There is thus something of similarity (though with attendant differences, of the most important kind) between the joint position of Dickens and Thackeray towards the world of the novel, and the joint position of Scott and Miss Austen.  They overlap more than their great forerunners of the preceding generation.  Both wrote historical novels:  it is indeed Thackeray’s unique distinction that he was equally master of the historical novel and of the novel of pure modern society, almost uneventful.  In parts of some of his later books, especially Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Dickens at least tried to exchange his picaresque-fantastic cloudland for actual ordinary modern life.  But on the whole the method of Thackeray was the method of the novel, though shot with a strong romantic spirit, and the method of Dickens the method of the romance applied, for the most part, to material which could hardly be called romantic.  Both, therefore, in a manner, recalled the forces of fiction from the rather straggling and particularist courses which it had been pursuing for the last quarter of a century.

In fact, even in the two mighty men of genius whom we have just been discussing, there may 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