For the mass of readers it is enough if they are mused; and indeed all readers, no matter how critical their taste, would rather be pleased by a transgression of the law than wearied by prescription.  Delight condones offence.  The only question for the writer is, whether the offence is so trivial as to be submerged in the delight.  And he will do well to remember that the greater flexibility belonging to the novel by no means removes the novel from the laws which rule the drama.  The parts of a novel should have organic relations.  Push the licence to excess, and stitch together a volume of unrelated chapters,—­a patchwork of descriptions, dialogues, and incidents,—­no one will call that a novel; and the less the work has of this unorganised character the greater will be its value, not only in the eyes of critics, but in its effect on the emotions of the reader.

Simplicity of structure means organic unity, whether the organism be simple or complex; and hence in all times the emphasis which critics have laid upon Simplicity, though they have not unfrequently confounded it with narrowness of range.  In like manner, as we said just now, when treating of diction they have overlooked the fact that the simplest must be that which best expresses the thought.  Simplicity of diction is integrity of speech; that which admits of least equivocation, that which by the clearest verbal symbols most readily calls up in the reader’s mind the images and feelings which the writer wishes to call up.  Such diction may be concrete or abstract, familiar or technical; its simplicity is determined by the nature of the thought.  We shall often be simpler in using abstract and technical terms than in using concrete and familiar terms which by their very concreteness and familiarity call up images and feelings foreign to our immediate purpose.  If we desire the attention to fall upon some general idea we only blur its outlines by using words that call up particulars.  Thus, although it may be needful to give some definite direction to the reader’s thoughts by the suggestion of a particular fact, we must be careful not to arrest his attention on the fact itself, still less to divert it by calling up vivid images of facts unrelated to our present purpose.  For example, I wish to fix in the reader’s mind a conception of a lonely meditative man walking on the sea-shore, and I fall into the vicious style of our day which is lauded as word-painting, and write something like this :—­

“The fishermen mending their storm-beaten boats upon the shore would lay down the hammer to gaze after him as he passed abstractedly before their huts, his hair streaming in the salt breeze, his feet crushing the scattered seaweed, his eyes dreamily fixed upon the purple heights of the precipitous crags.”

Now it is obvious that the details here assembled are mostly foreign to my purpose, which has nothing whatever to do with fishermen, storms, boats, sea-weeds, or purple crags; and by calling up images of these I only divert the attention from my thought.  Whereas, if it had been my purpose to picture the scene itself, or the man’s delight in it, then the enumeration of details would give colour and distinctness to the picture.