next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next. It would be
nearer the mark to say that the plot is good when "you want to make sure
what will happen next"! Good plots set you anxiously guessing what will
happen next.

When the reader is misled--not intentionally in order to get an effect,
but clumsily through amateurishness--then the construction is bad. This
calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really good work
another calamity does occur with far too much frequency--namely, the
tantalising of the reader at a critical point by a purposeless, wanton,
or negligent shifting of the interest from the major to the minor theme.
A sad example of this infantile trick is to be found in the thirty-first
chapter of _Rhoda_ _Fleming_, wherein, well knowing that the reader is
tingling for the interview between Roberts and Rhoda, the author, unable
to control his own capricious and monstrous fancy for Algernon, devotes
some sixteen pages to the young knave's vagaries with an illicit
thousand pounds. That the sixteen pages are excessively brilliant does
not a bit excuse the wilful unshapeliness of the book's design.

The Edwardian and Georgian out-and-out defenders of Victorian fiction
are wont to argue that though the event-plot in sundry great novels may
be loose and casual (that is to say, simply careless), the "idea-plot"
is usually close-knit, coherent, and logical. I have never yet been able
to comprehend how an idea-plot can exist independently of an event-plot
(any more than how spirit can be conceived apart from matter); but
assuming that an idea-plot can exist independently, and that the
mysterious thing is superior in form to its coarse fellow, the
event-plot (which I positively do not believe),--even then I still hold
that sloppiness in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave
iniquity. In this connection I have in mind, among English novels,