t organic; they are merely tied
together by the continuance of the same central character from one to
another. Any one of the sections might be discarded without detriment
to the others; and the order of them might be rearranged. Plays, as
well as novels, have been constructed in this inorganic way,--for
example, Moliere's "L'Etourdi" and "Les Facheux." If the actors, in
performing either of these plays, should omit one or two units of the
sausage-string of incidents, the audience would not become aware of
any gap in structure. Yet a story built in this straightforward and
successive way may give a vast impression of the shifting maze of
life. Mr. Kipling's "Kim," which is picaresque in structure, shows us
nearly every aspect of the labyrinthine life of India. He selects a
healthy and normal, but not a clever, boy, and allows all India to
happen to him. The book is without beginning and without end; but
its very lack of neatness and compactness of plan contributes to the
general impression it gives of India's immensity.

But a simple series of events arranged along a single strand of
causation, or a succession of several series of this kind strung
along one after the other, may not properly be called a plot. The
word _plot_ signifies a weaving together; and a weaving together
presupposes the co-existence of more than one strand. The simplest
form of plot, properly so called, is a weaving together of two
distinct series of events; and the simplest way of weaving them
together is by so devising them that, though they may be widely
separate at their beginnings, they progress, each in its own way,
toward a common culmination,--a single momentous event which stands
therefore at the apex of each series. This event is the knot which
ties together the two strands of causation. Thus, in "Silas Marner,"
the culminating event, which is the redemption of Marner from a
misanthropic aloofness from life, through the influence of Eppie, a
child in need of love, is led up to by two distinct series of events,
of which it forms the knot. The one series, which concerns itself with
Marner, may be traced back to the unmerited wrong which he suffered in
his youth; and the other series, which concerns itself with Eppie, may
be traced back to the clandestine marriage of Eppie's father, Godfrey
Cass. The initial event of one series has no immediate logical
relation to the initial event of the other; but each series, as it
progresses, approaches