he
more objective, and the second the more subjective, consciousness
of life. Of the two, the objective consciousness of life is (at its
weakest) more elementary and (at its strongest) more elemental than
the subjective.

Stevenson, in his "Gossip on Romance," has eloquently voiced the
potency of an objective sense of action as the initial factor in the
development of a narrative. He is speaking of the spell cast over him
by certain books he read in boyhood. "For my part," he says, "I liked
a story to begin with an old wayside inn where, 'towards the close of
the year 17--,' several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing
bowls. A friend of mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, with
a ship beating to windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean
proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate.
This was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel,
and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I
affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite
would do, but the highwayman was my favorite dish. I can still hear
that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and the
coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings of John
Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words 'post-chaise,' the 'great north
road,' 'ostler,' and 'nag' still sound in my ears like poetry. One and
all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read story-books
in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some
quality of the brute incident."--For the writer who works from the
outside in, it is entirely possible to develop from "some quality of
the brute incident" a narrative that shall be not only stirring in
its propulsion of events but also profound in its significance of
elemental truth.

The method of working from the inside out--of using a subjective
sense of character as the initial factor in the development of a
narrative--is wonderfully exemplified in the work of Ivan Turgenieff;
and the method is very clearly explained in Mr. Henry James' intimate
essay on the great Russian master. Mr. James remarks: "The germ of a
story, with him, was never an affair of plot--that was the last thing
he thought of: it was the representation of certain persons. The
first form in which a tale appeared to him was as the figure of an
individual, or a combination of individuals, whom he wished to see in
action, being sure that such people m