chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," George Eliot, the Brontës, and
Anthony Trollope.

The one other important rule in construction is that the plot should be
kept throughout within the same convention. All plots--even those of our
most sacred naturalistic contemporaries--are and must be a
conventionalisation of life. We imagine we have arrived at a convention
which is nearer to the truth of life than that of our forerunners.
Perhaps we have--but so little nearer that the difference is scarcely
appreciable! An aviator at midday may be nearer the sun than the
motorist, but regarded as a portion of the entire journey to the sun,
the aviator's progress upward can safely be ignored. No novelist has
yet, or ever will, come within a hundred million miles of life itself.
It is impossible for us to see how far we still are from life. The
defects of a new convention disclose themselves late in its career. The
notion that "naturalists" have at last lighted on a final formula which
ensures truth to life is ridiculous. "Naturalist" is merely an epithet
expressing self-satisfaction.

Similarly, the habit of deriding as "conventional" plots constructed in
an earlier convention, is ridiculous. Under this head Dickens in
particular has been assaulted; I have assaulted him myself. But within
their convention, the plots of Dickens are excellent, and show little
trace of amateurishness, and every sign of skilled accomplishment. And
Dickens did not blunder out of one convention into another, as certain
of ourselves undeniably do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been arraigned for
the conventionalism of his plots. And yet Hardy happens to be one of the
rare novelists who have evolved a new convention to suit their
idiosyncrasy. Hardy's idiosyncrasy is a deep conviction of the
whimsicality of the divine power, and again and again he has expressed