er 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.

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.

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 done so before him;
and Shakespeare and Ronsard, as Mr. Sidney Lee has proved, were
literary legatees of Petrarch, the aforesaid native of Arezzo. And
yet, if we were to tell the story of how Rossetti's sonnets came to be
composed, it is doubtful i