iticised.
Nothing in it shows lack of power (John Dashwood and his wife are of the
first order); a good deal in it shows lack of knowledge exactly how to
direct that power.

_Mansfield Park_ (1814), though hardly as brilliant as _Pride and
Prejudice_, shows much more maturity than _Sense and Sensibility_. Much
of it is quite consummate, the character of Mrs. Norris especially: and
for subtly interwoven phrase without emphasis, conveying knowledge and
criticism of life, it has few equals. But it has an elopement. _Emma_,
which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may
challenge that position on one ground beyond all question, though
possibly not on all. It is the absolute triumph of that reliance on the
strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss Austen's title to
pre-eminence in the history of the novel. Not an event, not a
circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of "the daily round, the
common task" of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower.
Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put _sub specie
eternitatis_ by the sorcery of art. Few things could be more
terrible--nothing more tiresome--than to hear the garrulous Miss Bates
talk in actual life; few things are more delightful than to read her
speeches as they occur here. An aspiring soul might feel disposed to
"take and drown itself in a pail" (as one of Dickens's characters says)
if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury are
represented as living; to read about that life--to read about it over
and over again--has been and is always likely to be one of the chosen
delights of some of the best wits of our race. This is one of the
paradoxes of art: and perhaps it is the most wonderful of them,
exceeding even the old "pity and terror" problem. And the discovery of
it, as a possible source of artistic success, is one of the greatest
triumphs and one of the most inexhaustible discoveries of that art
itself. For by another paradox--this time not of art but of nature--the
extraordinary is exhaustible and the ordinary is not. Tragedy and the
more "incidented" comedy, it is well known, run into types and reproduce
situations almost inevitably. "All the stories are told." But the story
of the life of Highbury never can be told, because there is really
nothing in it but the telling: and here the blessed infinity of Art
comes in again.

Miss Austen's last book, like her first, was published posthumous