’Tis joy to him that toils, when toil is o’er,
To find home waiting, full of happy things.
Peasant. If so it please thee, go thy way.[43]
Unquestionably, however, the best method of characterization is by action. In the first draft of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Krogstad uses with his employer Helmar, because he is an old school fellow, the familiar “tu.” This under the circumstance illustrates his tactlessness better than any amount of description. When Helmar is irritated by this familiarity, his petty vanity is perfectly illustrated. Any one who recalls the last scene of Louis XI as played by the late Sir Henry Irving remembers vividly the restless, greedily moving fingers of the praying King. They told far more than words. The way in which Mrs. Lindon, throughout the opening scene of Clyde Fitch’s The Truth,[44] touches any small article she finds in her way perfectly indicates her fluttering nervousness.
At Mrs. Warder’s.... A smart, good-looking man-servant, Jenks, shows in Mrs. Lindon and Laura Fraser. The former is a handsome, nervous, overstrung woman of about thirty-four, very fashionably dressed; Miss Fraser, on the contrary, a matter-of-fact, rather commonplace type of good humor—wholesomeness united to a kind of sense of humor....
Mrs. Lindon nervously picks up check-book from the writing-table, looks at it but not in it, and puts it down....
She opens the cigar box on the writing-table behind her and then bangs it shut....
She picks up stamp box and bangs it down.
Rises and goes to mantel, looking at the fly-leaves of two books on a table which she passes.