appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seem
always within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance in this respect is
enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in _St. Ronan's
Well_: and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged
in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely
goes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every other respect she does
not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair. The story
is the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously
_adequate_: neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with
the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite
indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a
few who are not quite of negligible judgment. But the reason of this
adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph. Not being a
poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic
phrase: though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose
variety. But in the other great province of character, though hers is
but a Rutland to his Yorkshire--or rather to his England or his
world--she is almost equally supreme. And by her manipulation of it she
showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and
even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to
supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable
extent. Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does
not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is
exhausted--if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of
Humanity were exhaustible. The chairs and tables, the beds and the
basins--everything--can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has been
made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any
other magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most curious
things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in
her. Even her young men--certainly not her greatest successes--are by no