short periods of writing—one of about three years, and another of not

much more than five—she executed six capital works, and has not left a

single failure. It is possible that the romantic paste in her

composition was defective: we must always remember that hardly anybody

born in her decade—that of the eighteenth-century

seventies—independently exhibited the full romantic quality. Even Scott

required hill and mountain and ballad, even Coleridge metaphysics and

German to enable them to chip the classical shell. Miss Austen was an

English girl, brought up in a country retirement, at the time when

ladies went back into the house if there was a white frost which might

pierce their kid shoes, when a sudden cold was the subject of the

gravest fears, when their studies, their ways, their conduct were

subject to all those fantastic limits and restrictions against which

Mary Wollstonecraft protested with better general sense than particular

taste or judgment. Miss Austen, too, drew back when the white frost

touched her shoes; but I think she would have made a pretty good journey

even in a black one.{xvi}
For if her knowledge was not very extended, she knew two things which

only genius knows. The one was humanity, and the other was art. On the

first head she could not make a mistake; her men, though limited, are

true, and her women are, in the old sense, “absolute.” As to art, if she

has never tried idealism, her realism is real to a degree which makes

the false realism of our own day look merely dead-alive. Take almost any

Frenchman, except the late M. de Maupassant, and watch him laboriously

piling up strokes in the hope of giving a complete impression. You get

none; you are lucky if, discarding two-thirds of what he gives, you can

shape a real impression out of the rest. But with Miss Austen the

myriad, trivial, unforced strokes build up the picture like magic.

Nothing is false; nothing is superfluous. When (to take the present book