neither primitive (the body-hunter) nor in the second stage of civilisation (the heart-hunter, the philanderer), but the soul-hunter, the connoisseur of rare emotions. The battle-royal between Myra and Cyril when he shows his hand is a masterpiece of analysis. He tries to show her the unwisdom of setting one's affections on anything or any one in the whole world other than oneself.

"I suggest that happiness only comes to the man who has strangled all affections and trodden every appetite under foot. If you marry, you are giving a hostage to misfortune in your wife and every one of your children. If you grow fond of a cat or a book or a house . . . the cat may die, the book may be lost, the house burnt down.'

"For the man who cannot take pleasure in the sight and scent of a rose because he knows it must soon die, there is no hope," quotes Myra. Later Cyril is brought to book by a member of his own family. "It's better to cultivate and cherish a rose and to enjoy its scent and beauty, even if it ultimately dies, than to be content with a wax flower which never fades, but never gives you a moment's gratification in a lifetime. We've all got to die, Cyril, and my complaint against your philosophy is not that it is rottenly unsound, not that it is going to make yours an unhappy life, but simply that you play the game of life and don't want to obey the rules. . . . You're going to die probably before your workwhatever it may be-is finished. So am I. Well, do the best you can in the interval. If you love your wife and she dies before you, well-so much the worse for you, and make the most you can of the time you're together. For heaven's sake don't imagine that you're entitled to a special Providence which is going to insure you against all risks free of

D

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charge, and don't have a grievance when death lays hands on your most cherished possessions." But he is not won over even when, in a third great scene, Myra shows her love for him and is prepared to marry him he sees too clearly: he loves her, but he is afraid of himself. "Before a man marries he must feel that his wife is indispensable to him, and that he could not go on living without her. I don't feel that. I've always boasted of not being dependent on any one for my happiness, and I've grown to believe it." The strange couple agree to a secret engagement for two years to test Cyril's idea that it may only be an infatuation. Cyril goes abroad with his sixteen year-old ward, Violet, another charming girl. Rodney, a rejected lover of Myra's, again returns to the attack and fails, and at length the time of probation comes to an end, Myra having discovered without the help of the gods the one man for whom she would sacrifice everything in the world; then suddenly Violet falls ill and nearly dies of diphtheria, while Cyril and Myra talk interminably (quoting the classics freely) in a way calculated to shock the careless reader. Cyril then saves Violet's life by risking his own, and to his astonishment finds that his ward on her recovery is in love with him, and he marries her, but Myra has the last word. "I'm too independent for you, Cyril: you want somebody who will look up to you and depend on you and need your help and support. That's why you and Violet are going to be very well suited and very happy together."

This really is the secret of Mr McKenna's limitations: all his heroes and heroines are good only in as far as they are well suited and happy together. It is time he deserted his Sonia and returned to Violet.

VI

THE CENTENARY OF JANE AUSTEN

A

I

S a callow undergraduate I remember being roused out of an apathetic stupor while at

tending a lecture on the history of the English novel by these startling words on the subject of Jane Austen's readers: "Rabbits cannot be expected to take an interest or see anything humorous in the sight of other rabbits performing their ludicrous antics."

Was the reason that I had failed to appreciate the subtlety and charm of Jane Austen solely due to the fact that I was dull of mind and of as commonplace a character as some of the dramatis personæ of her works, and therefore unable to see the comic side of her delineation? I returned home determined to find out exactly where her power lay, what claims she really had to be called the feminine counterpart to Shakespeare.

I found that the mistake I had made was not entirely due to my own ineptitude, but that I had read her too fast. I had hurried over page after page in order to reach the story, to get the hang of the plot, to find some exciting incident, for all the world as if I expected some lurid "film" drama. I had to revise my method of reading. I had to learn the hard lesson that Jane Austen was not Aunt Jane of the crinoline era moving stiffly in an artificial circumscribed area, speaking correctly in an old

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fashioned, effete, precise English, but a genial, kindly, yet caustic genius who wrote with her tongue in her cheek, and, like Chaucer, was not averse from pulling her readers' "legs" unless they exercised care. Instead of a "bookish blue-stocking" I found a woman with an almost uncanny depth of insight into human character, one who realised that although life was far more important than literature, yet the true novelist exercised the function of displaying the greatest powers of the mind, and that novels are works "in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."

In other words, I found that new, hitherto undreamt-of, vistas were being opened up to me, vistas which helped me to understand this complex, intricate tangle which we call the art of living. As a result of my re-reading I first felt a sense of shame at having allowed myself to be so blind to her greatness, and then a sense of mystery as to how a woman who lived so simple and secluded a life could ever have achieved so stupendous a task.

Here was a girl who only lived for forty-two years, the daughter of a country parson, who never went abroad, to London but rarely, whose greatest excitement was a visit to Bath or Lyme Regis, who may or may not have suffered disappointment in love, but certainly had no grand passion, who lived through the French Revolution, Waterloo, and Trafalgar, and yet makes no mention of those stirring times, leaving behind her a sequence of novels which within their own limitations are unapproachably perfect. She lived for the most part in the depths of the country at a time when rural society was even more vacuous

than it is to-day.

Small-talk, knitting, filigree-work, and backgammon occupied the leisure hours of her sex, while men shot and hunted in moderation, but were always ready to accompany the ladies on their shopping excursions or to a local dance.

This is the life that Jane Austen set out to describe, knowing no other. That she succeeded in imbuing this with eternal interest makes one wistfully regret that she had not Fanny Burney's chances of mixing with the great men and women of her time, and yet we have her own word for it that she could not have undertaken to deal with any other types of men and women than those among whom her lot was cast.

"I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit down seriously to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself and other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter."

When the Prince Regent's librarian suggested that she should delineate the habits of life of a clergyman, she replied:

"The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science-philosophy, of which I know nothing; or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman, who, like me, knows only her mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think