Thus by your example and daily practice you become a prop to the established order; and by the automatic operation of economic forces you become less and less tolerant of all rebels and disturbers of the peace. Because you know only the wealthy and the noble, you come to deal with them exclusively in your art works, you interpret their feelings, and behold life from their point of view. All critics unite in declaring that this is Reality, this is Nature, this is Art; while to object to this, and voice any other point of view, is Idealism, Preaching, and Propaganda. CHAPTER LII BEHIND THE HEDGE-ROWS Spreading the magic carpet of the imagination, we take flight from the free and easy court of Weimar to the home of an English rector, where impropriety is scarcely whispered, and where a little old maid of genius lives amid tea-parties and the embroidering of linen and the visiting of the poor, interrupted at intervals by the major crises of births, marriages and deaths. Jane Austen was the youngest of seven children, who dwelt together in that amity which the Bible recommends but which frail humanity infrequently realizes. She was a genius without eccentricities, egotisms or rebellions; never did a writer of immortal books live a more conventional life or have less to write about. She had no literary friends, not even at the end of her life. Her best work was done at the age of twenty-two, and was a secret kept from the members of her family. She wrote on little sheets of paper, which could be quickly hidden under a blotter or a piece of “fancy work.” Her books were not published until late in her life, and then they were published anonymously. She died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-two. The characters in her novels are the people of the world she knew. Her theme is, of course, the theme of all bourgeois fiction, the property marriage. Here we see the golden love-glints flashing from Cupid’s eyes; here we see the fortunes sailing about upon breezes of emotion; here we see Sensibility controlled by Sense. Not great fortunes, you understand, but modest ones, such as entitle one to be on the visiting list of an English country rector. A fortune sufficient to enable the hero to escape the inconvenience of working, and to live in the country and exhibit to mankind a beautiful and graceful specimen of the human race. A fortune sufficient to enable him to marry a lady of Sense and Sensibility, and to provide her with a beautiful home and a garden, and a few servants, and maintenance for whatever number of children it may please Providence to send. That is the sort of fortune for which Jane Austen’s heroines are competing, and which each of them invariably gets--the bourgeois happy ending.