same trait. How any one with her genius for laughter and affection, her interest in mankind, or her clearsightedness could be accused of cynicism, which is a property of the owl and bat and donkey in humanity, I do not understand. She is a master of irony and satire, it is true; but these are incompatible with misanthropy, the touch-stone of cynicism; of this she had not a trace. She is not of those who were disillusioned by the fever and the weariness and the fret of life. She was no pessimistic Teuton philosopher; she was too busy taking notes on the people with whom she came into contact to spend time in moralising. She was essentially of a happy nature, and kept a strong curb on her emotions; that she felt deeply is probable, that she ever gave full vent to her feelings we instinctively know to be untrue. Her love tragedy, if she had one, was not allowed to spoil her life; she may very well have passed through the depths, but she emerged from the conflict victorious, having battered down the forces of darkness, and continued to irradiate sweetness and light in her books as well as in her life.

Other authors might easily have been discomfited by the reception given to their work by publishers if a first manuscript had been rejected by return of post as hers was in the case of Pride and Prejudice. Not so Jane Austen; she continued to write almost until the day of her death, sure of the verdict of posterity, the only judgment upon which genius really relies. She knew that her appeal was universal and not liable to grow dim with the passage of years. Her satire and humour are as fresh to-day as ever they were, and as an antidote to the horrors of our time no other author can compare with her.

II

We commonly find that if we want to test the truth about an author, a perusal of his or her correspondence is of the greatest value to enable us to decide how far the judgments we have formed from their serious work are accurate. In their letters we take them off their guard; they are in undress, no longer the mouthpieces of divine inspiration, but flesh and blood like ourselves.

Jane Austen's almost racy letters to her sister shed a flood of light on her character and help us still further to dot the "i's" and cross the "t's" of criticism.

They are for the most part compositions of a quite light and trivial nature, dwelling on topics such as might interest any country-bred girl. Dress looms large, and so does small-talk about the everyday round of work and amusement, people met, dances, and the like. But all through them we see the same shrewd, Puck-like spirit darting hither and thither, we hear the silvery laughter of the girl who painted Mr Collins and Mrs Jennings; they are obviously written by a girl who cannot help seeing the funny side of everything, who is vividly interested in people and their idiosyncrasies; the deeper things in life are not discussed, not because she was shallow, but because there are some things which language is incapable of expressing, where silence is the only true speech. Those traces of bitterness which occasionally disturb us in her novels appear again here.

"Only think of Mrs Holder being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her," may stand as a typical example out of many;

but no one could contend that such phrases are deliberately cynical; at the worst they are but thoughtless witticisms, and really hurt no one. Jane Austen was entirely devoid of malice. She suffered fools more or less gladly; she would try the barb of irony to laugh them out of their folly, but they were not like those others, at the opposite end of the scale, pictures of perfection," which she confesses made her sick and wicked.

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The puzzle is that so highly gifted and all-seeing a genius should have adopted such a detached, tolerant attitude towards humanity. There have been many who have found fault with her for not waxing indignant at the follies of society. These assert that she has no moral sense, but surely to instil into us the necessity for mutual tolerance and unfailing humour in our dealings with our neighbours is in itself a moral act of the highest order.

The first thing that strikes any one who has tried to read Jane Austen's novels aloud is the dramatic power displayed in the conversations. No novelist ever made his or her characters express themselves so simply or forcibly in their parts as she does. It would seem that we have lost in her one of our greatest playwrights. The unfolding of character in dialogue has not been better done by any of our dramatists, and has certainly not been approached by any other novelist. No novels make so immediate an appeal when declaimed as hers do. Even youthful audiences who are popularly supposed to be incapable of appreciating the subtlety of her wit are quickly entranced.

Think for a moment of that famous second chapter in Sense and Sensibility, where Mr John Dashwood is converted by his wife with regard to his ideas as

to their duty to his widowed sister and her daughters. It is conceived and executed with an exactness of phrase and economy of words that calls to mind that parallel scene in King Lear where the old man is deprived of his retinue.

With what deft strokes are we shown the whole of a person's character in one short, ironic sentence. "Mrs Jennings was a widow, with an ample jointure. She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and she had now, therefore, nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world."

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The vulgarity of the Steele family is shown in their use of " prodigious," vast,' ""beau," and the like words, in omitting the personal pronoun in their correspondence; we recognise the type at once. That is the secret of Jane Austen's power: she has seized upon the salient, ineradicable characteristics of the type which is always with us; the unstable lover, the gossiping, scandal-mongering old dame, the young impressionable girl who could not bear the thought of her sister marrying a man with so little sensibility" that he could not read the poets with understanding or fire, the staunch, sound, unselfish heroine who bears her own tragedy without any outward sign, but spends herself in sympathising with weaker natures in their misfortunes; the pedant, the snob, the haughty, the supercilious, the impertinent . . . all are here drawn with unerring

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accuracy.

I know nothing in our literature to compare with the concluding paragraphs of Sense and Sensibility. Ninety-nine out of every hundred authors would have made Marianne a tragic heroine, but Jane Austen realised that she was not great enough for that t;

she was audacious enough to risk an anticlimax in order to secure verisimilitude.

"Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract by her conduct her most favourite maxims. She was born to overcome an affection formed so late in life as at seventeen, and with no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship, voluntarily to give her hand to another!-and that other a man who had suffered no less than herself, under the event of a former attachment, whom, two years before, she had considered too old to be married, and who still sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat!"

As for the villain, Willoughby, we read that "he lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity."

The opening sentences of Pride and Prejudice might almost be taken as a test of our ability to appreciate Jane Austen. She has a knack of beginning in an exhilarating, startling way on most occasions, but it may well be doubted whether any novel starts quite so happily as this:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife "—after which delightful touch of irony we are immediately introduced to Mr and Mrs Bennet, who proceed to squabble over their daughters' chances of securing the rich young stranger's hand and purse in a dialogue which touches the top note of humour.