r 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
other series of events. Through the skilful use of this expedient,
Dickens has contrived to give his novel unity of plot, in spite of the
diversity of its narrative elements. But on the other hand, in
"Middlemarch," George Eliot has told three stories instead of one. She
has failed to make her plot an organic whole by deftly interweaving
the three strands which she has spun. And therefore this monumental
novel, so great in other ways, is faulty in structure, because it
violates the principle of unity.

=Discursive and Compacted Narratives.=--According to the extent of
complication in the plot, novels may be grouped into two classes,--the
discursive and the compacted. Thackeray wrote novels of the former
type, Hawthorne of the latter. In "Vanity Fair" there are over half a
hundred characters; in "The Scarlet Letter" there are three, or
possibly four. The discursive novel gives a more extensive, and the
compacted novel a more intensive, view of life. English authors for
the most part have tended toward the discursive type, and Continental
authors toward the compacted. The latter type demands a finer and a
firmer art, the former a broader and more catholic outlook on the
world.

=Telling Much or Little of a Story.=--The distinction between the two
types depends chiefly upon how much or how little of his entire story
the author chooses to tell. In actual life, as was stated in a former
chapter, there are no very ends; and it may now be added that also
there are no absolute beginnings. Any event that happens is, in
Whitman's words, "an acme of things accomplished" and "an encloser of
things to be"; and in thinking back along its causes or forward along
its effects, we may continue the series until our thought loses itself
in an eternity. In any narrative, therefore, we are doomed to begin
and end in mid-career; and the question is merely how extended a
section of the entire imaginable and unimaginable series we shall
choose to represent to the reader. For instance, it would be a very
simple matter to trace the composition of Rossetti's "House of Life"
back along a causal series to the birth of a boy in Arezzo in 1304;
for it is hardly likely that Rossetti would have written a cycle of
love sonnets if many other poets, such as Shakespeare and Ronsard, had
not do