e different sections of the story is
not 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.

=Definition of Plot.=--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 coexistence 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 even