Not alone by making her characters thoroughly alive and interesting does Miss Austen effect this result:  but by her way of telling the tale as well; by a preponderance of dialogue along with clear portraiture she actually gets an effect that is dramatic.  Scenes from her books are staged even to the present day.  She found this manner of dialogue with comparative parsimony of description and narration, to be her true method as she grew as a fiction-maker:  the early unpublished story “Susan,” and the first draught of “Sense and Sensibility,” had the epistolary form of Richardson, the more undramatic nature of which is self-evident.  As for characterization itself, she is with the few:  she has added famous specimens—­men and women both—­to the natural history of fiction.  To think of but one book, “Pride and Prejudice,” what an inimitable study of a foolish woman is Mrs. Bennett!  Who has drawn the insufferable patroness more vividly than in a Lady Catherine de Bourgh!  And is not the sycophant clergyman hit off to the life in Mr. Collins!  Looking to the stories as a group, are not her heroines, with Anne Eliot perhaps at their head, wonderful for quiet attraction and truth, for distinctness, charm and variety?  Her personages are all observed; she had the admirable good sense not to go beyond her last.  She had every opportunity to see the county squire, the baronet puffed up with a sense of his own importance, the rattle and rake of her day, the tuft hunter, the gentleman scholar, and the retired admiral (her two brothers had that rank)—­and she wisely decided to exhibit these and other types familiar to her locality and class, instead of drawing on her imagination or trying to extend by guess-work her social purview.  Her women in general, whether satiric and unpleasant like Mrs. Norris in “Mansfield Park” or full of winning qualities like Catherine Moreland and Anne Eliot, are drawn with a sureness of hand, an insight, a complete comprehension that cannot be over-praised.  Jane Austen’s heroines are not only superior to her heroes (some of whom do not get off scot-free from the charge of priggishness) but they excel the female characterization of all English novelists save only two or three,—­one of them being Hardy.  Her characters were so real to herself, that she made statements about them to her family as if they were actual,—­a habit which reminds of Balzac.

The particular angle from which she looked on life was the satirical:  therefore, her danger is exaggeration, caricature.  Yet she yielded surprisingly little, and her reputation for faithful transcripts from reality, can not now be assailed.  Her detached, whimsical attitude of scrutinizing the little cross-section of life she has in hand, is of the very essence of her charm:  hers is that wit which is the humor of the mind:  something for inward smiling, though the features may not change.  Her comedy has in this way the unerring thrust and the amused tolerance of a Moliere whom her admirer Macaulay should have