbors is in itself a moral act of the highest order.

The first thing that strikes anyone who has tried reading Jane Austen's novels aloud is the dramatic power displayed in the conversations. Νο novelist ever made his or her charac

ters express themselves so simply or forcibly in their parts as she does. It would seem that we have lost in her one of our greatest playwrights. The unfolding of character in dialogue has not been better done by any of our dramatists, and has certainly not been approached by any other novelist. No novels make so immediate an appeal when declaimed as hers do. Even youthful audiences who are popularly supposed to be incapable of appreciating the subtlety of her wit are quickly entranced.

Think for a moment of that famous second chapter in Sense and Sensibility, where Mr. John Dashwood is converted by his wife with regard to his ideas as to their duty to his widowed sister and her daughters. It is conceived and executed with an exactness of phrase and economy of words that irresistibly calls to mind that parallel scene in King Lear where the old man is deprived of his retinue.

With what deft strokes are we shown the whole of a person's character in one short, ironic sentence.

Mrs. Jennings was a widow, with an ample jointure. She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and she had now, therefore, nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world.

The vulgarity of the Steele family is shown in their use of "prodigious," "vast," "beau," and the like words, in their notorious letters omitting the personal pronoun; we recognize the type at once. That is the secret of Jane Austen's power: she has seized upon the salient, ineradicable characteristics of the type which is always with us; the unstable lover, the gossiping, scandal-mongering old dame, the young impressionable girl who could not bear the thought of her sister marrying a man with so little "sensibility" that he could not read

I know nothing in our literature to compare with the concluding paragraphs of Sense and Sensibility. Ninetynine out of every hundred authors would have made Marianne a tragic heroine, but Jane Austen realized that she was not great enough for that; she was audacious enough to risk an anti-climax in order to secure verisimilitude.

Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract by her conduct her most favorite maxims. She was born to overcome an affection formed so late in life as at seventeen, and with no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship, voluntarily to give her hand to another! -and that other a man who had suffered no less than herself, under the event of a former attachment, whom, two years before, she had considered too old to be married, and who still sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat!

As for the villain, Willoughby, we read that "he lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humor, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity."

The opening sentences of Pride and Prejudice might almost be taken as a test of our ability to appreciate Jane Austen. She has a knack of beginning in an exhilarating, startling way on most occasions, but it may well be

doubted whether any novel starts quite so happily as this:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"-after which delightful touch of irony we are immediately introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, who proceed to squabble over their daughters' chances of securing the rich young stranger's hand and purse in a dialogue which touches the top note of humor.

Elizabeth Bennet is Jane Austen's as she is nearly everyone else's favorite heroine.

"I must confess," she writes to her sister, "that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." On her Jane Austen has lavished the best of her own inimitable humor, high spirits, gaiety, and courage, so that she takes high place among the great women in fiction, and becomes

no

mean companion for even Clara Middleton or Clarissa Harlowe.

The alternate attraction for and repulsion from Darcy which Elizabeth felt is drawn with the sure hand of the great creator; and then, while we are still absolutely absorbed in the swaying fortunes of the principals, there quietly creeps upon the scene one of the most famous characters in comedy, Mr. Collins. His interview with Elizabeth when he formally proposes to her is in Jane Austen's richest and happiest style. So long as humor lasts that chapter cannot fail to bring joy to the human heart. It is as universal in its appeal as the "Bottom" scenes in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Bottom was, after all, only Mr. Collins in one stage of society as Dogberry was in another) or the Falstaff episodes at Gads Hill and Eastcheap.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who "if she accepted any refreshments seemed to do it only for the sake of finding out that Mrs. Collins's joints of meat were too large for her family," is

another character over whom the Comic Spirit sheds its harmless but mirth-provoking rays. The whole novel abounds in rich personalities without whom the world would be the poorer, but we are most of all concerned with the happiness of Elizabeth, who, like others of Jane Austen's heroines, finds that true love which is all-powerful can spring from "the cold fountain of gratitude no less than from the volcano of passion." Jane Austen's lovers are remarkably free from passion.

After Pride and Prejudice, in popular estimation, comes Mansfield Park. Tennyson, for one, preferred the latter, but the general run of readers know their Pride and Prejudice well and Mansfield Park not at all. There is, of course, more emotion and drama in the earlier of the two, but Mansfield Park is freer from exaggeration and contains the never-to-be-forgotten impertinent and meddlesome Mrs. Norris. In no novel do we so quickly pick up the thread of the plot; by the third page, as Mr. Cornish says, we are quite at home, know everybody, and even begin to look forward to the final event.

After the ill-natured Mrs. Norris, who will not take Fanny Price because "I should not have a bed to give her, for I must keep a spare room for a friend," Jane Austen probably hated her sister, Lady Bertram, more than most of her other odious characters.

She was a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa, doing some long pieces of needlework, of little use and no beauty, thinking more of her pug than her children, but very indulgent to the latter when it did not put herself to inconvenience.

In this novel we see strongly brought out a trait that is particularly noticeable in all Jane Austen's novels, the mutual confidence and sincerity of feeling displayed between brother and

sister: she never tires of emphasizing this side of life.

Emma is the most consistently cheerful of all the novels. E. V. Lucas considers it to be her best, her ripest, and her richest, the most "readableagain" book in the world. Comedy reigns supreme with never the vestige of a cloud to spoil the serenity and the joy. No one is very wealthy or very poor: the whole action takes place in the village of Highbury among a set of people who meet daily. The gradual dawn and growth of love between Knightley and Emma, who makes matches for everyone but herself, is uncannily well brought home to the reader, and their final lovescene is one of the happiest in literature. The vulgar and patronizing Mrs. Elton and talkative Miss Bates are a joy forever, particularly the latter, who, though "neither young, handsome, rich, nor married, without beauty and cleverness, was yet happy and contented. She loved everybody, thought herself a most fortunate creature and surrounded with blessings."

Northanger Abbey is most interesting because of its historical value as an attack on the artificial school of romanticism which was so popular among young girls of that time. Catherine Morland's discovery of the roll of paper which she is convinced are love-letters is one of the most successfully satiric studies in the whole range of Jane Austen's work.

Darkness impenetrable and immovable filled the room. A violent gust of wind, rising with sudden fury, added fresh horror to the moment. . . . Human nature could support no more. . . . Groping her way to the bed, she jumped hastily in, and sought some suspension of agony by creeping far underneath the clothes. . . The storm still raged. . . . Hour after hour passed away, and the wearied Catherine had heard three proclaimed