" that sends the audience home content.
She treats this desire in herself with a gentle cynicism which,
read to-day, detracts somewhat perhaps from the verity of her
pictures. She steps out from the picture at the close of her
book to say a word in proper person. Thus, in "Mansfield Park,"
in bringing Fanny Price into the arms of her early lover,
Edmund, she says: "I purposely abstain from dates on this
occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own,
aware that the cure of unconquerable passions and the transfer
of unchanging attachments must vary much as to time in different
people. I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the
time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a
week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford and
became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire."

But it cannot be urged against her that it was her habit to
effect these agreeable conclusions to her social histories by
tampering with probability or violently wresting events from
their proper sequence. Life is neither comedy nor tragedy--it is
tragi-comedy, or, if you prefer the graver emphasis, comi-tragedy.
Miss Austen, truth-lover, has as good a right to leave
her lovers at the juncture when we see them happily mated, as at
those more grievous junctures so much affected by later fiction.
Both representations may be true or false in effect, according
as the fictionist throws emphasis and manages light-and-shade. A
final page whereon all is couleur de rose has, no doubt, an
artificial look to us now: a writer of Miss Austen's school or
her kind of genius for reporting fact, could not have finished
her fictions in just the same way. There is no blame properly,
since the phenomenon has to do with the growth of human thought,
the change of ideals reflected in literature.

For one more point: Miss Austen only knew, or anyhow, only cared
to write, one sort of Novel--the love story. With her, a young
man and woman (or two couples having similar relations) are
interested in each other and after various complications arising
from their personal characteristics, from family interference or
other criss-cross of events, misplacement of affection being a
trump card, are united in the end. The formula is of primitive
simplicity. The wonder is that so much of involvement and
genuine human interest can be got out of such scant use of the
possible permutations of plot. It is all in the way i