Mansfield Park (1814), though hardly as brilliant as Pride and Prejudice, shows much more maturity than Sense and Sensibility.  Much of it is quite consummate, the character of Mrs. Norris especially:  and for subtly interwoven phrase without emphasis, conveying knowledge and criticism of life, it has few equals.  But it has an elopement. Emma, which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may challenge that position on one ground beyond all question, though possibly not on all.  It is the absolute triumph of that reliance on the strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss Austen’s title to pre-eminence in the history of the novel.  Not an event, not a circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of “the daily round, the common task” of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower.  Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put sub specie eternitatis by the sorcery of art.  Few things could be more terrible—­nothing more tiresome—­than to hear the garrulous Miss Bates talk in actual life; few things are more delightful than to read her speeches as they occur here.  An aspiring soul might feel disposed to “take and drown itself in a pail” (as one of Dickens’s characters says) if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury are represented as living; to read about that life—­to read about it over and over again—­has been and is always likely to be one of the chosen delights of some of the best wits of our race.  This is one of the paradoxes of art:  and perhaps it is the most wonderful of them, exceeding even the old “pity and terror” problem.  And the discovery of it, as a possible source of artistic success, is one of the greatest triumphs and one of the most inexhaustible discoveries of that art itself.  For by another paradox—­this time not of art but of nature—­the extraordinary is exhaustible and the ordinary is not.  Tragedy and the more “incidented” comedy, it is well known, run into types and reproduce situations almost inevitably.  “All the stories are told.”  But the story of the life of Highbury never can be told, because there is really nothing in it but the telling:  and here the blessed infinity of Art comes in again.

Miss Austen’s last book, like her first, was published posthumously and she left nothing else but a couple of fragments.  One of these, Lady Susan, does not, so far as it extends, promise much, though it is such a fragment and such an evident first draft even of this, that judgment of it is equally unfair and futile.  The other, The Watsons, has some very striking touches, but is also a mere beginning. Persuasion—­which appeared with Northanger Abbey and which, curiously enough, has, like its nearly twenty years elder sister, Bath for its principal scene—­has also some pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally admitted to be of its author’s most delicate, most finished,