r of fact, great as realist and artist as she was, she
does not hesitate at that heightening of effect which insures
clearer seeing, longer remembering and a keener pleasure.
Perhaps she is in the broad view all the better artist because
of this: a thought sadly forgotten by the extreme veritists of
our day. It is the business of art to improve upon Nature.

Again the reader of Jane Austen must expect to find her with the
limitation of her time and place: it is, frankly, a dreadfully
contracted view of the world she represents, just for the reason
that it is the view of her Hampshire gentry in the day of the
third George. The ideals seem low, narrow; they lack air and
light. Woman's only role is marriage; female propriety chokes
originality; money talks, family places individuals, and the
estimate of sex-relations is intricately involved with these
eidola. There is little sense of the higher and broader issues:
the spiritual restrictions are as definite as the social and
geographical: the insularity is magnificent. It all makes you
think of Tennyson's lines:

"They take the rustic cackle of their burg
For the great wave that echoes round the world!"

Hence, one of the bye-products of Miss Austen's books is their
revelation of hide-bound class-distinction, the not seldom ugly
parochialism--the utilitarian aims of a circle of highly
respectable English country folk during the closing years of the
eighteenth century. The opening sentence of her masterpiece
reads: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man
in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
Needless to say that "universally" here is applicable to a tiny
area of earth observed by a most charming spinster, at a certain
period of society now fast fading into a dim past. But the
sentence might serve fairly well as a motto for all her work:
every plot she conceived is firm-based upon this as a major
premise, and the particular feminine deduction from those words
may be found in the following taken from another work,
"Mansfield Park": "Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria
Bertram was beginning to think marriage a duty; and as a
marriage with Mr. Rushford would give her the enjoyment of a
larger income than her father's, as well as insure her the house
in town, which was now a prime object, it became by the same
rule of moral obligation, her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushford
if she could." The egocentric worldliness of this is