“Love is best.”

Jane Austen’s diction—­or better, her style, which is more than diction—­in writing her series of social studies, affords a fine example of the adaptation of means to end.  Given the work to be accomplished, the tools are perfect instruments for the purpose.  The student of English style in its evolution must marvel at the idiom of Austen, so strangely modern is it, so little has time been able to make it passe.  From her first book, her manner seems to be easy, adequate, unforced, with nothing about it self-conscious or gauche.  In the development of some great writers the change from unsureness and vulgarity to the mastery of mature years can be traced:  Dickens is one such.  But nothing of the sort can be found in Austen.  She has in “Northanger Abbey” and “Pride and Prejudice”—­early works—­a power in idiomatic English which enables her reader to see her thought through its limpid medium of language, giving, it may be, as little attention to the form of expression as a man uninstructed in the niceties of a woman’s dress gives to those details which none the less in their totality produce on him a most formidable effect.  Miss Austen’s is not the style of startling tricks:  nor has she the flashing felicities of a Stevenson which lead one to return to a passage for re-gustation.  Her manner rarely if ever takes the attention from her matter.  But her words and their marshaling (always bearing in her mind her unambitious purpose) make as fit a garment for her thought as was ever devised upon English looms.  If this is style, then Jane Austen possesses it, as have very few of the race.  There is just a touch of the archaic in it, enough to give a quaintness that has charm without being precious in the French sense; hers are breeding and dignity without distance or stiffness.  Now and again the life-likeness is accentuated by a sort of undress which goes to the verge of the slip-shod—­as if a gentlewoman should not be too particular, lest she seem professional; the sort of liberty with the starched proprieties of English which Thackeray later took with such delightful results.  Of her style as a whole, then, we may say that it is good literature for the very reason that it is not literary; neither mannered nor mincing nor affectedly plain.  The style is the woman—­and the woman wrote as a lady should who is portraying genteel society; very much as she would talk—­with the difference the artist will always make between life and its expression in letters.

Miss Austen’s place was won slowly but surely, unlike those authors whose works spring into instantaneous popularity, to be forgotten with equal promptness, or others who like Mrs. Stowe write a book which, for historical reasons, gains immediate vogue and yet retains a certain reputation.  The author of “Pride and Prejudice” gains in position with the passing of the years.  She is one of the select company of English writers who after a century are really read, really of more than historical