equency--namely, the
tantalising of the reader at a critical point by a purposeless, wanton,
or negligent shifting of the interest from the major to the minor theme.
A sad example of this infantile trick is to be found in the thirty-first
chapter of _Rhoda_ _Fleming_, wherein, well knowing that the reader is
tingling for the interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author, unable
to control his own capricious and monstrous fancy for Algernon, devotes
some sixteen pages to the young knave's vagaries with an illicit
thousand pounds. That the sixteen pages are excessively brilliant does
not a bit excuse the wilful unshapeliness of the book's design.

The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out defenders of Victorian fiction
are wont to argue that though the event-plot in sundry great novels may
be loose and casual (that is to say, simply careless), the "idea-plot"
is usually close-knit, coherent, and logical. I have never yet been able
to comprehend how an idea-plot can exist independently of an event-plot
(any more than how spirit can be conceived apart from matter); but
assuming that an idea-plot can exist independently, and that the
mysterious thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow, the
event-plot (which I positively do not believe),--even then I still hold
that sloppiness in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave
iniquity. In this connection I have in mind, among English novels,
chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," George Eliot, the Brontes, and
Anthony Trollope.

The one other important rule in construction is that the plot should be
kept throughout within the same convention. All plots--even those of our
most sacred naturalistic contemporaries--are and must be a
conventionalisation of life. We imagine we have arrived at a convention
which is nearer to the truth of life than that of our forerunners.
Perhaps we have--but so little nearer that the difference is scarcely
appreciable! An aviator at midday may be nearer the sun than the
motorist, but regarded as a portion of the entire journey to the sun,
the aviator's progress upward can safely be ignored. No novelist has
yet, or ever will, come within a hundred million miles of life itself.
It is impossible for us to see how far we still are from life. The
defects of a new convention disclose themselves late in its career. The
notion that "naturalists" have at last lighted on a final formula which
ensures truth to life is ridiculous. "Naturalist" is m