making her characters talk. Luckily, conversation was still formal in
her day, and it was as possible for her as for Congreve to make middling
men and women talk first-rate prose. She did more than this, however.
She was the first English novelist before Meredith to portray charming
women with free personalities. Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse have
an independence (rare in English fiction) of the accident of being
fallen in love with. Elizabeth is a delightful prose counterpart of
Beatrice.

Miss Austen has another point of resemblance to Meredith besides that
which I have mentioned. She loves to portray men puffed up with
self-approval. She, too, is a satirist of the male egoist. Her books are
the most finished social satires in English fiction. They are so perfect
in the delicacy of their raillery as to be charming. One is conscious in
them, indeed, of the presence of a sparkling spirit. Miss Austen comes
as near being a star as it is possible to come in eighteenth-century
conversational prose. She used to say that, if ever she should marry,
she would fancy being Mrs. Crabbe. She had much of Crabbe's realism,
indeed; but what a dance she led realism with the mocking light of her
wit!




III

MR. G.K. CHESTERTON AND MR. HILAIRE BELLOC

1. THE HEAVENLY TWINS