hors compared with whom all that went before seems
but preparatory; one a man, the other a woman, who together
express and illustrate most conveniently for this study the main
movements of modern fiction,--romance and realism,--the instinct
for truth and the instinct for beauty; not necessarily an
antagonism, as we shall have ample occasion to see, since truth,
rightly defined, is only "beauty seen from another side." It
hardly needs to add that these two novelists are Jane Austen and
Walter Scott.

CHAPTER V

REALISM: JANE AUSTEN

It has been said that Miss Austen came nearer to showing life as
it is,--the life she knew and chose to depict,--than any other
novelist of English race. In other words, she is a princess
among the truth-tellers. Whether or not this claim can be
substantiated, it is sure that, writing practically half a
century after Richardson and Fielding, she far surpassed those
pioneers in the exquisite and easy verisimilitude of her art.
Nay, we can go further and say that nobody has reproduced life
with a more faithful accuracy, that yet was not photography
because it gave the pleasure proper to art, than this same Jane
Austen, spinster, well-born and well-bred: in her own phrase, an
"elegant female" of the English past. Scott's famous remark can
not be too often quoted: "That young lady had a talent for
describing the movements and feelings of characters of ordinary
life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with."

If you look on the map at the small Southern county of
Hampshire, you will see that the town of Steventon lies hard by
Selborne, another name which the naturalist White has made
pleasant to the ear. Throughout her forty-two years of life--she
was born the year of American revolution and died shortly after
Scott had begun his Waverley series--she was a country-woman in
the best sense: a clergyman's daughter identified with her
neighborhood, dignified and private in her manner of existence,
her one sensational outing being a four years' residence in the
fashionable watering-place of Bath, where Beau Nash once reigned
supreme and in our day, Beaucaire has been made to rebuke Lady
Mary Carlisle for her cold patrician pride. Quiet she lived and
died, nor was she reckoned great in letters by her
contemporaries. She wrote on her lap with others in the room,
refused to take herself seriously and in no respect was like the
authoress who is kodaked at the writing-desk and chro