her to say that, taking her fiction as a whole, she contentedly accepts this order of things and builds upon it.  She and her world exhibit not only worldliness but that “other-worldliness” which is equally self-centered and materialistic.  Jane Austen is a highly enjoyable mondaine.  To compare her gamut with that of George Eliot or George Meredith is to appreciate how much has happened since in social and individual evolution.  The wide social sympathy that throbs in modern fiction is hardly born.

In spite, too, of the thorough good breeding of this woman writer, the primness even of her outlook upon the world, there is plain speaking in her books, even touches of coarseness that are but the echo of the rankness which abounds in the Fielding-Smollett school.  Happily, it is a faint one.

Granting the slightness of her plots and their family likeness, warm praise is due for the skill with which they are conducted; they are neatly articulated, the climactic effect is, as a rule, beautifully graduated and sure in its final force:  the multitude of littles which go to make up the story are, upon examination, seen to be not irrelevant but members of the one body, working together towards a common end.  It is a puzzling question how this firm art was secured:  since technique does not mean so much a gift from heaven as the taking of forethought, the self-conscious skill of a practitioner.  Miss Austen, setting down her thoughts of an evening in a copybook in her lap, interrupted by conversations and at the beck and call of household duties, does not seem as one who was acquiring the mastery of a difficult art-form.  But the wind bloweth where it listeth—­and the evidences of skill are there; we can but chronicle the fact, and welcome the result.

She was old-fashioned in her adherence to the “pleasant ending”; realist though she was, she could not go to the lengths either of theme or interpretation in the portrayal of life which later novelists have so sturdily ventured.  It is easy to understand that with her avowed dislike of tragedy, living in a time when it was regarded as the business of fiction to be amusing—­when, in short, it was not fashionable to be disagreeable, as it has since become—­Jane Austen should have preferred to round out her stories with a “curtain” that sends the audience home content.  She treats this desire in herself with a gentle cynicism which, read to-day, detracts somewhat perhaps from the verity of her pictures.  She steps out from the picture at the close of her book to say a word in proper person.  Thus, in “Mansfield Park,” in bringing Fanny Price into the arms of her early lover, Edmund, she says:  “I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions and the transfer of unchanging attachments must vary much as to time in different people.  I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.”