the luminous reactions of one character upon another, and of all upon each; and, considering its difference from the other novels, it suggests that Jane Austen, had she lived, would have excelled in fiction of another kind than that which she had hitherto practised.

From one point of view, then, Persuasion may be regarded as Jane Austen's most characteristic novel. If it lacks the sharp wit and the high spirits of Pride and Prejudice, and the wide scope of Mansfield Park, it reveals more than they do of the interest which the seeing eye may find in ordinary people. Therein lies Jane Austen's individual quality. We have seen how conscious she was of her peculiar bent, and how resolute to keep to it. Maria Edgeworth, as Scott remarked, can offer us higher life, more romantic incident and broader comedy. Of romance, Jane Austen has none, either in character or in setting. The rocks and streams, the forests and castles, which form the furniture of the romantics, have no place in her novels. This was due to no want of appreciation of natural beauty. The opening of chapter IX of Sense and Sensibility would be sufficient to prove the contrary. Elinor, Marianne and Edward's talk on the picturesque in chapter XVIII of the same novel reveals once more the justice, the Greek sense and balance, that determine all Jane Austen's work; and, in chapter VIII of Mansfield Park, we find her giving the capital example of her principle. The party approaching Sotherton discusses its appearance; yet, the prominent interest of the scene is not the picturesqueness of Sotherton, but the relation of Sotherton and of its owner, Mr Rushworth, to the hopes and fears of women among the visitors. In her reaction from romance, Jane Austen dispensed with all aids borrowed from romance. The fall of Louisa Musgrave from the steps on the Cobb at Lyme Regis (an incident strictly consonant with the character and aims of Louisa); the fall of Marianne on the hill at Barton; the sudden return of Sir Thomas Bertram to Mansfield park-these are the most exciting incidents in the six novels. The very elopements are contemplated indirectly, and used, not for their own dramatic force, but for their effect upon the lives of others than the runaways. Character, not incident, was Jane Austen's aim; and, of character, whether in itself marked, or interesting only in its interactions, she found enough in the narrow circle and the humdrum life encountered by her immediate view. Humdrum, it certainly was. During Jane Austen's working years, while England was fighting for existence or newly triumphant, while the prince regent

E. L. XII. CH. X.

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was in the hey-day of his luxury and while revolutionary ideas were winning for poets and reformers present shame and future glory, there can have been no lack of bright colour and sharp contrast in life. Local humours, ripe and rich in the days of Fielding, can hardly have been planed away by the action of the growing refinement. Jane Austen, as novelist, is blind to all this multicoloured life. There are no extremes, social or other, in her books. The peasantry is scarcely mentioned; of noblemen, there is not one. Of set purpose, she keeps her eye fixed upon the manners of a small circle of country gentlefolk, who seem to have nothing to do but to pay calls, picnic, take walks, drive out, talk and dance. Of dancing, Jane Austen herself was fond; private theatricals are considered a little too heady an amusement for that circle. It is a world of idle men-her clergy are frequently absentees-and of unoccupied women, not one of whom is remarkable for any fineness or complexity of disposition or intellect, or for any strong peculiarity of circumstance. She shows, moreover, no ardent moral purpose or intellectual passion which might lend force where force was not to be found; she never uses her characters as pegs for ethical or metaphysical doctrines. Newman remarked of her that she had not a dream of the high catholic eos. There are no great passions in her stories. She rarely appeals to her reader's emotions, and never by means of the characters that she most admires or likes. It may be said that, on the whole, she appears to trust and to value love-it was observed by Whately that all Anne Eliot's troubles arose from her not yielding to her youthful love for Wentworth-but, beyond that, it would be unsafe to go.

sense.

With these limitations, natural and chosen, and out of these unpromising materials, Jane Austen composed novels that come near to artistic perfection. Her greatest gift was that sense of balance and proportion to which reference has been already made. To everything that she saw, she applied this touchstone of good Next came her extraordinarily perspicacious and sensitive understanding, not of women only, but of men as well. Notwithstanding her sheltered life and the moderate amount of her learning, she saw deeply and clearly to the springs of action, and understood the finest shades of feeling and motive. She was sensitive to the slightest deviation from the standard of good breeding and good sense; and any deviation (there can be no doubt of it) appealed to her sense of fun. Gossip by Miss Mitford

and, perhaps, others, brought her a reputation for acerbity and spleen. She reveals scarcely a hint of either in her writings; she is scrupulously fair even to Mrs Norris and to Mr Collins. Her attitude as satirist is best explained by a quotation from chapter XI of Pride and Prejudice. Says Darcy:

"The wisest and the best of men-nay, the wisest and best of their actions-may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.'

'Certainly,' replied Elizabeth-'there are such people, but I hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.'

And her sense of fun was proportioned to the follies which diverted her. Gross humours she disliked in other writers' novels, and never attempted in her own. With the sharpest and most delicate of wit, as deft in expression as it was subtle in perception, she diverted herself and her readers with the fine shades of folly in a circle of which the rudest member might be called refined. Her fun, moreover, was always fair, always goodtempered and always maintained in relation to her standard of good sense and good manners. To her delicate perception and her fairness, combined, is due what Whately called her Shakespearean discrimination in fools. Mr Collins could not be confused with Mr Elton, nor Lucy Steele with Mrs Elton, nor the proud Miss Eliot with the proud Misses Bertram. Jane Austen clings to her fairness even when it seems to tell against her favourite characters. She makes Fanny Price unhappy in her parents' home at Portsmouth, where a feebler novelist would have attempted to show her heroine in a light purely favourable; she attributes to Emma Woodhouse innumerable little failings. This just and consistent fidelity to character plays a large part in the subtlety of her discrimination, not only in fools but in less obviously diverting people. Her clarity of imaginative vision, and her fidelity to what she saw with it, make her characters real. Imagine Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse to be living women today, and at a first meeting in a drawingroom we might not know which was which. After seeing them through Jane Austen's eyes, we know them as thoroughly as we know the characters of Shakespeare; for, like Shakespeare, she knew all about the creatures of her observation and imagination. It is not only that she could tell her family and friends particulars of their lives which did not appear in the novels, or that she left their natures so plain that later writers may amuse themselves by

continuing their histories1. They are seen in the round, and are true, in the smallest details, to the particular nature.

Modest as she was, and working purposely in a very restricted field, Jane Austen set herself a very high artistic aim. To imagine and express personages, not types; to develop and preserve their characters with strict fidelity; to reveal them not by external analysis but by narrative in which they should appear to reveal themselves; to attain, in the construction of her novels, as near as might be, to a perfection of form that should be the outcome of the interaction of the natures and motives in the story: these were her aims, and these aims she achieved, perhaps, with more consistency and more completeness than any other novelist except, it may be, de Maupassant. In the earlier novels, her wit diverts her readers with its liveliness; her later work shows a tenderer, graver outlook and a deepening of her study of character. Through all alike, there runs the endearing charm of a shrewd mind and a sweet nature.

1 Cf. Brinton, Sybil G., Old Friends and New Fancies, 1913.

CHAPTER XI

LESSER NOVELISTS

JANE AUSTEN did not found any school; and her artistic strictness is not shown by any of her contemporaries or immediate successors. Several among them, especially women writers, took advantage of the new fields which she had opened to fiction; but, in most cases, the influence of the earlier and less regular novel is evident, and perhaps the influence of a period full of contrasts and extremes. In the novels of Susan Edmondstone Ferrier there is something of the rough sarcasm of Smollett, mingled with a strong didactic flavour and with occasional displays of sentiment that may be due to Mackenzie. To her personal friend Scott, she may have owed something in her studies of Scottish life, but Maria Edgeworth was her principal model. Her first novel, Marriage, was written in 1810, though it was not published till 1818, when it appeared anonymously. Marriage is full of vigorous work. The studies of the highland family into which an English lady of aristocratic birth and selfish temper marries by elopement are spirited and humourous; but the story rambles on through a good many years; and the character of Lady Juliana, poor, proud and worldly, is but a thin thread on which to hang the tale of three generations. The Inheritance, published in 1824, has more unity. Destiny, published in 1831, is chiefly remarkable for the character of McDow, the minister. To compare McDow with Mr Collins is to see the difference between Jane Austen and Susan Ferrier; but the latter, with her coarse workmanship succeeds in achieving a picture full of humour. The novel becomes very sentimental and strained towards the close, a criticism which, also, holds true of The Inheritance; but Susan Ferrier was a novelist of power, whose work is still fresh and interesting.

Coarse as her workmanship may be compared with that of Jane Austen, it is refined and delicate by the side of that of a re

markable woman, Frances, the mother of Anthony and Augustus, Adelphus, i