and most sustained work.  And this, like Emma, resolutely abstains from even the slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of “exciting” story, of glaring colour of any kind:  relying only on congruity of speech, sufficient if subdued description, and above all a profusion of the most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, made to unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, and seasoned throughout with the unfailing condiment—­the author’s “own sauce”—­of gentle but piquant irony and satire.

It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen’s methods, or her results, have appealed to everybody.  Madame de Stael thought her vulgaire—­meaning, of course, not exactly our “vulgar” but “commonplace”; Charlotte Bronte was not much otherwise minded; her own Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same.  Readers without some touch of letters may think her style old-fashioned:  it has even been termed “stilted.”  Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of passion and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern devotees of “analysis” may consider her superficial.  On the other hand, it is notorious that, from her own day to this, she has never wanted partisans, often of superlative competence, and of the most strikingly different tempers, tastes, and opinions.  The extraordinary quietness of her art is only matched by its confidence:  its subtlety by its strength.  She did not try many styles; she deliberately and no doubt wisely refused to try the other style which was already carrying all before it in her own later days.  She seems to have confined herself (with what seems to some high-flying judges an almost ignoble caution) to the strata of society that she knew most thoroughly:  and the curious have noted that she seldom goes above a baronet, and hardly even descends to a butler, in her range of personages who are not mere mutes.  It is not at all unlikely—­in fact it is almost certain—­that she might have enlarged this range, and that of her incident, with perfect safety and to the great profit and delight of her readers.  But these actual things she knew she could do consummately; and she would not risk the production of anything not consummate.

The value of her, artistically, is of course in the perfection of what she did; but the value of her historically is in the way in which she showed that, given the treatment, any material could be perfected.  It was in this way, as has been pointed out, that the possibilities of the novel were shown to be practically illimitable.  Tragedy is not needed:  and the most ordinary transactions, the most everyday characters, develop into an infinite series of comedies with which the novelist can amuse himself and his readers.  The ludicrum humani seculi on the one hand, and the artist’s power of extracting and arranging it on the other—­these two things supply all that is wanted.  This Hampshire parson’s daughter had found the philosopher’s stone of the novel:  and the very pots and pans, the tongs and pokers of the house, could be turned into novel-gold by it.