enting
some readers, the delicate and ever-present irony either escaping or
being distasteful to others, while the extreme quietness of the action
and the entire absence of excitement probably revolt a third class. But
the decriers do not usually attempt formal criticism. However, they
sometimes do, and such an attempt once came under the notice of the
present historian. It was urged that to extol Miss Austen's method is a
masculine delusion, that method being nothing but the throwing into
literature of the habit of minute and semi-satiric observation natural
to womankind. It did not apparently occur to this critic that he (or
she) was in the first place paying Miss Austen an extraordinarily high
compliment--a compliment almost greater than the most enthusiastic
"Janites" have ventured--inasmuch as no higher literary triumph can be
even conceived than thus to focus, formulate, and crystallise the
special talent and gift of an entire sex into a literary method. Nor did
it probably occur to him that he was laying himself open to the
damaging, or rather ruinous retort, "Then how is it that, of all the
women who have preceded and followed Miss Austen as novelists, no other
has displayed this specially and universally feminine gift?"

It is no doubt true that there is something feminine about the method,
which, with the addition of a certain _nescio quid_, giving it its
modern difference, may be said to combine the peculiarities of Fielding
and of Richardson, though it works on a much smaller scale than either.
It has the intense and pervading, though not the exuberant and
full-blooded, _livingness_ of Fielding, and it also has something not
unlike a feminine counterpart and complement of his pervading irony;
while it is not unlike Richardson in building up the characters and the
stories partly by an infinity of tiny strokes of detail, often
communicated in conversation, partly by the use of an exceedingly nice
and delicate analysis of motive and temperament. It is in the former
respect that Miss Austen stands apart from most, if not from all, women
who have written novels. Irony is by no means a frequent feminine gift;
and as women do not often possess it in any great degree, so they do not
as a rule enjoy it. Miss Austen is only inferior among English writers
to Swift, to Fielding, and to Thackeray--even if it be not improper to
use the term inferiority at all for what is after all not much more than
difference--in the use