e of them
who have been touched in treating of the _Cabinet des Fees_, to speak at
any length of the minor tale-tellers of the century. They are sometimes
not bad reading; but as a whole minor in almost all senses.

CHAPTER XII

"SENSIBILITY." MINOR AND LATER NOVELISTS.

THE FRENCH NOVEL, _C._ 1800

[Sidenote: "Sensibility."]

Frequent reference has been made, in the last two chapters, to the
curious phenomenon called in French _sensibilite_ (with a derivative of
contempt, _sensiblerie_), the exact English form of which supplies part
of the title, and the meaning an even greater part of the subject, of
one of Miss Austen's novels. The thing itself appears first
definitely[404] in Madame de la Fayette, largely, though not unmixedly,
in Marivaux, and to some extent in Prevost and Marmontel, while it is,
as it were, sublimed in Rousseau, and present very strongly in
Saint-Pierre. There are, however, some minor writers and books
displaying it in some cases even more extensively and intensively; and
in this final chapter of the present volume they may appropriately find
a place, not merely because some of them are late, but because
Sensibility is not confined to any part of the century, but, beginning
before its birth, continued till after its end. We may thus have to
encroach on the nineteenth a little, but more in appearance than in
reality. In quintessence, and as a reigning fashion, Sensibility was the
property of the eighteenth century.[405]

[Sidenote: A glance at Miss Austen.]

To recur for a moment to Miss Austen and _Sense and Sensibility_,
everybody has laughed, let us hope not unkindly, over Marianne
Dashwood's woes. But she herself was only an example, exaggerated in the
genial fashion of her creatress, of the proper and recognised standard
of feminine feeling in and long before her time. The "man of feeling"
was admitted as something out of the way--on which side of the way
opinions might differ. But the woman of feeling was emphatically the
accepted type--a type which lasted far into the next century, though it
was obsolete at least by the Mid-Victorian period, of which some do so
vainly talk. The extraordinary development of emotion which was expected
from women need not be illustrated merely from love-stories. The
wonderful transports of Miss Ferrier's heroines at sight of their
long-lost mothers; even those of sober Fanny Price in _Mansfield Park_,
at the recovery of her estimable but not pa