ates to think and yet wants to be made to think. But
that is a reader's condition. With equal readiness he will welcome
climactic movement and continue to read, or welcome any premature fall
in tensity and throw the story aside.

To show by example the results that may be achieved by use of the device
of movement to a climax is impracticable; these matters that cannot be
displayed by pungent quotation the student must dig out for himself by
intelligent reading. Almost any successful story will display climactic
arrangement of its major events. I cannot forbear to mention the
ascension whereby Thackeray leads a reader of "Vanity Fair" up to Rawdon
Crawley's confrontation of Becky and Lord Steyne. Hawthorne's "The House
of the Seven Gables," a book in most respects so totally dissimilar,
shows a like process in leading up to the death of Judge Pyncheon.
George Douglas's "The House With the Green Shutters," less widely known,
is strongly climactic in its latter part. But examples, in short story
and novel, are infinite in number and sort.

To recapitulate, a plot is a problem of human life brought to a fitting
and convincing solution, and consists of a series of events which
displays the fact and result of a conflict between opposing forces,
spiritual and material, actuating and affecting men and women. Therefore
the chief characteristic of a plot is its dramatic value. The definition
may be turned to use not so much in the discovery of plots as in
appraising their fictional value, their power to arouse and hold a
reader's interest, after they have been found or invented.

Since a plot is a conflict between opposing forces, and since fiction
deals with man, the three fundamental plot-themes are conflict between
man and his environment, conflict between man and man, and conflict in
the soul of the same man. Realization of the fact will serve to give
point and definition to the writer's search for the idea.

Finally, a just regard for his readers will lead the writer to cast his
incidents into some climactic arrangement. The first, last, and only
proper aim of a story is to interest, and break in the expected movement
to a climax is fatal to interest.

It would be interesting to go into the matter of plot-analysis at some
length--I have in mind particularly the deficiencies of Poe's
definition that a plot is a series of incidents contrived to produce a
single effect--but this book is for the writer. I shall try throughou