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.
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