A great writer, with a wider scope and a more incisive satire, is Maria Edgeworth, whose books take us over into the nineteenth century.  The lighter, more frivolous aspects of English high society are admirably portrayed in her “Belinda” and eight or ten other tales:  and she makes a still stronger claim to permanent remembrance in such studies of Irish types, whether in England or on the native soil, as “The Absentee” and “Castle Rackrent.”  I venture the statement that even the jaded novel reader of to-day will find on a perusal of either of these capital stories that Miss Edgeworth makes literature, and that a pleasure not a penance is in store.  She first in English fiction exploited the better-class Irishman at home and her scenes have historic value.  Some years later, Susan Ferrier, who enjoyed the friendship of Scott, wrote under the stimulus of Maria Edgeworth’s example a series of clever studies of Scotch life, dashed with decided humor and done with true observation.

These women, with their quick eye and facile ability to report what they saw, and also their ease of manner which of itself seems like a social gift, were but the prelude to the work so varied, gifted and vastly influential, which the sex was to do in the modern Novel; so that, at present, in an open field and no favors given, they are honorable rivals of men, securing their full share of public favor.  And the English Novel, written by so many tentatively during these fifty years when the form was a-shaping, culminates at the turn of the century in two contrasted authors compared with whom all that went before seems but preparatory; one a man, the other a woman, who together express and illustrate most conveniently for this study the main movements of modern fiction,—­romance and realism,—­the instinct for truth and the instinct for beauty; not necessarily an antagonism, as we shall have ample occasion to see, since truth, rightly defined, is only “beauty seen from another side.”  It hardly needs to add that these two novelists are Jane Austen and Walter Scott.

CHAPTER V

REALISM:  JANE AUSTEN

It has been said that Miss Austen came nearer to showing life as it is,—­the life she knew and chose to depict,—­than any other novelist of English race.  In other words, she is a princess among the truth-tellers.  Whether or not this claim can be substantiated, it is sure that, writing practically half a century after Richardson and Fielding, she far surpassed those pioneers in the exquisite and easy verisimilitude of her art.  Nay, we can go further and say that nobody has reproduced life with a more faithful accuracy, that yet was not photography because it gave the pleasure proper to art, than this same Jane Austen, spinster, well-born and well-bred:  in her own phrase, an “elegant female” of the English past.  Scott’s famous remark can not be too often quoted:  “That young lady had a talent for describing the movements and feelings of characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.”