re 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 Mr. George Meredith has 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 unjudicious 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 pregnant with potentiality for certain sorts of deeds and
thereby foreordain a train of action,--either is a legitimate method
for planning out a narrative. That method is best for any author which
is most natural for him; he will succeed best working in his own way;
and that critic is not catholic who states that either the narrative
of action or the narrative of character is a better type of work than
the other. The truth of human life may be told equally well by those
who sense primarily its element of action and by those who sense
primarily its element of character; for both elements must finally
appear commingled in any story that is real.

The critic may, however, make a philosophical distinction between the
two methods, in order to lead to a better understanding of them both.
The writers who sense life primarily as action may be said to work
from the outside in; and those who sense it primarily as character
may be said to work from the inside out. The first method requires t