ations to develop it, or lastly--you must bear with me while I
try to make this clear'--(here he made a gesture with his hand as if
he were trying to shape something and give it outline and form)--'you
may take a certain atmosphere and get action and persons to express it
and realize it. I'll give you an example--"The Merry Men." There I
began with the feeling of one of those islands on the west coast of
Scotland, and I gradually developed the story to express the sentiment
with which the coast affected me.'"

In other words, starting with any one of the three elements--action,
actors, or setting--the writer of narrative may create events by
imagining the other two. Comparatively speaking, there have been very
few stories, like "The Merry Men," in which the author has started out
from a sense of setting; and nearly all of them have been written
recently. The feeling for setting as the initial element in narrative
hardly dates back further than the nineteenth century. We may
therefore best consider it in a later and more special chapter, and
devote our attention for the present to the two methods of creating
narrative that have been most often used--that in which the author has
started with the element of action, and that in which he has started
with the element of character.

Very few of the great masters of narrative have, like Honore de
Balzac, employed both one and the other method with equal success:
nearly all of them have shown an habitual mental predilection for the
one or for the other. The elder Dumas, for example, habitually devised
a scheme of action and then selected characters to fit into his plot;
and George Meredith habitually created characters and then devised the
elements of action necessary to exhibit and develop them. Readers,
like the novelists themselves, usually feel a predilection for one
method rather than the other; but surely each method is natural and
reasonable, and it would be injudicious for the critic to exalt either
of them at the expense of the other. There is plenty of material in
life to allure a mind of either habit. Certain things that are done
are in themselves so interesting that it matters comparatively little
who is doing them; and certain characters are in themselves so
interesting that it matters comparatively little what they do. To
conceive a potent train of action and thereby foreordain the nature of
such characters as will accomplish it, or to conceive characters
pregnan