though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose variety.  But in the other great province of character, though hers is but a Rutland to his Yorkshire—­or rather to his England or his world—­she is almost equally supreme.  And by her manipulation of it she showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable extent.  Her philosopher’s stone (to take up the old parable again) does not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is exhausted—­if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of Humanity were exhaustible.  The chairs and tables, the beds and the basins—­everything—­can be made into novel-gold:  and, when it has been made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any other magician of the same class, as ever.  One of the most curious things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in her.  Even her young men—­certainly not her greatest successes—­are by no means doubles of each other:  and nature herself could not turn out half a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and finally the three sisters of Persuasion, the other (quite other) Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne.  The “ruts of the brain” in novelists are a by-word.  There are none here.

In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere.  The amateurs of cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and Michelet.  They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless psychological analysis.  It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay, nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina:  and was being given out in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and before he himself published anything, by a young English lady—­a lady if ever there was one and English if any person ever was—­in a country parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton.  They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of it, live and active, before the present.  The thing had been done, twenty years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius, did again and again.  Of all the essentials of the two manners of fictitious creation—­Michelet’s was not fictitious, but he almost made it so, and Stendhal’s was not historical, but he almost made it so likewise—­Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods, arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg, or Fust’s friend Mephistopheles—­who perhaps, on the whole, has the best title to the invention—­did in another matter three hundred years before.