first-class hero, and nobody knew this
better than Thackeray. What he meant was that he was sick of the
conventional bundle of characteristics styled a hero in his day, and
that he had changed the type. Since then we have grown sick of Dobbins,
and the type has been changed again more than once. The fateful hour
will arrive when we shall be sick of Ponderevos.

The temptation of the great novelist, overflowing with creative force,
is to scatter the interest. In both his major works Tolstoi found the
temptation too strong for him. _Anna Karenina_ is not one novel, but
two, and suffers accordingly. As for _War and Peace_, the reader wanders
about in it as in a forest, for days, lost, deprived of a sense of
direction, and with no vestige of a sign-post; at intervals
encountering mysterious faces whose identity he in vain tries to recall.
On a much smaller scale Meredith committed the same error. Who could
assert positively which of the sisters Fleming is the heroine of _Rhoda
Fleming_? For nearly two hundred pages at a stretch Rhoda scarcely
appears. And more than once the author seems quite to forget that the
little knave Algernon is not, after all, the hero of the story.

The second rule of design--perhaps in the main merely a different view
of the first--is that the interest must be maintained. It may increase,
but it must never diminish. Here is that special aspect of design which
we call construction, or plot. By interest I mean the interest of the
story itself, and not the interest of the continual play of the author's
mind on his material. In proportion as the interest of the story is
maintained, the plot is a good one. In so far as it lapses, the plot is
a bad one. There is no other criterion of good construction. Readers of
a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which
"you can't tell what is going to happen next." But in some of the most
tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen
next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next. It would be
nearer the mark to say that the plot is good when "you want to make sure
what will happen next"! Good plots set you anxiously guessing what will
happen next.

When the reader is misled--not intentionally in order to get an effect,
but clumsily through amateurishness--then the construction is bad. This
calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really good work
another calamity does occur with far too much fr