Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856 to 1911: In Mizzoura written by Augustus Thomas
A >>
Augustus Thomas >> Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856 to 1911: In Mizzoura
IN MIZZOURA
_A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS_
[Illustration: AUGUSTUS THOMAS]
AUGUSTUS THOMAS
(Born, St. Louis, Mo., January 8, 1859)
It is not a new thing for a dramatic author to write prefaces to his
plays. We are fortunate in possessing a series of personal opinions in
this form that constitute a valuable asset in determining individual
attitude and technical purpose. Read Schiller's opening remarks to
"The Robbers," Victor Hugo's famous opinions affixed to "Cromwell" and
his equally enlightening comments introducing "Hernani," and you can
judge the value autobiographically and philosophically.
The American dramatist has not been given, as a general rule, to such
self-examination; he has contented himself with supplying the fashions
of the day in the theatre, and has left to the ubiquitous press-agent
the special prerogative of whetting public curiosity as to what manner
of man he is and as to the fabric from which his play has been cut.
There has been no effort, thus far, on the part of literary executors,
in the cases, for example, of Bronson Howard or James A. Herne, to
preserve the correspondence of these men, so much of which dealt with
the circumstances surrounding them while writing or the conditions
affecting them while rehearsing. These data would be invaluable in
preserving a perspective which the modern historian of the American
theatre so wofully lacks.
All the more significant, therefore, is the edition of Mr. Augustus
Thomas's works, now being issued by Messrs. Samuel French. Thus far
the "autobiographies" of six plays have been prepared by the dramatist
in a charming, reminiscent vein. The present Editor is privileged to
make use of one, describing the evolution of "In Mizzoura," and this
inclusion removes from him the necessity of commenting too lengthily
on that play, for fear of creating an anti-climax.
Read consecutively, the prefaces suggest Mr. Thomas's mental
equipment, his charm and distinction of personality, the variety of
his experiences which have given him a man's observation of people and
of things. The personalia are dropped in casually, here and there, not
so much for the purpose of specific biography, as to illustrate the
incentives which shaped his thought and enriched his invention as a
playwright. His purpose in writing these forewords is just a little
didactic; he addresses the novice who may be befuddled after reading
various "Techniques of the Drama," and who looks to the established
and successful dramatist for the secrets of his workshop. These
prefaces reveal Thomas as working more with chips than with whole
planks from a virgin forest. He confesses as much, when he talks of
"Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots." It was "salvage," he writes, "it was the
marketing of odds and ends and remnants, utterly useless for any other
purpose." Yet, with the technical dexterity, which is Mr. Thomas's
strongest point, he pieced a bright comedy picture together--a very
popular one, too. In the course of his remarks, he says, "When I had
the art department on the old St. Louis Republican--" "There is an
avenue of that name [Leffingwell] in St. Louis, near a hill where I
used to report railroad strikes." Similar enlightening facts dot the
preface to "In Mizzoura," suggesting his varied employment in the
express and railroad business. Thus, with personal odds and ends,
we can build a picture of Thomas before he started on his regular
employment as a playwright, in 1884, with "Editha's Burglar", in
conjunction with Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett.
There is an autobiographical comment published, written presumably at
the request of the late Hamilton Wright Mabie, which is not only worth
preserving as a matter of record, but as measuring a certain facility
in anecdote and felicity of manner which have always made Thomas a
welcome chairman of gatherings and a polished after-dinner speaker.
"After Farragut ran the New Orleans blockade," he states, "my
father took direction of the St. Charles Theatre, New Orleans,
then owned by Ben De Bar. When he returned to St. Louis, in
1865, I was in my seventh year, and my earliest recollections
are tinged with his stories of Matilda Herron, John Wilkes
Booth, and others 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."
Thomas's interesting prefaces suggest this limitation in him, whether
it be a psychic subject he is to handle or an historical period he is
to cover. His manner of cogitating a theme has always been in terms of
the theatre, and he is willing to curtail any part of his theme for
a "point." His explanation, therefore, of the growth of detail, while
lacking in the high seriousness of Poe's explanation how he conceived
"The Raven," has nevertheless the same mathematical precision about
it. In other words, Thomas plays the theatre as Steinitz played chess,
with certain recognized openings and certain stated values to the
characters. We doubt whether, if the truth were told, many changes
ever occur, once a Thomas scenario is planned. His whole game is to
capture as many of his audience as he can by strategy, to checkmate
them by any legitimate theatrical move, regardless of tenability of
subject, and in despite of truth. Hence, when he fitted up "Arizona"
in clothes to suit recent Mexican complications, and called his play
"Rio Grande," he found he had lost the early sincerity of "Alabama,"
and his raciness was swamped in an apparent sophistication which only
added to his artificial method of conceiving a plot.
He has, therefore, played the theatrical game with love for it, with
thorough understanding of it--and though political preferment in the
Democratic Party has been offered him many times, he has thus far not
deserted the theatre. As the years advance, he does not seem to lose
any of his dexterity; on the other hand, he does not show inclination
to be stirred in his plays by the social problems of the day.
When "The Witching Hour" showed a departure into realms of subtle
psychology, we thought Thomas, as a playwright, had passed into the
realm of wisdom; but his introduction to that play reveals the fact
that, once, he was press-agent for a thought-reader. So it was
the "showman" aspect of the subject which led him to read up on
auto-hypnosis. It was not so much conviction as picturesqueness which
prompted him to write, in 1890, the one-act psychic sketch which
afterwards became the longer play. His enthusiasm was of considerable
duration; it passed from one play to another, and among his "subtle"
pieces on the same theme were "The Harvest Moon" and "As a Man
Thinks."
Apart from these--the nearest approach of Thomas to the so-called
"intellectual" drama--and apart from the racy territorial pieces like
"Alabama," "In Mizzoura," "Arizona," and "Colorado," his plays came
from a desire to suit the eccentricities of "stars," like
Lawrence D'Orsey in "The Earl of Pawtucket" and "The Embassy
Ball"--blood-cousins in humour to _Dundreary_--or "On the Quiet" for
the dry unctuousness of William Collier. In these plays, his purpose
was as deep as a sheet of plate glass, as polished on the surface, and
as quick to reflect the rays of smiles.
What one may say of Augustus Thomas with truth is that by temperament
he is American; his dramas have a native atmosphere about them. I have
never read "The Capitol" or "The Hoosier Doctor," but it is easy to
imagine his treatment of such themes. All of his work bears the Thomas
technique. He was more successful than Fitch in dramatization; his
"Colonel Carter of Cartersville," from F. Hopkinson Smith's novel, and
his "Soldiers of Fortune," from Richard Harding Davis's story, were
adequate stage vehicles,--whereas Fitch failed in his handling of
Mrs. Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth" and Alfred Henry Lewis's
"Wolfville Stories." And the reason for Thomas's success is that he
is better equipped for mosaic work in characterization, than for large
sweeps of personality. Not one of his plays contains a dominant figure
worth remembering afterwards for its distinguishing marks. He has
never painted a full portrait; he has only taken snap-shots. His plays
have been written as houses are built. More than likely he approaches
a subject as he approached "Oliver Goldsmith," as "largely a scissors
and paste-pot undertaking." But over it, when finished, there is a
high polish which denotes guaranteed workmanship. That same care
for finish which marks his plays marks his work with the actors, at
rehearsal, who have been selected by him with the unerring eye of the
illustrator.
It is significant that Thomas began his career as page boy in the 41st
Congress; that, after his railroad experience, he studied law; and
that, after his subordinate work with the newspapers, he became editor
and proprietor of the Kansas City _Mirror_. Since the death of Bronson
Howard, he has been regarded as the Dean of playwrights, and once
held the presidency of the Society of American Dramatists. Professor
Brander Matthews, Mr. William Gillette, and he represent the theatre
in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
IN MIZZOURA
_A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS_
By AUGUSTUS THOMAS
REVISED 1916 BY AUGUSTUS THOMAS
PREFACE.
This preface is one of a number[1] trying to show, each for its
particular play, the manner of the play's conception, whether starting
from a theme, a character, or a situation; the difficulty of the start
and the larger problems of the story's development, together with the
ways considered and chosen to answer them. It has been thought that
such accounts might be of interest, and, in some instances, perhaps,
helpful to others beginning on the same kind of work.
In the spring of 1891, Mr. Nat Goodwin was one of the most popular and
successful, as well as one of the most skilful, of American actors.
He had played lively and slight farces almost exclusively; but, having
the ability for serious work as well, he was ambitious to try it. In a
comedy by Brander Matthews and George H. Jessop, called "A Gold Mine,"
he had given one or two dramatic scenes most convincingly; and one
sentimental soliloquy with a rose in exquisite tenderness. In person
he is under the average height[2]; and then, was slight, graceful, and
with a face capable of conveying the subtlest shades of feeling. The
forehead was ample; the eyes were large and blue, clear and steady.
The nose was mildly Roman; the hair was the colour of new hay. His
voice was rich and modulated. These points are reported because they
helped form the equipment of the "star," who wanted a serious play in
which he should be the hero. The order was without other conditions;
the play might be of any period and of any land.
My own ignorance fixed certain limitations. At that time I had
acquaintance with no other countries than the United States and
Canada. These I knew fairly well. I had travelled them with one-night
theatrical companies; and also in newspaper assignments; and over
restricted districts I had worked in the employment of a railroad
company. I didn't care to write from books; so my Goodwin hero was
to be perforce an American. It seemed best to make him an American of
1891. Other times and places were excluded and dismissed from mind.
Now, a blond hero five feet seven inches tall and weighing under one
hundred and fifty-pounds--a Roman nose, and a steady, steel blue gaze!
I stood the Goodwin photograph on my table and looked at it until
it talked to me. The slight physique couldn't explain the solid
confidence of that look except there was behind it a gun. We were
doing more man to man shooting in the country then than now; and my
Western friendships made me more tolerant of the gun than some others
were. Goodwin and a gun sent me searching mentally over the West from
Colorado to the Coast, and through all occupations from bandit to
fighting parson; and then my potential gallery, quite apart from
any conscious effort of my own, divided itself into two kinds of
gunpackers: the authorized and the others. I concluded that there
would be less trouble, less "lost motion"--that was a phrase learned,
and an idea applied in the old-fashioned composing-room--less lost
motion, in portraying a lawful gun toter than in justifying an
outlaw; and the Goodwin part was therefore to be either a soldier or
a sheriff. I have said that he was thin, graceful--and he was, but he
wasn't particularly erect. He was especially free from any suggestion
of "setting-up:" sheriff was the way of least resistance.
My hero was a sheriff. You see how that clears the atmosphere. When
you must, or may, write for a "star," it is a big start to have the
character agreeably and definitely chosen.
There must be love interest, of course.
A sheriff would presumably be a bit of the rough diamond; _contrast_
wherein "lieth love's delight" prompted a girl apparently of a finer
strain than himself; and _conflict_ necessitated a rival. The girl
should be delicate and educated, the _rival_ should be attractive but
unworthy; and to make him doubly opposed to Goodwin I decided to
have him an outlaw--someone whom it would be the sheriff's duty and
business--_business_ used in the stage sense--to arrest.
Four or five years before the Goodwin contract, I had been one of the
_Post-Dispatch_ reporters on the "Jim Cummings" express robbery.
That celebrated and picturesque case was of a man who presented to
an express messenger at the side door of his express car, just as the
train was pulling from the St. Louis station, a forged order to carry
the bearer, dead-head, to a certain distant point on the run. The
messenger helped the dead-head into his car, and chummed with him,
until about an hour later, when, as he was on his knees arranging
some of his cargo, he found a pistol muzzle against his cheek, and his
smiling visitor prepared to bind and gag him. Having done this, the
stranger packed one hundred and twenty thousand dollars into a valise;
and dropped off into the dark, when the train made its accustomed
stop at a water-tank. The whole enterprise was so gentle, that the
messenger was arrested and held as an accomplice, while the Pinkertons
looked for the man with the money.
The robber was a kind-hearted person; and, being really grieved over
the detention of an innocent man, wrote several exculpating letters
to the papers, enclosing rifled express envelopes to prove his
peripatetic identity. These letters were signed "Jim Cummings," a _nom
de guerre_ borrowed from an older and an abler offender of the Jesse
James vintage.
After he was arrested and in his cell in the St. Louis jail, "Jim
Cummings" and I became friends, as criminals and newspaper men
sometimes do, and as criminals and I always have done, everywhere,
most easily. The details of his arrangements, both before and after
his draft on the company, were minutely in my mind, and were so very
vital that, with the first need for a drama criminal, I took him.
Goodwin's rival should be Jim Cummings; a glorified and beautiful and
matinee Cummings, but substantially he.
This adoption rescued the girl and the sheriff from the hazy geography
of the mining camps, and fixed the trio in Missouri.
After Cummings had dropped from the express car, he had walked some
fifteen miles to the Missouri River, near St. Charles, and had then
gone north on a train through Pike County. I had more than once made
the same trip on freight trains; and I had a liking for the county
as the home district of Champ Clark, a politico-newspaper comrade of
several legislative sessions and conventions. Newspaper experience
in those days, before the "flimsy" and the "rewrite," emphasized the
value of going to the place in order to report the occurrence; and I
knew that, aside from these three characters and their official and
sentimental relationships, the rest of my people and my play were
waiting for me in Bowling Green.
In those days, Mrs. Thomas and I used to hold hands on our evening
promenades; but I think it was really our foolish New York clothes
that made the blacksmith smile. At any rate, we stopped at his door
and talked with him. He knew Champ Clark and Dave Ball--another
Missouri statesman--and had the keenest interest in the coming
convention for the legislative nomination. It was fine to hear him
pronounce the state name, _Mizzoura_, as it was originally spelt on
many territorial charts, and as we were permitted to call it in the
public schools until we reached the grades where imported culture
ruled. The blacksmith's helper, who was finishing a wagon shaft with a
draw knife, was younger and less intelligent, and preferred to talk
to Mrs. Thomas. It is distracting to listen at the same time to three
persons; but I learned that "You kin make anything that's made out
o' wood with a draw knife;" and over the bench was the frame for an
upholstered chair. A driver brought in a two-horse, side seated,
depot wagon on three wheels and a fence rail. The fourth wheel and its
broken tire were in the wagon; and the blacksmith said he'd weld the
tire at five-thirty the next morning.
We went without breakfast to see him do it. He was my heroine's father
by that time; a candidate for the legislature; and I was devising for
him a second comedy daughter, to play opposite to the boy with a draw
knife. That day I also found the drug-store window and the "lickerish"
boxes that Cummings should break through in his attempted escape; and
I recovered the niggers, the "dog fannell," the linen dusters, and the
paper collars which, in my recent prosperity, I'd forgotten. I also
nominated Goodwin for the legislature, which increased his importance,
and gave him something to sacrifice for the girl's father. But it was
all so poverty-stricken, as I glimpsed it through the blacksmith shop
and the little house I'd chosen for its consort. I yearned for some
money; not much, but enough to afford "a hired girl," and for some
means of bringing the money into the story. When we left Bowling
Green, I had given Goodwin a substantial reward for the robber's
capture; but he wouldn't accept it. That was a mere dramatist's
device; and my quiet sheriff was already above it; besides, he wasn't
sure that he'd hold the fellow. His wish to please the girl was
already debating the matter with his duty.
On the way back to St. Louis, the conductor, who took our tickets,
recognized me. Charlie Church had been a freight brake-man when I was
in the St. Louis yards. He was proud of his advancement to a passenger
conductorship--proud of his train--proud of the new Wabash road-bed
on the single track line. This road-bed was made of macadam-looking
metal, clean and red as the painted bricks in the local Dutch women's
gardens, and hard as flint. When we gave the right-of-way, and ran in
on a siding, Church brought us up a few pieces to the back platform;
and with one of them scratched my initials on the glass window.
"What was it, iron ore?--no, that mud that the river leaves when it
rises--'Gumbo' the people call it. Some fellow found by accident that
it became red flint when fired, and was making a fortune selling it to
the railroad." To burn it, he used the slack coal from the Jonesburg
mines nearby, which until then had also been waste. I put a handful of
the stuff in my pocket; and, after the conductor left us, I turned the
whole enterprise over to the Goodwin part. When the play ended, the
audience should feel sure that he and Kate need never want for a
dollar. I knew also where he had accidentally burnt his first sample,
and made his discovery; in the blacksmith shop.
But what accident brought the raw gumbo there? Perhaps the wheels of
the stage-coach; but that wasn't definitely Goodwin. The soft gumbo is
not unlike putty; it would make a fair cushion for a broken limb: but
I didn't want to halt my story with anybody crippled to that extent;
and then I remembered the yellow dog drinking from the blacksmith's
tub. I broke _his_ leg and had Goodwin carry him miles in the stage,
with his poor paw in a poultice of gumbo. It was a counter-pointing
touch to a sheriff with two guns; it gave him an effective entrance;
and it coupled in a continuous train, the sheriff, the bad man who
sneered at it, the blacksmith and his motherly wife who sympathized
and helped in a better dressing, the forge where a piece of the
discarded gumbo should fall amongst the coke, the helper who should
pump the bellows for another and verifying bake: and last, and best
of all, it gave me a "curtain" for a second act; when, perturbed and
adrift after being temporarily rejected by the girl, Goodwin should
turn in an undefined but natural sympathy to the crippled dog in his
box under the helper's bench.