such profound psychological insight as may be found in George Sand (not to mention male writers), but taking the type to which the characters belong, we see the most intimate and accurate knowledge in all Miss Austen’s creations.

Only cultivated minds fairly appreciate the exquisite art of Miss Austen.  Those who demand the stimulus of effects, those who can only see by strong lights and shadows, will find her tame and uninteresting.  We may illustrate this by one detail.  Lucy Steele’s bad English, so delicately and truthfully indicated, would in the hands of another have been more obvious, more “effective” in its exaggeration, but the loss of this comic effect is more than replaced to the cultivated reader by his relish of the nice discrimination visible in its truthfulness.  And so of the rest. Strong lights are unnecessary, true lights being at command.  The incidents, the characters, the dialogue—­all are of every-day life, and so truthfully presented that to appreciate the art we must try to imitate it, or carefully compare it with that of others.

We are but echoing an universal note of praise in speaking thus highly of her works, and it is from no desire of simply swelling that chorus of praise that we name her here, but to call attention to the peculiar excellence, at once womanly and literary, which has earned this reputation.  Of all imaginative writers she is the most real.  Never does she transcend her own actual experience, never does her pen trace a line that does not touch the experience of others.  Herein we recognize the first quality of literature.  We recognize the second and more special quality of womanliness in the tone and point of view; they are novels written by a woman, an Englishwoman, a gentlewoman; no signature could disguise that fact; and because she has so faithfully (although unconsciously) kept to her own womanly point of view, her works are durable.  There is nothing of the doctrinaire in Jane Austen; not a trace of woman’s “mission;” but as the most truthful, charming, humorous, pure-minded, quick-witted and unexaggerated of writers, female literature has reason to be proud of her.

And this is her suggestive portrait of the other, drawn with that skill which is only displayed when one genius interprets another through community of feeling and purpose.

Of greater genius, and incomparably deeper experience, George Sand represents woman’s literature more illustriously and more obviously.  In her, quite apart from the magnificent gifts of nature, we see the influence of sorrow as a determining impulse to write, and the abiding consciousness of the womanly point of view as the subject matter of her writings.  In vain has she chosen the mask of a man:  the features of a woman are everywhere visible.  Since Goethe no one has been able to say with so much truth, “My writings are my confessions.”  Her biography lies