But apparently Senor Valdes would not think this any great artistic result.  “Things that appear ugliest in reality to the spectator who is not an artist, are transformed into beauty and poetry when the spirit of the artist possesses itself of them.  We all take part every day in a thousand domestic scenes, every day we see a thousand pictures in life, that do not make any impression upon us, or if they make any it is one of repugnance; but let the novelist come, and without betraying the truth, but painting them as they appear to his vision, he produces a most interesting work, whose perusal enchants us.  That which in life left us indifferent, or repelled us, in art delights us.  Why?  Simply because the artist has made us see the idea that resides in it.  Let not the novelists, then, endeavor to add anything to reality, to turn it and twist it, to restrict it.  Since nature has endowed them with this precious gift of discovering ideas in things, their work will be beautiful if they paint these as they appear.  But if the reality does not impress them, in vain will they strive to make their work impress others.”

XV.

Which brings us again, after this long way about, to Jane Austen and her novels, and that troublesome question about them.  She was great and they were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day.  Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness.  Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English novelists, and alone worthy to be matched with the great Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists.  It is not a question of intellect, or not wholly that.  The English have mind enough; but they have not taste enough; or, rather, their taste has been perverted by their false criticism, which is based upon personal preference, and not upon, principle; which instructs a man to think that what he likes is good, instead of teaching him first to distinguish what is good before he likes it.  The art of fiction, as Jane Austen knew it, declined from her through Scott, and Bulwer, and Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte, and Thackeray, and even George Eliot, because the mania of romanticism had seized upon all Europe, and these great writers could not escape the taint of their time; but it has shown few signs of recovery in England, because English criticism, in the presence of the Continental masterpieces, has continued provincial and special and personal, and has expressed a love and a hate which had to do with the quality of the artist rather than the character of his work.  It was inevitable that in their time the English romanticists should treat, as Senor Valdes says, “the barbarous customs of the Middle Ages, softening and distorting them, as Walter Scott