But it cannot be urged against her that it was her habit to effect these agreeable conclusions to her social histories by tampering with probability or violently wresting events from their proper sequence.  Life is neither comedy nor tragedy—­it is tragi-comedy, or, if you prefer the graver emphasis, comi-tragedy.  Miss Austen, truth-lover, has as good a right to leave her lovers at the juncture when we see them happily mated, as at those more grievous junctures so much affected by later fiction.  Both representations may be true or false in effect, according as the fictionist throws emphasis and manages light-and-shade.  A final page whereon all is couleur de rose has, no doubt, an artificial look to us now:  a writer of Miss Austen’s school or her kind of genius for reporting fact, could not have finished her fictions in just the same way.  There is no blame properly, since the phenomenon has to do with the growth of human thought, the change of ideals reflected in literature.

For one more point:  Miss Austen only knew, or anyhow, only cared to write, one sort of Novel—­the love story.  With her, a young man and woman (or two couples having similar relations) are interested in each other and after various complications arising from their personal characteristics, from family interference or other criss-cross of events, misplacement of affection being a trump card, are united in the end.  The formula is of primitive simplicity.  The wonder is that so much of involvement and genuine human interest can be got out of such scant use of the possible permutations of plot.  It is all in the way it is done.

Love stories are still written in profusion, and we imagine that so compelling a motive for fiction will still be vital (in some one of its innumerable phases) in the twenty-fifth century.  Yet it is true that novelists now point with pride to the work of the last generation of their art, in that it has so often made sex love subsidiary to other appeals, or even eliminated it altogether from their books.  Some even boast of the fact that not a woman is to be found in the pages of their latest creation.  Nearly one hundred years ago, Defoe showed the possibility (if you happen to have genius) of making a powerful story without the introduction of the eternal feminine:  Crusoe could not declare with Cyrano de Bergerac: 

“Je vous dois d’avoir eu tout au moins, une amie; Grace a vous, une robe a passe dans ma vie.”

It is but natural that, immensely powerful as it is, such a motive should have been over-worked:  the gamut of variations has been run from love licit to love illicit, and love degenerate and abnormal to no-love-at-all.  But any publisher will assure you that still “love conquers all”; and in the early nineteenth century any novelist who did not write tales of amatory interest was a fool:  the time was not ripe to consider an extension of the theme nor a shifted point of view.  For the earlier story-tellers, in the language of Browning’s lyric,