Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the average novel did not come to anything like perfection for a very long time.  In a single example, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almost at once.  Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the Four Masters of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as the others by courtesy of letters.  But in the first (as for the matter of that in the last) of the four the success was rather a matter of individual and inimitable genius than of systematic discovery of method practicable by others.  Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has ever followed Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; as Fielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following Thackeray, no one has ever followed Thackeray satisfactorily at all.  Such reasons as presented themselves have been given for the fact that nearly half of the whole period passed before the two systems—­of the pure novel and the novel-romance—­were discovered:  and even then they were not at once put to work.  But the present writer would be the very first to confess that these explanations leave a great deal unexplained.

Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there could be no doubt about the demand when it was once started.  It was indeed almost entirely independent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself.  Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion of that population who were likely to—­who indeed could—­read, and for the inferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those of the most trumpery trash of the “Minerva Press” period—­the last decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century.  For the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely uncritical of what it devours.  The admirable though certainly fortunate Scot who “could never remember drinking bad whisky” might be echoed, if they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a bad novel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.

At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes was compensated by an absence of that working of those recipes to death which the last century—­or the last three-quarters of it—­has seen.  The average work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers of novels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not necessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned out thing—­one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticism in detail—­than even the best of the works of the earlier division outside of Fielding.  But the eighteenth-century books—­faulty, only partially satisfying as they may be in comparison, say, with a well-succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores—­very often have a certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine-work, which supplies something not altogether unlike the contrast between the furniture of the two periods.  Stress and dwelling have been purposely given, to some minor books of this period, for this very reason.