or down, as the
case may be, through the influence of circumstances, of their own
wills, or of the wills of other people. The recurrent characters of
Mr. Kipling's early tales, such as Mrs. Hauksbee, Strickland,
Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, are static figures. Although they do
different things in different stories, their characters remain always
the same. But Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are kinetic figures; they
grow and change throughout the novel; they are, each in his own way,
bigger and wiser people when we leave them than they were when first
we met them. To show a character developing under stress or ripening
easily beneath beneficent influences is one of the greatest
possibilities of fiction. And to exhibit the gradual disintegration of
a character, as George Eliot does in the case of Tito Melema, is to
teach us more of the tragedy of life than we might learn in many years
of actual experience.

=Direct and Indirect Delineation.=--Only after the process of creation
is completed, and a character stands living in the mind of the
novelist, need he consider the various technical expedients which may
be employed to make the reader conscious of the character as a
personal presence. These technical expedients are many; but they may
all be grouped as phases of one or the other of two contrasted methods
of delineating character, which may be called, for convenience, direct
and indirect. According to the first method, traits of character are
conveyed directly to the reader through some sort of statement by the
writer of the story: according to the second method, characteristics
are conveyed indirectly to the reader through a necessary inference,
on his part, from the narrative itself. In employing the first, or
direct, method, the author (either in his own person or in that of
some character which he assumes) stands between the reader and the
character he is portraying, in the attitude, more or less frankly
confessed, of showman or expositor. In employing the second, or
indirect, method, the author seeks to obliterate himself as much as
possible from the reader's consciousness; and having brought the
reader face to face with the character he desires to portray, leaves
the reader to make his own acquaintance with the character. The
indirect method is of course more difficult, and, when successfully
employed, is more artistic, than the direct method. But seldom is
either used to the exclusion of the other; and it woul