such as Lady Bertram or Mr Woodhouse. Nor does Jane Austen ever again repeat the parallelism between two sisters, that makes the fabric of the two early books. Already, in her incisive treatment of Charlotte Lucas, the later Jane Austen is foreshadowed; and Pride and Prejudice' contains the first example of her special invention, the middle-aged married woman whose delightful presence in the middle-distance of the picture reflects an added pleasantness on the different leading figures with which Mrs Gardiner, Mrs Grant, Mrs Weston, and Mrs Croft are brought in contact, as foils and confidants. Had Macaulay happed on these examples, the proof of his contention would have been as unquestionable as its truth.

In 'Northanger Abbey' Jane Austen takes a big stride forward. Developing her taste for technical problems, she here tackles a very difficult one-in an artist's consciousness of the problem, indeed, but with youth's indomitable unconsciousness of its full difficulty. A lesser writer, or a maturer, would have either jibbed at such a task as that of interweaving two motives, of parody and serious drama, or would have crashed heavily through their thin ice. In buoyancy of youth and certainty of power, Jane Austen skims straight across the peril, and achieves a triumph so complete that easy readers run the risk of missing both triumph and problem, in mere joy of the book. She even allows herself to dally here with her own delight, and personally steps forward in the tale with her three great personal outbreaks,-on Novels, on Folly in Females, and on the Vanity of Feminine Motives in Dress. As for the reader, the closer his study of the dovetailing of the two motives, the profounder his pleasure. Parody rules, up to the arrival of Catherine at Northanger, which is the pivot of the composition; after which the drama, long-brewing out of the comic motive, runs current with it, and soon predominates. The requisite hyphen is provided by John and Isabella Thorpe, as differently important in one aspect of the tale as in the other. Each moment of the drama artfully echoes some note of the parody that had prevailed before; and the General's final outburst is just what had been foreshadowed long before, in burlesque, of Mrs Allen. Catherine herself suffers by this very nicety of poise and

adjustment; she is really our most delightful of all ingénues, but her story is kept so constantly comic that one has no time to concentrate on its chief figure.

Fun, too, tends to overshadow the emotional skill with which the movement is developed. Even the processes by which Catherine so plausibly hardens herself into her grotesque belief that General Tilney killed his wife, even her stupefaction before the commonplaceness of the murdered martyr's room, pale beside the sudden comic tragedy of her awakening,* so convincing as it is, so completely blending the two motives of the book, and, in itself, so vibrant with an emotion as genuine as its generating causes are ridiculous. She raised her eyes to him more fully than she had ever done before,' is an early, but very notable, instance of Jane Austen's peculiar power of conveying intense feeling with a touch. In fact, Northanger Abbey' marks the point of transition between the author's first period and her second. Already character is a serious rival to the story; henceforth it becomes more and more the main motive, till finally we reach Persuasion,' than which no known novel of anything like equal calibre is so entirely devoid of any 'story' at all.

And now, in Jane Austen's life comes an unexpected gap. The family is moving; it goes to Bath; it goes to Portsmouth. In all those ten odd years she produces nothing, except the beginning of The Watsons,' which she soon dropped in an unexplained distaste, for which critics have vainly sought a reason. Was it, perhaps, because these were the crucial years of the Napoleonic war, during which its stress was most felt, and concentration on novel-writing was found to be impossible? Much more probably she was simply fretted with removals and uncongenial surroundings; and unhappy, not only in general circumstances, but also with what gleam of personal romance came abortive into her own life. Anne Elliot's distaste for Bath has a more personal note than is usual in her creator's work, and the Portsmouth scenes of 'Mansfield Park' a peculiarly vécu quality. Altogether one cannot but feel that in her thirties our heroine was

⚫ Jane Austen loves to have her heroine taken in, either by herself or some one else; so that author and reader can enjoy a private smile together.

not in health of body and spirit, nor in any environment sufficiently settled and sympathetic, to generate those floods of delight which she had hitherto poured forth. And then the family settles at Chawton. Immediately Jane Austen gets to work again; and with astounding fecundity pours forth the three supreme efforts of her maturity in the last three or four years before her death, presumably of cancer, at the age of forty-two. And not one of the three is a novel of laughter, like those of the earlier period.

Mansfield Park' is Jane Austen's gran rifiuto, perhaps under the influence of the unhappiness through which she had been passing. None of her books is quite so brilliant in parts, none shows a greater technical mastery, a more audacious facing of realities, a more certain touch with character. Yet, alone of her books, 'Mansfield Park' is vitiated throughout by a radical dishonesty, that was certainly not in its author's own nature. One can almost hear the clerical relations urging dear Jane' to devote 'her undoubted talent to the cause of righteousness'; indeed, if dates allowed, one could even believe that Mr Clarke's unforgettable suggestion about the country clergyman had formed fruit in this biography of Edmund Bertram. In any case, her purpose of edification, being not her own, is always at cross-purposes with her unprompted joy in creation. She is always getting so interested in her subject, and so joyous in her management of it, that when her official purpose comes to mind, the resulting high sentiment or edifying speech is a wrench alike to one's attention and credulity. And this dualism of motive destroys not only the unity of the book, but its sincerity. You cannot palter with truth; one false assumption puts all the drawing and colouring out of gear.

For example, Jane Austen has vividly and sedulously shown how impossible a home is Mansfield for the young, with the father an august old Olympian bore, the mother one of literature's most finished fools, and the aunt its very Queen of Shrews; then suddenly, for edification, she turns to saying that Tom Bertram's illness converted him to a tardy appreciation of domestic bliss. Having said which, she is soon overmastered by truth once more, and lets slip that he couldn't bear his

father near him, that his mother bored him, and that consequently these domestic blisses resolved themselves into better service than you'ld get in lodgings, and the ministrations of the uninspiring Edmund. Worse still, because more vital in the book, is her constant deliberate weighting of the balance against Crawford and Mary, who obviously have her artist's affection as well as her moralist's disapproval (as is proved by the very violence of her outbreaks of injustice against them). The consequent strain is such that she defeats her own end by making us take their side against Edmund and Fanny. She throws away the last chance of imposing her view, when she makes Mary, ex hypothesi worldly, calculating and callous, not only accept a penniless dull little nobody as her brilliant brother's wife, but even welcome her with a generous cordiality of enthusiasm which sets Fanny's cold self-righteous attitude of criticism to the Crawfords in a more repellent light than ever.

The dénouement is an inevitable failure, accordingly. It is the harshest of those precipitate coups de théâtre by which Jane Austen, impatient of mere happenings, is too apt to precipitate the conclusions of her books, and jerk her reader's belief with a sudden peripety for which no previous symptom of character had prepared him. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice' and 'Northanger Abbey' are the only two of her books which work out to an inevitable end by means of character, and character alone. But the elopement of Crawford and Maria is a specially flagrant fraud on the reader, a dishonest bit of sheer bad art, meant to clear the field for Fanny, and wrench away the story from its obvious proper end, in the marriages of Edmund and Mary, Crawford and Fanny. However much an author may dislike letting his 'pen dwell on guilt and misery,' this is no excuse for making Henry forfeit the woman he loves (and is winning), for the sake of another about whom he does. not care two straws. Crawford was no mere boy, to be rushed by any married woman into a scandal so fatal to his plans; and without some sufficient explanation one utterly declines to believe he ever did so. Yet Jane Austen inartistically shirks giving any reason for a perversity otherwise incredible. It was not that she would not; her fundamental honesty told her she could not.

Yet Henry, after all, had a very lucky miss of Fanny. How he could ever seriously have wanted to marry her, in fact, becomes a puzzle, for she is the most terrible incarnation we have of the female prig-pharisee. Those who still survive of the Victorian school, which prized a woman in proportion as she was 'little' and soft and silly, keep a special tenderness in their hearts for Fanny Price. Alas, poor souls, let them only have married her! Gentle and timid and shrinking and ineffectual as she seems, fiction holds no heroine more repulsive in her cast-iron self-righteousness and steely rigidity of prejudice; though allowance must be made, of course, as Jane Austen always implies it, and at least once definitely states it, for the jealousy that taints her whole attitude to Mary. Fate has not been kind to Mary Crawford. Her place in the book, her creator's spasms of bias against her, combine to obscure the fact that she is by far the most persistently brilliant of Jane Austen's heroines. It is mere unfair Fanny-feeling to pretend she has neither heart nor morals, but she predominates in brains; and, of all her creator's women, she would be the most delightful as a wife-to any man of brains himself, with income and position. For even dear Elizabeth might sometimes seem a trifle pert beneath the polluted shades of Pemberley, and dear Emma have her moments of trying to direct destiny at Donwell as disastrously as she'd already done at Hartfield.

On the whole, then, Mansfield Park,' with its unparalleled flights counteracted by its unparalleled lapses, must count lower as an achievement than Emma,' with its more equal movement, at a higher level of workmanship. Had it not been for its vitiating purpose, indeed, 'Mansfield Park" would have taken highest rank. Amazing, even in Jane Austen, is the dexterity of the play scenes, and the day at Sotherton; amazing even in a French realist would be the unflinching veracity with which the Portsmouth episode is treated. Only those who have tried to write, perhaps, can fully realise the technical triumphs of Jane Austen. At Sotherton she has practically her whole cast on the stage at once, yet she juggles so accurately that each character not only keeps its own due importance but continues to evolve in exactly the proper relation to all the other ones. And