ive) a _nouement_
followed by a _denouement_. The events in the _denouement_ bear
a closer logical relation to each other than the events in the
_nouement_, because all of them have a common cause in the major knot,
whereas the major knot is the ultimate effect of several distinct
series of causes which were quite separate one from another at the
time when the _nouement_ was begun. For this reason the _denouement_
shows usually a more hurried movement than the _nouement_,--one event
treading on another's heels.

Undoubtedly it was this threefold aspect of a plot--1. The
Complication; 2. The Major Knot; 3. The Explication--which Aristotle
had in mind when he stated that every story must have a beginning,
a middle, and an end. These words were not intended to connote a
quantitative equality. What Aristotle called the "middle" may, in a
modern novel, be stated in a single page, and is much more likely to
stand near the close of the book than at the center. But everything
that comes after it, in what Aristotle called the "end," should be an
effect of which it is the cause; and everything that comes before
it, in what Aristotle called the "beginning," should be, directly
or indirectly, a cause of which it is the effect. Only under these
conditions will the plot be, as Aristotle said it should be, an
organic whole. Only in this way can it conform to the principle of
unity, which is the first principle of all artistic endeavor.

Bearing the principle of unity ever in his mind, Stevenson, in a
phrase omitted for the moment in one of the quotations from "A Humble
Remonstrance" set forth at the beginning of this chapter, advised
the fiction-writer to "avoid a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in
Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of the main
intrigue." It seems safe to state that a sub-plot is of use in a novel
only for the purpose of tying minor knots in the leading strands of
causation, and should be discarded unless it serves that purpose.
There is no reason, however, why a novel should not tell at once
several stories of equal importance, provided that these stories be
deftly interlinked, as in that masterpiece of plotting, "Our Mutual
Friend." In this novel, the chief expedient which Dickens has employed
to bind his different stories together is to make the same person
an actor in more than one of them, so that a particular event that
happens to him may be at the same time a factor in both one and the
oth