Austen's; and every dim character in our 'dusty mortal days' has something of one or another in the long gallery of her creations. Thus to become the very texture of humanity's mind and talk from generation to generation, is the attainment of the supreme visualisers only; talent, at the best, can merely photograph, either from the real or from an ideal.

So far we have looked only at the literary aspect of Jane Austen. The secret of her immortality is to be found in that underlying something which is the woman herself; for, of all writers, she it is who pursues truth with most utter and undeviable devotion. The real thing is her only object always. She declines to write of scenes and circumstances that she does not know at first hand; she refuses recognition, and even condonement, to all thought or emotion that conflicts with truth, or burkes it, or fails to prove pure diamond to the solvent of her acid. She is, in fact, the most merciless, though calmest, of iconoclasts; only her calm has obscured from her critics the steely quality, the inexorable rigour of her judgment. Even Butler, her nearest descendant in this generation, never seems really to have recognised his affinity. For Jane Austen has no passion, preaches no gospel, grinds no axe; standing aloof from the world, she sees it, on the whole, as silly. She has no animosity for it; but she has no affection. She does not want to better fools, or to abuse them; she simply sets herself to glean pleasure from their folly. Nothing but the firstrate in life is good enough for her tolerance; remember Anne Elliot's definition of 'good company,' and her cousin's rejoinder, 'That is not good company; that is the best.'

Everything false and feeble, in fact, withers in the demure greyness of her gaze; in 'follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies,' she finds nothing but diversion, dispassionate but pitiless. For, while no novelist is more sympathetic to real values and sincere emotion, none also is so keen on detecting false currency, or so relentless in exposing it. At times, even, her antagonism to conventionalities and shams betrays her almost to a touch of passion. Yet, if ever she seems cruel, her anger is but just impatience against the slack thought and ready-made pretences that pass current in the world and

move her always to her quiet but destructive merriment; as in the famous outburst about Miss Musgrove's 'large fat sighings over a son whom alive no one had cared for a cri de cœur for which the author for once feels immediately bound to come before the curtain, to mitigate it with a quasi-apology quite devoid of either conviction or recantation. Nor will she hear of any reserves in honesty and candour; not only the truth, but the whole truth, must be vital to any character of whom she herself is to approve. Civilised urbane discretion, and assent to social falsehoods, make strong points in Anne's private distrust of William Elliot, and in Fanny's disapproval of Henry Crawford, artfully thrown in contrast as he is against the breezy impetuous young frankness of William Price.

She is consumed with a passion for the real, as apart from the realistic; and the result is that her creations, though obviously observed, are no less obviously generalised into a new identity of their own. She acknowledges no individual portrait, such as those in which alone such essentially unimaginative writers as Charlotte Bronté can deal. And in this intense preoccupation with character, she is frankly bored with events; the accident at Lyme shows how perfunctorily she can handle a mere occurrence, being concentrated all the time on the emotions that engender it, and the emotions it engenders. Her very style is the mirror of her temperament. Naturally enough, she both writes and makes her people speak an English much more flowing and lucid than is fashionable in ordinary writers and ordinary life; but, allowing for this inevitable blemish, the note of her style is the very note of her nature, in its lovely limpidity, cool and clear and flashing as an alpine stream, without ebulliencies or turbidness of any kind. It is not for nothing that 'rational' is almost her highest word of praise. Good sense, in the widest meaning of the word, is her be-all and end-all; the perfect σωφροσύνη which is also the perfect αὐταρκεια.

For her whole sex she revolts against 'elegant females,' and sums up her ideal woman, not as a 'good-natured unaffected girl' (a phrase which, with her, connotes a certain quite kindly contempt), but as a 'rational creature.' The pretences of 'Vanity Fair,' for instance,

to be an historical novel, fade into the thinnest of hot air when one realises, with a gasp of amazement, that Amelia Sedley is actually meant to be a contemporary of Anne Elliot. And thus one understands what a deep gulf Victorianism dug between us and the past; how infinitely nearer to Jane Austen are the sane sensible young women of our own day than the flopping vaporous fools who were the fashion among the Turkish-minded male novelists of Queen Victoria's fashions.* Take Catherine Morland, a country parson's daughter, suffered to run quite wild,† and compare her list of reading with the incredible Pinkertonian education in 'accomplishments.' Imagine Miss Pinkerton allowing Amelia Sedley to read 'Othello'; or Amelia wishing to do so, or understanding any of it if she did! At the same time, the famous outburst in Northanger Abbey' shows that, in those days as well as later, 'imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms.' It is by a most curious irony of fate, indeed, that the ignorant attribute to Jane Austen and her heroines just that very primness and futility of which she, and they, are most contemptuous.

Her heroines, indeed, are out-of-door creatures, by no means fettered by conventional ignorance or innocence; and they all have minds of their own so clear and firm that, while their good-feeling remains unalienated, their judgments equally remain unconciliated. A knowledge, which she often wished less, of her father's character' is part of lovely gentle Anne; and even self-righteous Fanny owns to herself that her father was still worse than she had expected-' he swore and he drank, he was dirty and gross-with a succinct yet comprehensive candour that would certainly not have marked any Victorian heroine's attitude towards her dear papa.'

* It is but fair to add that male delight in female imbecility is as eternal as Jane Austen herself declared; and that Scott's heroines (with the exception of Diana Vernon) are generally of an insipid feebleness sinking to the lowest Victorian standards.

† Jane Austen seems to have postulated so much of intelligence in her girls, as to prefer for them a haphazard rather than a regular education. Elizabeth Bennet, also, was left to choose for herself whether she would learn or not; while Miss Lee's pompous curriculum at Mansfield is openly laughed at, and shown to lead to no good result, to no real education in character.

And, how much nearer we are to-day to Anne and Fanny than to the generation immediately behind us, is shown by the fact that Pastor Manders' ejaculation in Ghosts," that it is Oswald's duty to love and honour his impossible dead father, represented such an accepted axiom to the Victorians that its obvious irony in the play was felt to be a blasphemy; whereas to us of to-day the irony has lost all point, because the axiom itself is seen as clearly to be mere nonsense, as it was seen long ago, by Fanny and Anne and Eleanor Tilney.

In fact, all the women whom Jane Austen commends are absolutely honest and well-bred in mind. Breeding is not a matter of birth or place, but of attitude towards life; Jane Austen's standard, like Anne Elliot's behaviour, is as 'consciously right as it is invariably gentle'; and, one may add, as unselfconscious about its quality as real breeding is always bound to be. Her tone of perfect quiet assurance, and taking-for-grantedness, has nowhere been equalled. Many writers, even of the great (especially nowadays, and especially among women), are too painfully at ease in their Sions of castle or countryhouse,* with a naïve excessiveness, a solemn rapture of emphasis, that shows their inmost feeling to be really Mary Crawford's at finding herself in Mansfield Vicarage garden. Even Thackeray gloats over the silver coffeepots at Castle Gaunt; even Henry James lingers too lovingly amid the material details of what Gertrude Atherton would call 'aristocratic' life; Jane Austen alone is as indifferent and as much at ease, wherever she goes, as those only can be who are to the manner and the matter born and bred. Note, with what decision, for instance, but with what a lack of betraying emphasis, she reserves 'vulgar' forms, such as 'quiz' and 'beau,' and you was,' to the exclusive use of her vulgar characters. And how it is only her underbred womenIsabella Thorpe, Mrs Elton, Lucy Steele-who use the bare surname of a man; Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, even in their most intimate private dialogues, never talk of 'Bingley' or 'Darcy' until the familiarity has been justified by betrothal. And again, the middle-class

Mary Crawford had seen scores of great houses, and cared for none of them.'

sisters, Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris, are to each other, respectively, 'Sister' and 'Lady Bertram,' throughout their book. These are samples of the small unobtruded points that give Jane Austen's readers such unending delight.

'Lady Susan' is the first of her books to call for comment. It is not good; it is crude and hard, with the usual hardness of youth. Yet it is so important to the study of its author's career and temperament that it would be disastrous to omit it from future editions, in deference to any fancied wishes of her 'shade.' The faults of youth are really only the excesses of what are to be excellences in the matured writer; and the cold unpleasantness of Lady Susan' is but the youthful exaggeration of that irreconcilable judgment which is the very backbone of Jane Austen's power, and which, harshly evident in the first book, is the essential strength of all the later ones, finally protruding its bony structure nakedly again in 'Persuasion.' But 'Lady Susan' also links on to Mansfield Park.' For where and when did Jane Austen come into contact with the 'Smart Set' of her time? Biographies give no slightest hint; but we must not forget Miss Mitford's impression of Jane Austen as a pretty little empty-headed husband-hunting fool. However violently at variance may be this verdict from all we can divine of Jane Austen, it was evidently this unsuspectedly gay creature who foregathered at one time with the 'Souls,' in intellectual attraction and moral repulsion. For out of the same set, brilliant and heartless, which is the very scene of Lady Susan, are ultimately to be projected Henry and Mary Crawford.

With 'Sense and Sensibility' we approach the maturing Jane Austen. But it has the almost inevitable frigidity of a reconstruction, besides an equally inevitable uncertainty in the author's use of her weapons. There are longueurs and clumsinesses; its conviction lacks fire; its development lacks movement; its major figures are rather incarnate qualities than qualitied incarnations. Never again does the writer introduce a character so entirely irrelevant as Margaret Dashwood, or marry a heroine to a man so remote in the story as Colonel Brandon. This is not, however, to say that 'Sense and