naturalist among tame animals. She does not study man (as Dostoevsky
does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and
women are essentially men and women of the fireside.

Nor is Jane Austen entirely a realist in her treatment even of these.
She idealizes them to the point of making most of them good-looking, and
she hates poverty to such a degree that she seldom can endure to write
about anybody who is poor. She is not happy in the company of a
character who has not at least a thousand pounds. "People get so
horridly poor and economical in this part of the world," she writes on
one occasion, "that I have no patience with them. Kent is the only place
for happiness; everybody is rich there." Her novels do not introduce us
to the most exalted levels of the aristocracy. They provide us, however,
with a natural history of county people and of people who are just below
the level of county people and live in the eager hope of being taken
notice of by them. There is more caste snobbishness, I think, in Jane
Austen's novels than in any other fiction of equal genius. She, far more
than Thackeray, is the novelist of snobs.

How far Jane Austen herself shared the social prejudices of her
characters it is not easy to say. Unquestionably, she satirized them. At
the same time, she imputes the sense of superior rank not only to her
butts, but to her heroes and heroines, as no other novelist has ever
done. Emma Woodhouse lamented the deficiency of this sense in Frank
Churchill. "His indifference to a confusion of rank," she thought,
"bordered too much on inelegance of mind." Mr. Darcy, again, even when
he melts so far as to become an avowed lover, neither forgets his social
position, nor omits to talk about it. "His sense of her inferiority, of
its being a degradation ... was dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due
to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend