Some of these habits are innate and temperamental--habits formed, no
doubt, by far-off ancestors.[1] But this distinction does not here
concern us. Temperamental bias is a habit, like another, only somewhat
older, and, therefore, harder to deflect or eradicate. What do we imply,
then, when we complain that, in a given character, no development has
taken place? We imply that he ought, within the limits of the play, to
have altered the mental habits underlying his speech and actions. But is
this a reasonable demand? Is it consistent with the usual and desirable
time-limits of drama? In the long process of a novel, there may be time
for the gradual alteration of habits: in the drama, which normally
consists of a single crisis, any real change of character would have to
be of a catastrophic nature, in which experience does not encourage us
to put much faith. It was, indeed--as Dryden pointed out in a passage
quoted above[2]--one of the foibles of our easy-going ancestors to treat
character as practically reversible when the time approached for ringing
down the curtain. The same convention survives to this day in certain
forms of drama. Even Ibsen, in his earlier work, had not shaken it off;
witness the sudden ennoblement of Bernick in _Pillars of Society_. But
it can scarcely be that sort of "development" which the critics consider
indispensable. What is it, then, that they have in mind?

By "development" of character, I think they mean, not change, but rather
unveiling, disclosure. They hold, not unreasonably, that a dramatic
crisis ought to disclose latent qualities in the persons chiefly
concerned in it, and involve, not, indeed, a change, but, as it were, an
exhaustive manifestation of character. The interest of the highest order
of drama should consist in the reaction of character to a series of
crucial experiences. We should, at the end of a play, know more of the
protagonist's character than he himself, or his most intimate friend,
could know at the beginning; for the action should have been such as to
put it to some novel and searching test. The word "development" might be
very aptly used in the photographic sense. A drama ought to bring out
character as the photographer's chemicals "bring out" the forms latent
in the negative. But this is quite a different thing from development in
the sense of growth or radical change. In all modern drama, there is
perhaps no character who "develops," in the ordinary sense of the w