l--only _The
Inheritance_ having much central unity. And there is still
eighteenth-century quality rather than nineteenth in her
alternations of Smollettian farce-satire and Mackenziefied
sentiment. She is very good to read, but stand a little out of
the regular historic succession, as well as out of the ordinary
novel classes.

CHAPTER VI

THE SUCCESSORS--TO THACKERAY

A person inexperienced in the ways of life and literature might expect
that such developments as those surveyed and discussed in the last
chapter must have immediate and unbroken development further. Scott had
thrown open, and made available, the whole vast range of history for the
romancer: Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary
and present things for the novelist. And such a one might contend that,
even if the common idea of definite precursorship and teachership be a
mistake, the more subtle doctrine that such work as Scott's, and as Miss
Austen's, is really the result of generally working forces, as well as
of individual genius, would lead to the same conclusion. But the
expectation would show his inexperience, and his ignorance of the fact
that Art, unlike Science, declines to be bound by any calculable laws
whatsoever.

It was indeed impossible that Scott's towering fame should not draw the
nobler sort, and his immense gains the baser, to follow in his track:
and they promptly did so. But, as he himself quoted in the remarkable
comments (above alluded to) on his early imitators in the _Diary_, they
had "gotten his fiddle, but not his rosin"--an observation the truth of
which may be shown presently. Miss Austen's immediate influence in the
other direction was almost _nil_: and this was hardly to be regretted,
because a tolerably stationary state of manners, language, etc., such
as her kind of novel requires, had not quite, though it had nearly, been
reached. At any rate, the kind of ebb or half ebb, which so often,
though not so certainly, follows flood-tides in literature, came upon
the novel in the twenties and thirties. Even the striking appearance of
Dickens and _Pickwick_ in 1837 can hardly be said to have turned it
distinctly: for the Dickensian novel is a species by itself--neither
strictly novel nor strictly romance, but, as Polonius might say, a
picaresque-burlesque-sentimental-farcical-realist-fantastic nondescript.
Not till _Vanity Fair_ did the novel of pure real life advance its