The failure of her books to attract the mass of novel-readers is due in the first place to a lack of "exciting" qualities. No syndicate that knew its business would offer them for serial purposes; they have no breathless "situations," and their strong appeal is to the calmer feelings and the intellect, not to the passions and the prejudices. In one respect only has she anything in common with the popular novelists of our day. Her set of characters is even more limited than theirs. The virtuous heroine, the handsome hero, the frivolous coquette, the fascinating libertine, the worldly priest, are to be encountered in her pages, but the wicked nobleman and the criminal adventuress find no places there. What is often overlooked, however, by those who speak of Jane Austen's few characters, is that no two of them have quite the same characteristics of mind. They are differentiated with admirable art. Even so, the types are few, and the smallness of the field which she cultivated has been frequently adduced as a bar to her inclusion among the { 16} masters of English fiction. She has the least range of them all. When one thinks of the host of strongly-marked types in Scott, in Dickens, in Thackeray, of the diversity of scenes and incidents which fill the pages of their books, her few squires and parsons and unemployed officers, with their wives and daughters, who live out their days in Georgian parlours and in shrubberies and parks, make a poor enough show in the dramatic and spectacular way.
No particular passion dominates the life of any one of her leading personages. Avarice, which has afforded such notable figures to almost every great novelist, in her world is only represented by meanness; lust and hate are nowhere strongly emphasized, even love is rarely permitted to suggest the possibility of becoming violent. There are no Pecksniffs, Quilps, Père Grandets, nor Lord Steynes; no Lady Kews, Jane Eyres, nor Lisbeth Fischers. Only into the hearts of her younger women does Jane Austen throw the searchlight of complete knowledge, lit by her own feelings, and tended with self-analysis, and her heroines still leave a large part of virtuous womankind unrepresented.
Balzac, describing the origins of his play _La Marâtre_ to the manager who produced it, said: "We are not concerned with an appalling melodrama wherein the villain sets light to houses and massacres the inhabitants. No, I imagine a drawing-room comedy where all is calm, tranquil, pleasant. The men play peacefully at the whist-table, by the light of wax candles under little green shades. The women chat and laugh as they do their fancy needlework. Presently they all take tea together. In a word, everything shows the influence of regular habits and harmony. But for all that, beneath this placid surface the passions are at work, the drama progresses until the moment when it bursts out like the flame of a conflagration. That is what I want to show."