never the vestige of a cloud to spoil the serenity and the joy. No one is very wealthy or very poor: the whole action takes place in the village of Highbury among a set of people who meet daily. The gradual dawn and growth of love between Knightley and Emma, who makes matches for every one but herself, is uncannily well brought home to the reader, and their final love-scene is one of the happiest in literature. The vulgar and patronising Mrs Elton and talkative Miss Bates are a joy for ever, particularly the latter, who, though "neither young, handsome, rich, nor married, without beauty and cleverness, was yet happy and contented. She loved everybody, thought herself a most fortunate creature and surrounded with blessings.'

Northanger Abbey is most interesting because of its historical value as an attack on the artificial school of romanticism which was so popular among young girls of that time. Catherine Morland's discovery of the roll of paper which she is convinced are loveletters is one of the most successfully satiric studies in the whole range of Jane Austen's work.

"Darkness impenetrable and immovable filled the room. A violent gust of wind, rising with sudden fury, added fresh horror to the moment. . . . Human nature could support no more. . . . Groping her way to the bed, she jumped hastily in, and sought some suspension of agony by creeping far underneath the clothes. . . . The storm still raged., . . Hour after hour passed away, and the wearied Catherine had heard three proclaimed by all the clocks in the house before the tempest subsided and she unknowingly fell fast asleep. She was awaked the next morning at eight o'clock by the housemaid's opening her windowshutter. She flew to the mysterious manuscript. If

the evidence of sight might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand."

No longer could the Catherine Morlands dare to put any faith in the style of literature made popular by The Castle of Otranto, or The Mysteries of Udolpho. By this one blow did Jane Austen clear the ground for the manly, healthy, historical romance of Scott and disperse the whole gang of foolish frighteners of youth who filled the minds of young girls with unimaginable horrors and sentimental tomfoolery.

Persuasion, the last of her novels, begins with as famous a sentence as that which I quoted from Pride and Prejudice, describing the joy which Sir Walter Elliot took in "the Snob's Bible," the Baronetage, and is famous for the fact that it contains about the only memorable incident recorded in any of her work : the accident that befell Louisa Musgrove on the Cobb at Lyme Regis. Here, too, occurs one of those rare descriptions of natural scenery, of which, as a rule, Jane Austen is so sparing. She shows that she could observe, when she wished, inanimate objects in Nature with as acute an eye as she usually brought to bear on humanity. It was only that her fellow-men interested her more than Nature did. She watches them lynx-eyed, and, as her biographer says, she never drops a stitch." The reason is not so much that she took infinite trouble, though no doubt she did, as that everything was actual to her, as in his larger historical manner everything was actual to Macaulay.

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In all her gallery, as Macaulay noticed, she left scarcely a single caricature, and it is in this that Jane Austen approaches most nearly to the manner of Shakespeare. To be humorous, it has often been pointed out, it is necessary to exaggerate abundantly.

Jane Austen has gone a long way to refute what else might seem an irrefutable argument.

Scott and Tennyson both spoke of her work in glowing terms, and from their day to this she has had no detractors among the greatest critics (with the sole exception of Charlotte Brontë), but only increased the circle of her readers.

Her plots, like Shakespeare's, were not in a high degree original or ingenious; her work is almost devoid of incident: she repeats, not only her situations, but in a lesser degree her characters.

But, as G. K. Chesterton says, no other woman has been able to capture the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist; she did not know what she did not know, like a sound agnostic: she knew more about men than most women, in spite of the fact that she is commonly supposed to have been protected from truth. If that was so, it was precious little of truth that was protected from her. When Darcy says, "I have been a selfish being all my life in practice though not in theory," he approaches the complete confession of the intelligent male.

Womanly foibles have never before been so mercilessly exposed; compared with her astringent tonic properties, the satire of Addison or Steele is as barley water is to ammonia. Her pen has the point of a stencil and the sharpness of a razor-edge: there is nothing in her work of the vague or the shadowy; every character stands out like a cameo, every sentence was true to the ordinary speech of her day, and yet possesses that unfathomable universal quality which makes it ring as fresh and as true after a hundred years as it did on the day when it was first written.

MTM

VII

CLEMENCE DANE

ISS CLEMENCE DANE in Regiment of Women has startled me more than any writer on education whose work I have ever read. Why the book was not censored I cannot understand. Those of us whose prime care in life it is to see a wholesale reform in education must owe her a very considerable debt, for she has attacked the existing system with an amazing insight into its weakest and most vulnerable places. I have spent many years in trying to prove that our great stumbling-block was the lack of interest in intellectual and artistic occupations, and that all would be well if we could once stimulate the youth of the country to care about learning in the same degree that it cares about athletics-and now a self-confessed amateur comes along and knocks all my pet theories down and tells us that the problem is quite different.

To put it tersely, it is not the brain, but sex that is wrongly developed and neglected. Every schoolmaster knows that one of the most perplexing features of boarding-school life lies in the question of boyfriendships. We of the public schools rigorously keep boys of sixteen and over apart from the juniors. In spite, however, of the harshest rules (perhaps because of them, in some instances) irregular friendships are formed, hideous scandals take place, and wholesale expulsions follow.

On the face of it there would appear to be little

harm in these friendships, and if these led to nothing more than friendships we should encourage rather than hinder them. But strange as it may sound to the uninitiated, these friendships rapidly develop into love-affairs, and the element of passion is introduced. We talk of boys "being keen" on each other, of girls having "a craze " for one another. If we could dismiss these cases as mere ebullitions of "sloshy " sentiment we might perhaps have cause to complain that they were a waste of time, but we could scarcely condemn them as pernicious.

I do not wish in a paper on the art of the novel to introduce a disquisition on unnatural vice, but I never met an author who dared even to suggest the prevalence of this poisonous habit in schools. We have bound ourself in a conspiracy of silence to the detriment of all progress. It is quite time we started to enlighten the parents of our charges. But while we professionals funk the problem, a mere outsider throws the bomb with complete assurance and leaves us aghast... not because she joins with our unspoken thoughts, and decides that the imagination of a child's heart is unclean, but because she wishes to make all of us-schoolmasters and mistresses-sit up and take stock of our own position in the matter.

It is we who are to blame, it seems. Instead of keeping to our rôle of stern autocrat, unapproachable despot, we choose to descend from our daïs, become friendly and companionable and inspire hero- and heroine-worship, quite without meaning to. A kindly word here, encouragement over a piece of work, an inspired talk about History or Mathematics or Divinity (even the dullest of us is inspired sometimes), and we are regarded as only a little inferior to the Deity: our lightest word is regarded as a