o class as negative those events whose immediate tendency
is to turn him aside from the straight and narrow path. And yet both
classes of events, positive and negative, make up really only a single
series; because the negative events are conquered one by one by the
preponderant power of the positive events, and contribute therefore
indirectly, through their failure, to the ultimate attainment of the
culmination.

When a straightway arrangement of positive events along a single
strand of causation is varied and emphasized in this way by the
admission of negative events, whose tendency is to thwart the progress
of the series, the structure may be made very suggestive of that
conflict of forces which we feel to be ever present in actual life.
This structure is exhibited, for example, in Hawthorne's little tale
of "David Swan." The point of the story is that nothing happens to
David; the interest of the story lies in the events that almost happen
to him. The young man falls asleep at noon-time under the shade of
a clump of maples which cluster around a spring beside the highroad.
Three people, or sets of people, observe him in his sleep. The first
would confer upon him Wealth, the second Love, the third Death, if he
should waken at the moment. But David Swan sleeps deeply; the people
pass on; and all that almost happened to him subsides forever to the
region of the might-have-been.

A simple series of this sort, wherein the events proceed, now
directly, now indirectly, along a single logical line, may be
succeeded by another simple series of the same sort, which in turn
may be succeeded by a third, and so on indefinitely. In this way is
constructed the type of story known as picaresque, because in Spain,
where the type was first developed, the hero was usually a _picaro_,
or rogue. The narrative expedient in such stories is merely to select
a hero capable of adventure, to fling him loose into the roaring and
tremendous world, and to let things happen to him one after another.
The most widely known example of the type is not a Spanish story, but
a French,--the "Gil Blas" of Alain Rene Le Sage. As soon as Gil Blas
arrives at the culmination of one series of adventures, the author
starts him on another. Each series is complete in itself and distinct
from all the rest; and the structure of the whole book may be likened,
in a homely figure, to a string of sausages. The relation between the
different sections of the story is no