ictitious character more
completely in a brief space of time than he could get to know him,
if the character were actual, in several years of continuous
acquaintanceship. We meet two sorts of characters in the pages of
the novelists,--characters which may be called static, and characters
which may be called dynamic. The first remain unchanged throughout the
course of the story: the second grow up 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 dynamic 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.

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 reade