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 word, so startlingly as Ibsen’s Nora; and we cannot but feel that the poet has compressed into a week an evolution which, in fact, would have demanded many months.

The complaint that a character preserves the same attitude throughout means (if it be justified) that it is not a human being at all, but a mere embodiment of two or three characteristics which are fully displayed within the first ten minutes, and then keep on repeating themselves, like a recurrent decimal.  Strong theatrical effects can be produced by this method, which is that of the comedy of types, or of “humors.”  But it is now generally, and rightly, held that a character should be primarily an individual, and only incidentally (if at all) capable of classification under this type or that.  It is a little surprising to find Sarcey, so recently as 1889, laying it down that “a character is a master faculty or passion, which absorbs all the rest....  To study and paint a character is, therefore, by placing a man in a certain number of situations, to show how this principal motive force in his nature annihilates or directs all those which, if he had been another man, would probably have come into action.”  This dogma of the “ruling passion” belongs rather to the eighteenth century than to the close of the nineteenth.

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We come now to the second of the questions above propounded, which I will state more definitely in this form:  Is “psychology” simply a more pedantic term for “character-drawing”?  Or can we establish a distinction between the two ideas?  I do not think that, as a matter of fact, any difference is generally and clearly recognized; but I suggest that it is possible to draw a distinction which might, if accepted, prove serviceable both to critics and to playwrights.