She had a clear-eyed comprehension of her own restrictions; and possessed that power of self-criticism which some truly great authors lack.  She has herself given us the aptest comment ever made on her books:  speaking of the “little bit of ivory two inches wide on which she worked with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labor";—­a judgment hardly fair as to the interest she arouses, but nevertheless absolutely descriptive of the plus and minus of her gift.

Miss Austen knew the genteel life of the upper middle class Hampshire folk, “the Squirearchy and the upper professional class,” as Professor Saintsbury expresses it, down to the ground—­knew it as a sympathetic onlooker slightly detached (she never married), yet not coldly aloof but a part of it as devoted sister and maiden aunt, and friend-in-general to the community.  She could do two things which John Ruskin so often lauded as both rare and difficult:  see straight and then report accurately; a literary Pre-Raphaelite, be it noted, before the term was coined.  It not only came natural to her to tell the truth about average humanity as she saw it; she could not be deflected from her calling.  Winning no general recognition during her life-time, she was not subjected to the temptations of the popular novelist; but she had her chance to go wrong, for it is recorded how that the Librarian to King George the Third, an absurd creature yclept Clark, informed the authoress that his Highness admired her works, and suggested that in view of the fact that Prince Leonard was to marry the Princess Charlotte, Miss Austen should indite “An historical romance illustrative of the august house of Coburg.”  To which, Miss Jane, with a humor and good-sense quite in character (and, it may be feared, not appreciated by the recipient):  “I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than amusement to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up, and never relax into laughter at myself and other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.  No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way.”

There is scarce a clearer proof of genius than this ability to strike out a path and keep to it:  in striking contrast with the weak wobbling so often shown in the desire to follow literary fashion or be complaisant before the suggestion of the merchants of letters.

All her novels are prophetic of what was long to rule, in their slight framework of fable; the handling of the scenes by the way, the characterization, the natural dialogue, the vraisemblance of setting, the witty irony of observation, these are the elements of interest.  Jane Austen’s plots are mere tempests in tea-pots; yet she does not go to the extreme of the plotless fiction of the present.  She has a story to tell, as Trollope would say, and knows how to tell it in such a way as to subtract from it every ounce of value.  There is a clear kernel of idea in each and every