BOOK V

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER XXII

CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY

For the invention and ordering of incident it is possible, if not to lay down rules, at any rate to make plausible recommendations; but the power to observe, to penetrate, and to reproduce character can neither be acquired nor regulated by theoretical recommendations.  Indirectly, of course, all the technical discussions of the previous chapters tend, or ought to tend, towards the effective presentment of character; for construction, in drama of any intellectual quality, has no other end.  But specific directions for character-drawing would be like rules for becoming six feet high.  Either you have it in you, or you have it not.

Under the heading of character, however, two points arise which may be worth a brief discussion:  first, ought we always to aim at development in character? second, what do we, or ought we to, mean by “psychology”?

It is a frequent critical complaint that in such-and-such a character there is “no development”:  that it remains the same throughout a play; or (so the reproach is sometimes worded) that it is not a character but an invariable attitude.  A little examination will show us, I think, that, though the critic may in these cases be pointing to a real fault, he does not express himself quite accurately.

What is character?  For the practical purposes of the dramatist, it may be defined as a complex of intellectual, emotional, and nervous habits.  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?