by the method of much-in-little.

There is nothing sensational in incident or complication: as
with Richardson, an elopement is the highest stretch of external
excitement Miss Austen vouchsafes. Yet all is drawn so
beautifully to scale, as in such a scene as that of the quarrel
and estrangement of Elizabeth and Darcy in "Pride and
Prejudice," that the effect is greater than in the case of many
a misused opportunity where the events are earth-shaking in
import. The situation means so much to the participants, that
the reader becomes sympathetically involved. After all,
importance in fiction is exactly like importance in life;
important to whom? the philosopher asks. The relativity of
things human is a wholesome theory for the artist to bear in
mind. Even as the most terrific cataclysm on this third planet
from the sun in a minor system, makes not a ripple upon Mars, so
the most infinitesimal occurrence in eighteenth century
Hampshire may seem of account,--if only a master draws the
picture.

Not alone by making her characters thoroughly alive and
interesting does Miss Austen effect this result: but by her way
of telling the tale as well; by a preponderance of dialogue
along with clear portraiture she actually gets an effect that is
dramatic. Scenes from her books are staged even to the present
day. She found this manner of dialogue with comparative
parsimony of description and narration, to be her true method as
she grew as a fiction-maker: the early unpublished story
"Susan," and the first draught of "Sense and Sensibility," had
the epistolary form of Richardson, the more undramatic nature of
which is self-evident. As for characterization itself, she is
with the few: she has added famous specimens--men and women
both--to the natural history of fiction. To think of but one
book, "Pride and Prejudice," what an inimitable study of a
foolish woman is Mrs. Bennett! Who has drawn the insufferable
patroness more vividly than in a Lady Catherine de Bourgh! And
is not the sycophant clergyman hit off to the life in Mr.
Collins! Looking to the stories as a group, are not her
heroines, with Anne Eliot perhaps at their head, wonderful for
quiet attraction and truth, for distinctness, charm and variety?
Her personages are all observed; she had the admirable good
sense not to go beyond her last. She had every opportunity to
see the county squire, the baronet puffed up with a sense of his
own importance, the rattle and rake of h