in the eighteenth century—­and perhaps a little later.  His son Henry, in common with most of his author’s jeunes premiers, has been similarly objected to as colourless.  He really has a great deal of subdued individuality, and it had to be subdued, because it would not have done to let him be too superior to Catherine.  James Morland and Frederick Tilney are not to be counted as more than “walking gentlemen,” Mr. Allen only as a little more:  and they fulfil their law.  But Isabella Thorpe is almost better than her brother, as being nearer to pure comedy and further from farce; Eleanor Tilney is adequate; and Mrs. Allen is sublime on her scale.  A novelist who, at the end of the eighteenth century, could do Mrs. Allen, could do anything that she chose to do; and might be trusted never to attempt anything that she could not achieve.  And yet the heroine is perhaps—­as she ought to be—­the greatest triumph of the whole, and the most indicative of the new method.  The older heroines had generally tried to be extraordinary:  and had failed.  Catherine tries to be ordinary:  and is an extraordinary success.  She is pretty, but not beautiful:  sensible and well-natured, but capable, like most of us, of making a complete fool of herself and of doing complete injustice to other people; fairly well educated, but not in the least learned or accomplished.  In real life she would be simply a unit in the thousands of quite nice but ordinary girls whom Providence providentially provides in order that mankind shall not be alone.  In literature she is more precious than rubies—­exactly because art has so masterfully followed and duplicated nature.

Precisely to what extent the attractive quality of this art is enhanced by the pervading irony of the treatment would be a very difficult problem to work out.  It is scarcely hazardous to say that irony is the very salt of the novel:  and that just as you put salt even in a cake, so it is not wise to neglect it wholly even in a romance.  Life itself, as soon as it gets beyond mere vegetation, is notoriously full of irony:  and no imitation of it which dispenses with the seasoning can be worth much.  That Miss Austen’s irony is consummate can hardly be said to be matter of serious contest.

It has sometimes been thought—­perhaps mistakenly—­that the exhibition of it in Northanger Abbey is, though a very creditable essay, not consummate.  But Pride and Prejudice is known to be, in part, little if at all later than Northanger Abbey:  and there can again be very little dispute among judges in any way competent as to the quality of the irony there.  Nor does it much matter what part of this wonderful book was written later and what earlier:  for its ironical character is all-pervading, in almost every character, except Jane and her lover who are mere foils to Elizabeth and Darcy, and even in these to some extent; and in the whole story, even in the at least permitted suggestion that the sight of Pemberley,