way as to
subtract from it every ounce of value. There is a clear kernel
of idea in each and every one of her tales. Thus, in "Sense and
Sensibility," we meet two sisters who stand for the
characteristics contrasted in the title, and in the fortunes of
Mariane, whose flighty romanticism is cured so that she makes a
sensible marriage after learning the villainy of her earlier
lover and finding that foolish sentimentalism may well give way
to the informing experiences of life,--the thesis, satirically
conveyed though with more subtlety than in the earlier
"Northanger Abbey," proclaims the folly of young-girl
sentimentality and hysteria. In "Pride and Prejudice," ranked by
many as her masterpiece, Darcy, with his foolish hauteur, his
self-consciousness of superior birth, is temporarily blind to
the worth of Elizabeth, who, on her part, does not see the good
in him through her sensitiveness to his patronizing attitude; as
the course of development brings them together in a happy union,
the lesson of toleration, of mutual comprehension, sinks into
the mind. The reader realizes the pettiness of the worldly
wisdom which blocks the way of joy. As we have said, "Northanger
Abbey" speaks a wise word against the abuse of emotionalism; it
tells of the experiences of a flighty Miss, bred on the
"Mysteries of Udolpho" style of literature, during a visit to a
country house where she imagined all the medieval romanticism
incident to that school of fiction,--aided and abetted by such
innocuous helps as a storm without and a lonesome chamber within
doors. Of the later stories, "Mansfield Park" asks us to
remember what it is to be poor and reared among rich relations;
"Emma" displays a reverse misery: the rich young woman whose
character is exposed to the adulations and shams incident upon
her position; while in "Persuasion," there is yet another idea
expressed by and through another type of girl; she who has
fallen into the habit of allowing herself to be over-ridden and
used by friends and family.--There is something all but
Shaksperian in that story's illustration of "the uncertainty of
all human events and calculations," as she herself expresses it:
Anne Eliot's radical victory is a moral triumph yet a warning
withal. And in each book, the lesson has been conveyed with the
unobtrusive indirection of fine art; the story is ever first, we
are getting fiction not lectures. These novels adorn truth; they
show what literature can effect