t 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.
Those 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 the
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.

=The Narrative of Action.=--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 favourite
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 rea