ust do something very special and
interesting. They stood before him definite, vivid, and he wished
to know, and to show, as much as possible of their nature. The first
thing was to make clear to himself what he did know, to begin with;
and to this end he wrote out a sort of biography of each of his
characters, and everything that they had done and that had happened
to them up to the opening of the story. He had their _dossier_, as
the French say, and as the police has of that of every conspicuous
criminal. With this material in his hand he was able to proceed; the
story all lay in the question, What shall I make them do? He always
made them do things that showed them completely; but, as he said, the
defect of his manner and the reproach that was made him was his want
of 'architecture'--in other words, of composition. The great thing,
of course, is to have architecture as well as precious material, as
Walter Scott had them, as Balzac had them. If one reads Turgenieff's
stories with the knowledge that they were composed--or rather that
they came into being--in this way, one can trace the process in
every line. Story, in the conventional sense of the word--a fable
constructed, like Wordsworth's phantom, 'to startle and waylay'--there
is as little as possible. The thing consists of the motions of a group
of selected creatures, which are not the result of a preconceived
action, but a consequence of the qualities of the actors."--And yet,
for the writer who, like Turgenieff, works from the inside out, it
is entirely possible to develop from "the qualities of the actors" a
train of action that shall be as stirring as it is significant.

The main principle of narrative to bear in mind is that action alone,
or character alone, is not its proper subject-matter. The purpose of
narrative is to represent events; and an event occurs only when both
character and action, with contributory setting, are assembled and
commingled. Indeed, in the greatest and most significant events, it
is impossible to decide whether the actor or the action has the upper
hand; it is impossible, in regarding such events, for the imagination
to conceive what is done and who is doing it as elements divorced.
A novelist who has started out with either element and has afterward
evoked the other may arrive by imagination at this final complete
sense of an event. The best narratives of action and of character are
indistinguishable, one from another, in their ult