ay be seen--at their beginnings at least--something
of that irresolution, uncertainty, and want of reliance on the powers of
the novel, it-by-itself-it, which we have noticed before: and which the
unerring craftsmanship of Scott had already pointed out in the
"Conversation of the Author of _Waverley_ with Captain Clutterbuck" more
than once referred to. They want excuses and pretexts, bladders and
spring-boards. Even Dickens, despite his irrepressible self-reliance,
burdens himself, at the beginning of _Pickwick_, with the clumsy old
machinery of a club which he practically drops: and, still later, with
the still more clumsy framework of "Master Humphrey's Clock" which he
has not quietly to drop, but openly to strip off and cast away, before
he has gone very far. Thackeray takes sixteen years of experiment before
he trusts his genius, boldly and on the great scale, to reveal itself in
its own way, and in the straight way of the novel.

Yet in this time also a great advance was made, as is shown not only by
the fact that Dickens and Thackeray themselves became possible, but by
the various achievements of the principal writers mentioned in this
chapter, of one or two who might have been, but are perhaps, on the
whole, best postponed to the next, such as Lever, and of the great army
of minorities who have been of necessity omitted. In every direction and
from every point of view novel is _growing_. Although it was abused by
precisians, the _gran conquesta_ of Scott had forced it into general
recognition and requisition. Even the still severe discipline of family
life in the first half of the nineteenth century, instead of excluding
it altogether, contented itself with prescribing that "novels should not
be read in the morning." A test which may be thought vulgar by the
super-fine or the superficial, but a pretty good one, is the altered
status and position of the writers of novels. In the eighteenth,
especially the earlier eighteenth, century the novelist had not merely
been looked down upon _as_ a novelist, but had, as a rule, resorted to
novel-writing under some stress of circumstance. Even when he was by
birth a "gentleman of coat armour" as Fielding and Smollett were, he was
usually a gentleman very much out at elbows: the stories, true or false,
of _Rasselas_ and Johnson's mother's funeral expenses, of the _Vicar of
Wakefield_ and Goldsmith's dunning landlady, have something more than
mere anecdote in them. Mackenzie,