t is done.

Love stories are still written in profusion, and we imagine that
so compelling a motive for fiction will still be vital (in some
one of its innumerable phases) in the twenty-fifth century. Yet
it is true that novelists now point with pride to the work of
the last generation of their art, in that it has so often made
sex love subsidiary to other appeals, or even eliminated it
altogether from their books. Some even boast of the fact that
not a woman is to be found in the pages of their latest
creation. Nearly one hundred years ago, Defoe showed the
possibility (if you happen to have genius) of making a powerful
story without the introduction of the eternal feminine: Crusoe
could not declare with Cyrano de Bergerac:

"Je vous dois d'avoir eu tout au moins, une amie;
Grace a vous, une robe a passe dans ma vie."

It is but natural that, immensely powerful as it is, such a
motive should have been over-worked: the gamut of variations has
been run from love licit to love illicit, and love degenerate
and abnormal to no-love-at-all. But any publisher will assure
you that still "love conquers all"; and in the early nineteenth
century any novelist who did not write tales of amatory interest
was a fool: the time was not ripe to consider an extension of
the theme nor a shifted point of view. For the earlier
story-tellers, in the language of Browning's lyric,

"Love is best."

Jane Austen's diction--or better, her style, which is more than
diction--in writing her series of social studies, affords a fine
example of the adaptation of means to end. Given the work to be
accomplished, the tools are perfect instruments for the purpose.
The student of English style in its evolution must marvel at the
idiom of Austen, so strangely modern is it, so little has time
been able to make it passe. From her first book, her manner
seems to be easy, adequate, unforced, with nothing about it
self-conscious or gauche. In the development of some great
writers the change from unsureness and vulgarity to the mastery
of mature years can be traced: Dickens is one such. But nothing
of the sort can be found in Austen. She has in "Northanger
Abbey" and "Pride and Prejudice"--early works--a power in
idiomatic English which enables her reader to see her thought
through its limpid medium of language, giving, it may be, as
little attention to the form of expression as a man uninstructed
in the niceties of a woman's dress gives to those detai