Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/222

 kind that needs no "storied urn or animated bust" to keep it alive. In a very different sense, but as truly as of the great architect, it may be said, "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice!" for it is in looking round us at the every-day men and women whom we meet in our every-day life that we learn to appreciate truly the genius which could read those characters so perfectly and paint them so unerringly.

As we look back on the scanty records of Jane Austen's career, or turn from these to criticise the writings which were, in fact, her life, we cannot but feel that it was a life prematurely ended as regarded her fame, and that in the future she might have even surpassed the works we already have from her. Yet, much as we must regret that she lived to write nothing more, we cannot attach the idea of incompleteness or immaturity to anything she did write. Everything is finished to the highest point of finish; no labour has been spared, and yet nothing is laboured. George Eliot has named her "The greatest artist that has ever written the most perfect master over the means to her end." Could higher praise be bestowed upon any style of writing? It is in this completeness, this absoluteness of dainty finish, joined, as it is, to a keen, delicate satire and a humour which is never coarse, that lies Jane Austen's gift; and it is one in which she has never had a rival.

It is nearly eighty years since she died, and there has been no writer since whose style, to those who know Jane Austen's well, can really challenge comparison with it for a moment. It is impossible to urge her merits on any who do not see them from her writings, "next to Shakespeare," as Lord Tennyson called