Arts and Letters

Augustus Thomas was born in 1857 of a fine St. Louis family of moderate means, and early became a breadwinner for the family. As a page in the state legislature of Missouri and later in the House of Representatives at Washington he earned ninety dollars per month, all of which went to help out the folks back home. Passing from this to newspaper work, he had small opportunity for an academic education. He got his learning as he went along the road.

In the newspaper office he began to write plays, and from writing plays he naturally passed to the acting of them. The earlier years of his career were alternately spent in acting in other men's pieces and in struggles to produce his own. His first success came with Alabama, in 1891, a success which he confirmed by another local color piece called In Mizzoura.

Nothing like these plays had been done of the South West, although New England had produced Way Down East and Shore Acres. He continued in this vein by writing Arizona and Colorado. His distinction lies in work of this character although later in his career he won almost equal praise for two plays with psychical content, The Witching Hour and As a Man Thinks.

In his autobiography he tells us definitely that these two plays were based upon his experiences as a young advance man for Bishop, the mind-reader. He once said to me, "Bishop started me thinking of the hidden world." He also points out in The Print of My Remembrance, that his experiences as an actor on the road and as railroad clerk and newspaper reporter furnished him with a fund of dramatic material upon which he drew throughout his long life as a dramatist.

He wrote and saw the production of more than sixty plays, and these productions put him at the top of the American playwrights of his day. Whatever else critics may say of them, they were built of native material. They were of the new world, his world. Nearly all of them were wholly his own creation, but he dramatized several books—as in Colonel Carter. Five or six of them are of enduring quality, landmarks in the history of the American drama. New Blood and The Copperhead are serious studies of sociological material. Humorous character comedy, however, was his strong point.

Although following his career with keen interest I did not come to know him till in 1898 when Charles Dudley Warner, president of the newly formed National Institute of Arts and Letters. appointed him with me on a committee, with instructions to draft a Constitution and by-laws for the organization. Our work on the committee led to a warm friendship which lasted throughout his life and led to many meetings of delight and profit to me.

He was at this time the conquering prince of the theater, handsome, witty, polished, and dangerously suave. He was in high demand as an after-dinner orator, and his skill as a presiding officer was unexcelled. He knew everybody and met everybody with smiling, imperturbable humor. He carried himself with grace and natural dignity and his richly modulated voice was a delight to the ear. His spoken English was singularly free from any provincial stridency and his use of words was seldom wrong. His knowledge of French and German, his residence in France and England, and especially his association with the great actors of his day, had made him a shining exemplar of what American speech should be.

All this is the more praiseworthy when it is held in mind that he had at most no schooling of the customary sort, and that his education in writing and speech had been acquired along his busy and variant way. It was because of this noble blend of English and American "accent" that I asked him to serve with me on the committee which the American Academy had authorized and empowered to award a medal for good diction on the radio.

His mind was catholic in its interests and generous in its outgiving. I never knew a more alert intelligence. He had seen so much, read so much, and done so much of vital interest that conversation with him was a delight. He was witty but never at the expense of pain in others. His humor was kindly. In our later years we spent many hours discussing literary problems and feeling our way along psychical paths—always to my advantage. I never talked with one more sympathetic in understanding or swifter in seizing upon my half uttered thought.

He spoke better than he wrote—or so it seemed to me. He would have made an admirable diplomat. He should have been sent to France or England where his polished oratory, his wide experience, and his handsome face and figure would have presented to the old world the most admirable type of self-made man, original dramatist, and tactful orator. He was representative of the best self-cultured new world intellectual aristocrats.