one of her tales.  Thus, in “Sense and Sensibility,” we meet two sisters who stand for the characteristics contrasted in the title, and in the fortunes of Mariane, whose flighty romanticism is cured so that she makes a sensible marriage after learning the villainy of her earlier lover and finding that foolish sentimentalism may well give way to the informing experiences of life,—­the thesis, satirically conveyed though with more subtlety than in the earlier “Northanger Abbey,” proclaims the folly of young-girl sentimentality and hysteria.  In “Pride and Prejudice,” ranked by many as her masterpiece, Darcy, with his foolish hauteur, his self-consciousness of superior birth, is temporarily blind to the worth of Elizabeth, who, on her part, does not see the good in him through her sensitiveness to his patronizing attitude; as the course of development brings them together in a happy union, the lesson of toleration, of mutual comprehension, sinks into the mind.  The reader realizes the pettiness of the worldly wisdom which blocks the way of joy.  As we have said, “Northanger Abbey” speaks a wise word against the abuse of emotionalism; it tells of the experiences of a flighty Miss, bred on the “Mysteries of Udolpho” style of literature, during a visit to a country house where she imagined all the medieval romanticism incident to that school of fiction,—­aided and abetted by such innocuous helps as a storm without and a lonesome chamber within doors.  Of the later stories, “Mansfield Park” asks us to remember what it is to be poor and reared among rich relations; “Emma” displays a reverse misery:  the rich young woman whose character is exposed to the adulations and shams incident upon her position; while in “Persuasion,” there is yet another idea expressed by and through another type of girl; she who has fallen into the habit of allowing herself to be over-ridden and used by friends and family.—­There is something all but Shaksperian in that story’s illustration of “the uncertainty of all human events and calculations,” as she herself expresses it:  Anne Eliot’s radical victory is a moral triumph yet a warning withal.  And in each book, the lesson has been conveyed with the unobtrusive indirection of fine art; the story is ever first, we are getting fiction not lectures.  These novels adorn truth; they show what literature can effect by the method of much-in-little.

There is nothing sensational in incident or complication:  as with Richardson, an elopement is the highest stretch of external excitement Miss Austen vouchsafes.  Yet all is drawn so beautifully to scale, as in such a scene as that of the quarrel and estrangement of Elizabeth and Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice,” that the effect is greater than in the case of many a misused opportunity where the events are earth-shaking in import.  The situation means so much to the participants, that the reader becomes sympathetically involved.  After all, importance in fiction is exactly like importance in life; important to whom? the philosopher asks.  The relativity of things human is a wholesome theory for the artist to bear in mind.  Even as the most terrific cataclysm on this third planet from the sun in a minor system, makes not a ripple upon Mars, so the most infinitesimal occurrence in eighteenth century Hampshire may seem of account,—­if only a master draws the picture.