superb. The
author, it may be granted, has a certain playful satire in her
manner here and elsewhere, when setting forth such views: yet it
seems to be fair to her to say that, taking her fiction as a
whole, she contentedly accepts this order of things and builds
upon it. She and her world exhibit not only worldliness but that
"other-worldliness" which is equally self-centered and
materialistic. Jane Austen is a highly enjoyable mondaine. To
compare her gamut with that of George Eliot or George Meredith
is to appreciate how much has happened since in social and
individual evolution. The wide social sympathy that throbs in
modern fiction is hardly born.

In spite, too, of the thorough good breeding of this woman
writer, the primness even of her outlook upon the world, there
is plain speaking in her books, even touches of coarseness that
are but the echo of the rankness which abounds in the
Fielding-Smollett school. Happily, it is a faint one.

Granting the slightness of her plots and their family likeness,
warm praise is due for the skill with which they are conducted;
they are neatly articulated, the climactic effect is, as a rule,
beautifully graduated and sure in its final force: the multitude
of littles which go to make up the story are, upon examination,
seen to be not irrelevant but members of the one body, working
together towards a common end. It is a puzzling question how
this firm art was secured: since technique does not mean so much
a gift from heaven as the taking of forethought, the self-conscious
skill of a practitioner. Miss Austen, setting down her
thoughts of an evening in a copybook in her lap, interrupted by
conversations and at the beck and call of household duties, does
not seem as one who was acquiring the mastery of a difficult
art-form. But the wind bloweth where it listeth--and the
evidences of skill are there; we can but chronicle the fact, and
welcome the result.

She was old-fashioned in her adherence to the "pleasant ending";
realist though she was, she could not go to the lengths either
of theme or interpretation in the portrayal of life which later
novelists have so sturdily ventured. It is easy to understand
that with her avowed dislike of tragedy, living in a time when
it was regarded as the business of fiction to be amusing--when,
in short, it was not fashionable to be disagreeable, as it has
since become--Jane Austen should have preferred to round out her
stories with a "curtain