Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura | Page 2

who played in that
theatre. Father was an orator of considerable ability, and I remember
him, for the amusement of my mother, reciting long speeches from
Kotzebue, Schiller, and Shakespeare. In his association with the theatre
he took me very early to plays, and I have always been an attendant;
consequently dialogue seemed the most natural literary vehicle. I found
later that this impression was justified when I discovered that the most
telling things in Homer and later Greek poets and philosophy were in
dialogue--that this was true of Confucius and of Christ.

"I began writing plays when I was about fourteen years of age. When I
was sixteen and seventeen, an amateur company that I organized played
in certain railway centres on the old North Missouri Railway, for the
benefit of local unions of the working men. In 1882, I made a
dramatization of Mrs. Burnett's 'Editha's Burglar'. With this as a
curtain-raiser, and a rather slap-stick farce called 'Combustion', I made
a tour of the country with a company I organized, and with which I ran
in debt several thousand dollars. In 1889, a four-act version of 'The
Burglar', arranged by me, was played in New York, and was successful,
and since that time my royalties have enabled me to give my attention
on the business side exclusively to play-writing.
"You ask why everybody who knows me is my friend? I might answer
laconically that it was because they did not know me thoroughly, but,
dismissing that defensive assumption of modesty, and making such
self-inquiry as I can, I think I have a capacity for companionship from
the fact that I was painfully poor as a kid. My consecutive schooling
stopped when I was ten. I gave up all attempt to attend school even
irregularly, when I was thirteen. Between that age and my
twenty-second year, I worked in various sections of the freight
departments of railways. Most of the mid-day meals of that time I took
from a tin-bucket. This meal was in the company of freight-handlers on
the platform, men recruited almost exclusively from the Irish at that
time in the middle West; or the meal was with the brakemen in the
switch shanties, these brakemen generally Americans rather near the
soil; or was with the engineers and firemen in their cabs, or on the
running-boards of boxcars with trainmen. Without knowing it, I
acquired the ability of getting the other fellow's point of view, and,
when I got old enough not to be overwrought by sympathy that was
inclined to be too partisan, I found an immense intellectual enjoyment
in watching the interplay between temperament and environment. I
think this answers your question. I have retained a gossip's ability to be
interested in most anybody else's affairs."
It is a strange combination--this democratic sympathy, with a later
developed French finesse of technique, so clearly felt in comparing one
of his "soil" plays, like "Alabama," with a more finished product, like
"As a Man Thinks." The word "robustness" has been applied to Thomas,
which recalls that when 10-cent melodrama was in flower on the

American stage, the writer of "Convict 999" was called the Augustus
Thomas of melodrama, and the inventor of "Jennie, the Sewing
Machine Girl" was regarded as the Clyde Fitch of melodrama. Thomas
is as careful in observing the small psychologies of men as Fitch ever
was of women. There is a neatness, a finish to his small scenes that hint
at a depth and largeness which he has never given rein to in any play he
has thus far written. The consequence is, when he aimed at mental
effect, the result was nearly always pompous, as when _Dr. Seelig_, in
"As a Man Thinks," tries to explain the psychological matrix of the
piece, and as when _Jack Brookfield_, in "The Witching Hour,"
explains the basis of telepathy. But when he aimed nowhere, yet gave
us living, breathing flashes of character, as dominate "The Other Girl"
and are typified in the small role of _Lew Ellinger_, in "The Witching
Hour," Thomas was happiest in his humour, most unaffected in his
inventions, most ingenious in his "tricks." The man on the street is his
special _metier_, and his skill in knitting bones together gives one the
impression of an organic whole, though, on closer examination, as in
"As a Man Thinks," the skeleton is made up of three or four unrelated
stories. Only skilful surgery on Thomas's part carries the play to
success, for we are nearly always irritated by the degree to which he
falls short of real meat in spite of all the beautiful architectonics. He
"thinks things," declares one critic,--"that anybody can see; and
sporadically he says things; but he does not say them connectedly and
as part of some definite dramatic theme."