Sense and Sensibility was the first published of Miss Austen’s novels. It has perhaps more of movement than its successors, and in no other is there a character of so much passionate tenderness as belongs to Marianne. It is not, however, as a whole, equal to her later works; yet it may be as often resorted to with advantage as any of them, and it is full of the author’s genius....

To Miss Austen all subsequent novelists have been infinitely indebted. She led the way in the return to nature; she again described individuals instead of classes or nationalities; she re-indicated and worked the inexhaustible mines of wealth for the writer of fiction which everywhere lie beneath the surface of ordinary life.

That Dickens should have been as blind as this clumsy critic is astonishing, but it is a blot on his scutcheon, not on hers. To deny women humour was ungrateful of Dickens, when they so loved his own books; to commit them without calling the writer of Emma as chief witness for the defence, was an act of scandalous injustice.

George Henry Lewes was such an adorer of Miss Austen that he showed his odd lack of critical acumen by asking Charlotte Brontë to imitate her, as who should bid a heavy-scented hon eysuckle flinging cream-coloured blossoms over a green hedge in perfumed luxuriance, to change itself by magic into a charming gold-laced, brown velvet polyanthus, sitting primly, yet with its own quaint fascination, in the tidiest of garden borders. Mr. Lewes raves about Jane’s “mild eyes” to fiery Charlotte; he tells her to “learn to admire Miss Austen as one of the greatest artists, the greatest painters of human character.”

Yet it was neither of these who really expressed clearly why the Austenite of to-day can, undaunted even by the Encyclopædia, take up her books again and again, as Tennyson’s life told us was his common custom. A short time after the untimely death of Miss Austen, who certainly achieved literary immortality in her brief thirty-eight years, a second notice in the Quarterly, by Archbishop Whateley, did her thorough justice, because it pointed out that her humour was her strongest, her impregnable point.

“Like Shakespeare,” he said, “she shows as admirable a discrimination in the character of fools as people of sense, a merit which is far from common. To invent, indeed, a conversation full of wit or wisdom requires that the writer should himself possess ability; but the converse does not hold good. It is no fool that can describe fools well.”

Jane Austen’s novels have their momentum mostly in conversation, with which is combined narration in little patches. Description, too, does not stand by itself for more than a few sentences, but is knit into the narrative. Letters are frequently employed, usually serving the same purpose as the monologue or the soliloquy of the stage. This dilated drama moves forward slowly, but it always moves, for the reason that so little is introduced for its own sake. After a breakfast-table conversation, a visit, a walk, or an excursion, and by means of them, the characters are shifted about, new light is thrown upon them, and a step has been taken toward the final issue....

Now when we come to bring together in a few sentences Jane Austen’s contribution to fiction, it is quite clear what must be said. She was a realist. She gave anew to the novel an art and a style, which it once had had, particularly in Fielding, but which it had since lost. Fielding was master of two styles, the burlesque and the rich eloquence of the great orators and moralists; he was at will Cervantic and Demosthenic. Jane Austen’s style is the language of everyday life—even with a tinge of its slang—to which she has added an element of beauty. In the manipulation of characters and events, she left much less to chance than did Fielding.