f the plus
and minus of her gift.

Miss Austen knew the genteel life of the upper middle class
Hampshire folk, "the Squirearchy and the upper professional
class," as Professor Saintsbury expresses it, down to the
ground--knew it as a sympathetic onlooker slightly detached (she
never married), yet not coldly aloof but a part of it as devoted
sister and maiden aunt, and friend-in-general to the community.
She could do two things which John Ruskin so often lauded as
both rare and difficult: see straight and then report
accurately; a literary Pre-Raphaelite, be it noted, before the
term was coined. It not only came natural to her to tell the
truth about average humanity as she saw it; she could not be
deflected from her calling. Winning no general recognition
during her life-time, she was not subjected to the temptations
of the popular novelist; but she had her chance to go wrong, for
it is recorded how that the Librarian to King George the Third,
an absurd creature yclept Clark, informed the authoress that his
Highness admired her works, and suggested that in view of the
fact that Prince Leonard was to marry the Princess Charlotte,
Miss Austen should indite "An historical romance illustrative of
the august house of Coburg." To which, Miss Jane, with a humor
and good-sense quite in character (and, it may be feared, not
appreciated by the recipient): "I could not sit down to write a
serious romance under any other motive than amusement to save my
life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up, and
never relax into laughter at myself and other people, I am sure
I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I
must keep to my own style and go on in my own way."

There is scarce a clearer proof of genius than this ability to
strike out a path and keep to it: in striking contrast with the
weak wobbling so often shown in the desire to follow literary
fashion or be complaisant before the suggestion of the merchants
of letters.

All her novels are prophetic of what was long to rule, in their
slight framework of fable; the handling of the scenes by the
way, the characterization, the natural dialogue, the
vraisemblance of setting, the witty irony of observation, these
are the elements of interest. Jane Austen's plots are mere
tempests in tea-pots; yet she does not go to the extreme of the
plotless fiction of the present. She has a story to tell, as
Trollope would say, and knows how to tell it in such a