to be done at the time and in the place in which he
loiters wasted. We grow aware of a great thing longing to be done,
when there is no one present who is capable of doing it. We behold
conditions of place and time entirely fitted for a certain sort of
happening; but nothing happens, because the necessary people are away.
"Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!" sang
Robert Browning; and then he dreamed upon an event which was waiting
to be born,--waiting for the imagined meeting and marriage of its
elements.

It is the function of the master of creative narrative to call events
into being. He does this by assembling and marrying the elements
without which events cannot occur. Granted the conception of a
character who is capable of doing certain things, he finds things of
that sort for the character to do; granted a sense of certain things
longing to be done, he finds people who will do them; or granted the
time and the place that seem expectant of a certain sort of happening,
he finds the agents proper to the setting. There is a conversation
of Stevenson's, covering this point, which has been often quoted. His
biographer, Mr. Graham Balfour, tells us: "Either on that day or about
that time I remember very distinctly his saying to me: 'There are, so
far as I know, three ways, and three ways only, of writing a story.
You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a
character and choose incidents and situations 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
therefo