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