ar before Jane Austen died.

Charlotte Bronte knew all about Jane Austen, and her example fired
Charlotte's ambition. Both were daughters of country clergymen. Charlotte
lived in the North of England on the wild and treeless moors, where the
searching winds rattled the panes and black-faced sheep bleated piteously.
Jane Austen lived in the rich quiet of a prosperous farming country, where
bees made honey and larks nested. The Reverend Patrick Bronte disciplined
his children: George Austen loved his. In Steventon there is no "Black
Bull"; only a little dehorned inn, kept by a woman who breeds canaries,
and will sell you a warranted singer for five shillings, with no charge
for the cage. At Steventon no red-haired Yorkshiremen offer to give fight
or challenge you to a drinking-bout.

The opposites of things are alike, and that is why the world ties Jane
Eyre and Jane Austen in one bundle. Their methods of work were totally
different: their effects gotten in different ways. Charlotte Bronte
fascinates by startling situations and highly colored lights that dance
and glow, leading you on in a mad chase. There's pain, unrest, tragedy in
the air. The pulse always is rapid and the temperature high.

It is not so with Jane Austen. She is an artist in her gentleness, and the
world is today recognizing this more and more. The stage now works its
spells by her methods--without rant, cant or fustian--and as the years go
by this must be so more and more, for mankind's face is turned toward
truth.

To weave your spell out of commonplace events and brew a love-potion from
every-day materials is high art. When Kipling takes three average soldiers
of the line, ignorant, lying, swearing, smoking, dog-fighting soldiers,
who can even run on occasion, and by telling of them holds a world in
thrall--that's art! In these soldiers three we recognize something very
much akin to ourselves, for the thing that holds no relationship to us
does not interest us--we can not leave the personal equation out. This
fact is made plain in "The Black Riders," where the devils dancing in
Tophet look up and espying Steve Crane address him thus: "Brother!"

Jane Austen's characters are all plain, every-day folks. The work is
always quiet. There are no entangling situations, no mysteries, no
surprises.

Now, to present a situation, an emotion, so it will catch and hold the
attention of others, is largely a knack--you practise on the thing until
you do it we