Such uncritical admiration as Mr. Anthony Hope referred to is even more annoying than the tone in which I have heard a distinguished writer speak of Jane Austen as "that woman"—the mildest of the contemptuous terms that Napoleon applied to Madame de Staël. The author who spoke of Jane Austen so slightingly admitted her power of presenting a "bloodless" and trivial society in a life-like manner. No such recognition of power is allowed to her by an American critic of to-day, who says of her work "it may be called art, but it is a poor species of that old art which depended for its effect upon false similitudes." It is hard to believe that the writer of this astonishing opinion had read many pages of the author he thus condemned to a place among the third-rates.

II
EQUIPMENT; AND METHOD

Literary influences—Jane Austen's defence of novelists—The old essayists—Her favourite authors—Some novels of her time—Criticism of her niece's novel—Sense of her own limitations—Her method—Humour—Familiar names—Some characteristics of style—Suggested emendations—A new "problem" of authorship—A "forbidding" writer—"Commonplace" and "superficial"—Thomas Love Peacock—Sapient suggestions.

"I believe there is no constraint to be put upon real genius; nothing but inclination can set it to work," was one of the many sensible, if unoriginal, observations of the monarch in whose reign Jane Austen was born and died. But the inclination itself is usually started by external suggestions, and it is a mere truism that most books are written because others have appeared before them. Macaulay declared that but for Fanny Burney's example Jane Austen would never have been a novelist. Some of her early attempts at a complete novel did indeed take the epistolary form which was common in the preceding age, and was the method of her admired Richardson, who, I think, fired her ambition quite as much as Miss Burney. It would also seem that Mrs. Radcliffe's wild romances had induced in Jane the desire to do something that should please by the absence of every quality that had made them popular.

I doubt if there is any author of any period to whom the most famous remark of Buffon could be more justly applied than to Jane Austen. "Le style est la femme même" is a conviction which becomes more and more firm as one reads her novels and her letters, and reflects over their relationship. Her simple life and her limited opportunities, her genius being granted, are a sufficient explanation of her work. Part of that life, and a part more important, in proportion to the rest, than it would have been in the case of one who had lived less remote from the world of thought and action, was the reading of favourite books. Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison and Pamela influenced her strongly, but she avoided more than she took from them in the formation of her style. Miss Burney she now and then laughs at a little, as when, after John Thorpe has said to Catherine (who confesses she has never read Camilla): "You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul, there is not," Jane Austen adds that "the justness" of this critique "was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine." But where she loved she laughed. She appreciated her sister-novelist's work very highly, and she writes of a young woman whom she met at a neighbour's house: "There are two traits in her character which are pleasing—namely, she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea."

Scott's poetry, of course, Jane read and enjoyed. Three of his most popular novels—Waverley, Guy Mannering, and The Antiquary—appeared during her lifetime, and their authorship, like that of her own works, was not avowed until after her death. How wide-open was the "secret" of their origin from the very first, years before Scott's acknowledgment, we may see in one of Jane's letters of 1814, where she says: "Walter Scott has no business to write novels; especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but I fear I must." She herself declared, half jestingly, that she wrote for fame and not for profit. Neither, in any but shallow measure, was granted to her whilst she lived. She did not, like Robert Burns, "pant after distinction," nor was she of the "pushing" type. The offering-up of self-respect in the cause of self-interest was the least possible of sacrifices with her.

The machine-made horrors of Ann Radcliffe—"la reine des épouvantements" as she has been aptly called, in spite of her retiring disposition—were as familiar to Jane as were those, far less pouvantable, of Ainsworth to the girls of a later generation. The Radcliffe novels were published between Jane's fourteenth and twenty-third years, when she was most open to romantic influences, but however much she may have shuddered over them in her teens, she laughed at them in her twenties, and it is certainly to the desire to satirize the melodramatic sensations of the school of fiction which they represent that we chiefly owe Northanger Abbey, a pleasant mixture of a serious love-story and a burlesque, a motto for which might have been found in a sonnet of Shakespeare:

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
*****
I grant I never saw a goddess go,—
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground."