To be content with this as aught but the most
26



Her Contemporaries and Herself

unimportant cause of what may be fairly called
Miss Austen's supremacy would be to fulfil Dog-
berry's desire in one's own person and to write down
Miss Austen as a novelist who had wit and talent
enough to string together sensible and plausible
commonplaces of everyday scenes and characters.
That method has been of inestimable value to the
kind of work to which allusion has been made,
but there is infinitely more of course in Miss
Austen's method and, one may surely add, in
Miss Austen's inspiration. The words ' inspiration '
and ' genius ' are almost synonymous, and no true
admirer of Miss Austen will for a moment admit
that she was possessed of nothing more than a great
and unique talent. Talent and close observation
will do very much, but they will not avail to turn
events and people which, as Madame de Stael had
it, are vulgaires — that is to say, in their essence of
a usual character — into types of enduring interest
and charm, which, despite the rapid changes in habits
and manners, delight the present, and one hopes the
rising generation, just as much as they delighted Sir
Walter Scott, to whom the ways and turns of speech of
Miss Austen's folk were familiar as household words.
