her son. But this word “cynical” is one of the most misused in the

English language, especially when, by a glaring and gratuitous

falsification of its original sense, it is applied, not to rough and

snarling invective, but to gentle and oblique satire. If cynicism means

the perception of “the other side,” the sense of “the accepted hells

beneath,” the consciousness that motives are nearly always mixed, and

that to seem is not identical with to be—if this be cynicism, then

every man and woman who is not a fool, who does not care to live in a

fool’s paradise, who has knowledge of nature and the world and life, is

a cynic. And in that sense Miss Austen certainly was one. She may even

have been one in the further sense that, like her own Mr. Bennet, she

took an epicurean delight in dissecting, in displaying, in setting at

work her fools and her mean persons. I think she did take this delight,

and I do not think at all the worse of her for it as a woman, while she

was immensely the better for it as an artist.
In respect of her art generally, Mr. Goldwin Smith has truly observed

that “metaphor has been exhausted in depicting the perfection of it,

combined with the narrowness of her field;” and he has justly added that

we need not go beyond her own comparison to the art of a miniature{xv}

painter. To make this latter observation quite exact we must not use the

term miniature in its restricted sense, and must think rather of Memling

at one end of the history of painting and Meissonier at the other, than

of Cosway or any of his kind. And I am not so certain that I should

myself use the word “narrow” in connection with her. If her world is a

microcosm, the cosmic quality of it is at least as eminent as the

littleness. She does not touch what she did not feel herself called to

paint; I am not so sure that she could not have painted what she did not

feel herself called to touch. It is at least remarkable that in two very