Jane Austen knew herself for what she was, an inveterate laugher.  She belonged essentially to the eighteenth century—­the century of the wits.  She enjoyed the spectacle of men and women making fools of themselves, and she did not hide her enjoyment under a pretence of unobservant good-nature.  She observed with malice.  It is tolerably certain that Miss Mitford was wrong in accepting the description of her in private life as “perpendicular, precise, taciturn, a poker of whom every one is afraid.”  Miss Austen, one is sure, was a lady of good-humour, as well as a novelist of good-humour; but the good-humour had a flavour.  It was the good-humour of the satirist, not of the sentimentalizer.  One can imagine Jane Austen herself speaking as Elizabeth Bennet once spoke to her monotonously soft-worded sister.  “That is the most unforgiving speech,” she said, “that I ever heard you utter.  Good girl!”

Miss Austen has even been accused of irreverence, and we occasionally find her in her letters as irreverent in the presence of death as Mr. Shaw.  “Only think,” she writes in one letter—­a remark she works into a chapter of Emma, by the way—­“of Mrs. Holder being dead!  Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her.”  And on another occasion she writes:  “Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright.  I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”  It is possible that Miss Austen’s sense of the comic ran away with her at times as Emma Woodhouse’s did.  I do not know of any similar instance of cruelty in conversation on the part of a likeable person so unpardonable as Emma Woodhouse’s witticism at the expense of Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic.  Miss Austen makes Emma ashamed of her witticism, however, after Mr. Knightley has lectured her for it.  She sets a limit to the rights of wit, again, in Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth defends her sharp tongue against Darcy.  “The wisest and best of men,” ... he protests, “may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.”  “I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good,” says Elizabeth in the course of her answer.  “Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.”  The six novels that Jane Austen has left us might be described as the record of the diversions of a clergyman’s daughter.

The diversions of Jane Austen were, beyond those of most novelists, the diversions of a spectator. (That is what Scott and Macaulay meant by comparing her to Shakespeare.) Or, rather, they were the diversions of a listener.  She observed with her ears rather than with her eyes.  With her, conversation was three-fourths of life.  Her stories are stories of people who reveal themselves almost exclusively in talk.  She wastes no time in telling us what people and places looked like.  She will dismiss