home was her sister Cassandra, and it is significant that only upstairs, behind her shut door, did she read her own work aloud, for the benefit of her chosen circle in the younger generation. Yet more significant, though, is the fact that nowhere does she give any picture of united family happiness; the successful domestic unity will certainly not be successfully sought at Longbourn or Mansfield, Northanger or Kellynch. This, to any one who understands Jane Austen's preoccupation with truth, and her selection of material only from among observed facts tested by personal experience, speaks volumes, in its characteristically quiet way, for her position towards her own family. She was in it; but she was not really of it.

Even on the point of her intimacy with Cassandra there is something curiously suggestive in the fact that, after her first two novels, she never again gives us a picture of two intimately united sisters. Maria and Julia are allies only till their interests clash; Isabella is nothing to Emma; only time and trials teach Fanny to surmount her first startled disapproval of Susan; and the best that Anne can feel for Mary Musgrove is that she is not so repulsive and unsisterly as Elizabeth.' On the other hand, in three out of these four books, the author's delight is transferred to the relations between brother and sister-Wentworth and 'Sophy,' Henry and Eleanor, William and Fanny, and, above all, for depth of tried alliance, Crawford and Mary. Finally, she does not even die for us of anything particular, but fades out, with Victorian gentility, in a hazy unspecified decline. How much more fortunate, in her different class, is Charlotte Bronté, of whom no detail is hidden from her admirers by any such instinct for muffling things up in discretions and evasions! Even in popular language this distinction holds; no one dreams of calling the lesser writer anything but 'Charlotte Bronté,' while there still exists a whole sect of Jane Austen's devotees, no Laodiceans either, who to this day will always talk of her as Miss Austen.' Which is as if one were to speak currently of Mr Milton, and Monsieur de Molière.

These fantasies of propriety, together with her own misleadingly modest allusion to the 'little piece of ivory' on which she worked, have done much to perpetuate the

theory, still held among the profane, that she is a 'limited' writer. It is by no means so that her faithful see their radiant and remorseless Jane; and, though criticism depends, in the last resort, chiefly on what the critic himself brings to his subject (so that what each man comes seeking, that he will most surely find), Jane Austen's personality may be much more profitably reconstructed in her work, than from the superficial details of her life, doled out to us by her biographer. A writer's fame, in fact, relies for its permanent value on his own transpiring personality; in every line he is inevitably 'giving himself away,' and the future of his work depends on whether what he has to give possesses the salted quality of eternity. And impersonality comes as the first ingredient in the specific for immortality. The selfrevelation of the writer must be as severely implicit as it is universally pervasive; it must never be conscious or obtruded.

There is, indeed, a section of writers, as of readers, who believe in frequent appearances of the author before his curtain, to make deductions from his text, and point out conclusions. This is a pandering to laziness in the reader; every meaning should be clearly discoverable in the text, without its being necessary for the author himself to dig it out for us. And to such readers as these, who want their pabulum already peptonised, Jane Austen deliberately avoids appeal. As in her own life she evaded the lionising that lesser women covet, and would assuredly have approved Cassandra's destruction of her private letters, so in her work she no less carefully avoids overt appearance on her stage. She is there all the time, indeed, but never in propria persona, except when she gaily smiles through the opener texture of 'Northanger Abbey,' or, with her consummate sense of art, mitigates for us the transition out of her paradises back into the grey light of ordinary life, by letting the word 'I' demurely peer forth at last, as the fantasmagoria in Mansfield Park,' 'Emma' or 'Northanger Abbey' begins to thin out to its final pages. Otherwise she is the most aloof of writers, and does not work for such dull elves' (as she says herself) as will not so far come to meet the author as to make out for themselves his conclusions and deductions.

.

This elimination of the author is only part of the intense concentration which the greatest writers develop in their subject. The essence of conviction, in the game of make-believe, is to convince yourself first of all, finally and absolutely. This can only be done by forgetting yourself entirely, by blotting out the whole irrelevant world from your purview, and centralising, with a singleeyed undeviating passion of conviction, upon the tale you are setting out to live. It is at this point that all living writers (with the exception of Rhoda Broughton) fail. They are telling stories in which they have either no flesh-and-blood belief of their own, or else too much; telling them with an eye to their audience and to themselves and their own pet notions, telling them, that is, objectively, not subjectively, and piling up masses of detail and explanation in order to obscure the inner lack of any completed identity between the author and his matter.

It is precisely here that Jane Austen so magnificently succeeds. Wars may be raging to their end as the background of Persuasion,' or social miseries strike a new facet of Emma'; otherwise all the vast anguish of her time is non-existent to Jane Austen, when once she has got pen in hand, to make us a new kingdom of refuge from the toils and frets of life. Her kingdoms are hermetically sealed, in fact, and here lies the strength of their impregnable immortality; it is not without hope or comfort for us nowadays, to remember that 'Mansfield Park' appeared the year before Waterloo, and 'Emma' the year after. For Jane Austen is always concerned only with the universal, and not with the particular. And it is according as they invest their souls in the former or the latter that authors eternally survive or rapidly pass away. Fashions change, fads and fancies come and go, tyrannies and empires erupt and collapse; those who make events and contemporary ideas the matter of their work have their reward in instant appreciation of their topical value. And with their topical value they die. Art is a mysterious entity, outside and beyond daily life, whether its manifestation be

After Mr Gray of Sackville Street, Jane Austen specifies no tradesman, except Broadwood, nor even dwells on any detail of fashion.

by painting or sculpture or literature. If it use outside events at all, it must subdue them to its medium, and become their master, not their mere vehicle. So a hundred thousand novels come and go; but Jane Austen can never be out of date, because she never was in any particular date (that is to say, never imprisoned in any), but is coextensive with human nature.

Talk of her 'limitations' is vain, and based on a misapprehension. When we speak of her as our greatest artist in English fiction we do not mean that she has the loudest mastery of any particular mood, the most clamant voice, the widest gamut of subjects; we mean that she stands supreme and alone among English writers in possession of the secret which so many French ones possess-that is, a most perfect mastery of her weapons, a most faultless and precise adjustment of means to end. She is, in English fiction, as Milton in English poetry, the one completely conscious and almost unerring artist. This is to take only the technical side of her work; her scale and scope are different matters. There is, in some quarters, a tendency to quarrel with Jane Austen because in her books there is nothing that she never intended to be there, no heroic hectorings, no Brontesque ebulliencies, no mountain or moor or bonny beck' (to use Charlotte Bronté's own phrase)-surely one of the monumental ineptitudes of criticism, seeing that the most elementary axiom of art is the artist's initial right to choose his own medium. We have no more right, in fact, to cavil at Jane Austen for not writing 'The Duchess of Malfi' than at Webster for not writing Northanger Abbey.'

At the same time, it must never be thought that limitation of scene implies limitation of human emotion. The measure of perfection has no relation to the size of its material. Perfection is one and incommensurable. Class-limitation, in fact, is no limitation of sympathy; and a breaking heart is a breaking heart, no more nor less, whether it find vent in the ululations of Tamburlaine, or in the almost screamed with agony' of Marianne Dashwood. Jane Austen's heroes and heroines and subject-matter are, in fact, universal human nature, and conterminous with it, though manifested only in one class, with that class's superficial limitations, in habits and manner of life.

And here another error vitiates the caviller's thought. Readers fall into two groups-the objective and the subjective. And it is only the objective class who, because emotion is not vehemently expressed by Jane Austen, will fail to realise with what profound effect it is implied. She does not expound feeling; she conveys it. With her artist's instinct, she knows that exposition by the writer destroys conviction in the reader. She has at heart, all through her life, that maxim of the French which English writers find it so impossible to assimilate -'Glissez toujours, n'appuyez pas': do your work rightly, and trust the intelligence of the reader to do the rest. When Anne again meets Wentworth there is nothing shown in the text but the little flutter given to the sentence by the repetition of the descriptive adjective in:'The room seemed full, full of persons and voices;' but the sensitised reader is left fairly staggering in the gale of Anne's emotion, revealed in that tiny hint more intimately than by all the paragraphs of passionate prose in which other writers would exhaustively set out the emotions of Wentworth and Anne, until no emotion at all was left in the reader. For the objective writer toils and toils outside his subject, accumulating convincing details until conviction is destroyed; the subjective gives the bare and encyclopædic essential in a line or a word, and then goes on. And of all great writers Jane Austen is the most evocative, doing in half a dozen words (applied in exactly the proper measure, in exactly the proper place) what the sedulous subtleties of Henry James are unable to convey so clearly in as many fine-spun pages. Knightley, for instance, staying 'vigorously' on, away from Emma in Brunswick Square, gives us in one syllable more of Knightley and more of Emma than whole long paragraphs of analysis.

And among the secrets of Jane Austen's inexhaustible charm is that her work, especially in her second period, is so packed with such minute and far-reaching felicities that the thousandth reading of 'Emma' or 'Persuasion' will be certain to reveal to you a handful of such brilliant jewels unnoticed before. If she has nothing to say to those who want to sit passive while the whole story is put down plain before them like meat on a plate, she has all the more delights to unfold for those who know that