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.

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."

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;

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 waist

coat!"

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.

Elizabeth Bennet is Jane Austen's as she is nearly every one else's favourite heroine.

"I must confess," she writes to her sister, "that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." On her Jane Austen has lavished the best of her own inimitable humour, high spirits, gaiety and courage, so that she takes high place among the great women in fiction, and becomes no mean companion for even Clara Middleton or Clarissa Harlowe.

The alternate attraction for and repulsion from Darcy which Elizabeth felt is drawn with the sure hand of the great creator; and then, while we are still absorbed in the swaying fortunes of the principals, there quietly creeps upon the scene one of the most famous characters in comedy, Mr Collins. His interview with Elizabeth when he formally proposes to her is in Jane Austen's richest and happiest style. So long as humour lasts that chapter cannot fail to bring joy to the human heart. It is as universal in its appeal as the "Bottom " scenes in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Bottom was, after all, only Mr Collins in one stage of society as Dogberry was Mr Collins in another) or the Falstaff episodes at Gad's Hill and Eastcheap.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who "if she accepted any refreshments seemed to do it only for the sake of finding out that Mrs Collins's joints of meat were too large for her family," is another character over whom the Comic Spirit sheds its harmless but mirthprovoking rays. The whole novel abounds in rich personalities without whom the world would be the poorer, but we are most of all concerned with the happiness of Elizabeth, who, like others of Jane Austen's heroines, finds that true love which is allpowerful can spring from "the cold fountain of grati

tude no less than from the volcano of passion." Jane Austen's lovers are remarkably free from passion.

After Pride and Prejudice, in popular estimation, comes Mansfield Park. Tennyson, for one, preferred the latter, but the general run of readers know their Pride and Prejudice well and Mansfield Park not at all. There is, of course, more emotion and drama in the earlier of the two, but Mansfield Park is freer from exaggeration and contains the never-to-beforgotten impertinent and meddlesome Mrs Norris. In no novel do we so quickly pick up the thread of the plot; by the third page, as Mr Cornish says, we are quite at home, know everybody, and even begin to look forward to the final event.

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After the ill-natured Mrs Norris, who will not extend her hospitality to Fanny Price because “I Ι should not have a bed to give her, for I must keep a spare room for a friend," Jane Austen probably hated her sister, Lady Bertram, more than most of her other odious characters.

"She was a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa, doing some long pieces of needlework, of little use and no beauty, thinking more of her pug than her children, but very indulgent to the latter when it did not put herself to inconvenience."

In this novel we see strongly brought out a trait that is particularly noticeable in all Jane Austen's novels, the mutual confidence and sincerity of feeling displayed between brother and sister she never tires of emphasising this side of life.

Emma is the most consistently cheerful of all the novels. E. V. Lucas considers it to be her best, her ripest, and her richest, the most "readable-again " book in the world. Comedy reigns supreme, with