so far short of this in the prose
variety. But in the other great province of character, though hers is
but a Rutland to his Yorkshire--or rather to his England or his
world--she is almost equally supreme. And by her manipulation of it she
showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and
even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to
supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable
extent. Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does
not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is
exhausted--if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of
Humanity were exhaustible. The chairs and tables, the beds and the
basins--everything--can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has been
made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any
other magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most curious
things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in
her. Even her young men--certainly not her greatest successes--are by no
means doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out half
a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than
Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and
finally the three sisters of _Persuasion_, the other (quite other)
Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. The "ruts of the brain" in novelists are a
by-word. There are none here.

In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the
first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often
gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of
cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and
Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless
psychological analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay,
nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given out
in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and
before he himself published anything, by a young English lady--a lady if
ever there was one and English if any person ever was--in a country
parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace
to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton.
They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of
the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of
it, live and active, before the present. Th