[In the following excerpt, Howells praises Thomas for his skill as a dramatist, and particularly for his ability to construct plot and to render details authentically.]

If Mr. Thomas could have marked more distinctly his own sense of the fallacious sentimentality which actuates the hero of his Arizona, he would have saved me from much the same discomfort I suffered in seeing Mr. Herne's Sag Harbor. But, apparently, he could not find the moment to take that mistaken young man aside and say to him, in the hearing of the audience, “Now, go on if you must, and sacrifice your good name to save from public dishonor a woman who has dishonored herself by consenting to leave her husband for her lover. Be scorned by her husband as a thief; suffer yourself to be forced out of the army; break the hearts of your friends who see in you the disgrace you will not explain; put to cruel and senseless proof the faith of the good girl who loves you; do all this, if you will, because you are a young, romantic ass; but don't expect me to back you. Any one else would see that this woman who has allowed her heart to be turned from her husband because she finds army-post life dull and has no amusement but flirting, is a fool and worse, and not worth saving from the shame she has consented to at the cost of any shame to others; she is spoiled and lost already, for it is not the adultery, but the adulterous heart that counts in these things. Instead of ‘saving’ her, by throwing dust in her husband's eyes—for that is what it comes to—do the straight, honest, manly thing. Tell the truth; say that you have stopped her from eloping, and that you took from her lover the jewels found on you with a purpose of safeguarding them, and so make me a situation worthy of my skill. Don't load me up with another stage hero, when I am looking for a real hero; give me a chance, and I will make your reputation.”

Probably the young man would have denied any such appeal, but Mr. Thomas would at least have washed his hands of him, if he had made the audience understand that he had no sympathy with his self-sacrifice. It seems not so central, so pivotal, so structural (or destructural), somehow, as the self-sacrifice of the heroine in Sag Harbor, though I should be puzzled to say why it does not seem so. It may be because it is postulated of that military life which is the negation of the ideals of the civil life. What is certain is that the situation gains in possibility (not to go so far as to say probability) by being imagined of army people, and after a good deal of war drama one still finds a refreshing novelty in Mr. Thomas's pictures of army-post life in Arizona. The sense of being in safe hands with regard to the lesser as well as larger facts enhances the comfort of the spectator, and one thrills in the exciting effects with the conviction that one's thrills are fully authorized. The dramatist has mastered his material so thoroughly that one has a pleasure in the details of his action, such as one feels in the authenticities of, say, The Gay Lord Quex. In both plays the same sort of exhaustive and scrupulous æsthetic conscience has been at work, and the same sort of keen and alert intelligence. The result is a restful evenness in the composition which the nerves can feel better than the words can say. In the Arizona one had not a moment's fear that the dramatist did not know the road he had taken, or that the passengers would have to get out anywhere and walk.

The American atmosphere in such dramas as we have produced is of the thin clearness of the atmosphere which wraps our portion of the planet; and in Arizona it lacks even such mellowness as softens the outlines of personality in Sag Harbor and other creations of the home-keeping invention of our playwrights. In its intense distinctness the local color has a peculiar charm; the picturesqueness of the life is extraordinarily vivid, and there is no shadow of uncertainty in the action; it is sharp and rapid, as if it were the nervous response of human nature keyed to sympathy with the moistureless air of the region, and unclogged by the vapors of misgiving that burden it in other climes. In the whole entourage there is the fascination of something old, something Oriental, as if the far West had got beyond itself in the farthest East. Whenever we part company with the army people, and find ourselves amidst the mixed population of the Arizona ranch where the scene mostly passes, it is with a sort of dream-like bewilderment in the encounter of such types as the old, over-drinking, raucous, bragging, joking rancher and his wife, who bully each other and threaten and then give way, and are really always good friends in spite of themselves. The plot is closely wrought, and vigorously operated, with its sort of threefold movement in the several affairs of the Colonel and his fool wife, of the hero who sacrifices himself for her and is in love with her sister, and of the young Mexican who sees no reason against marrying a girl in the fact that her trust has been abused by another, and who resents the obtrusion of the fact upon his knowledge as a sort of disgusting impertinence. The weak point in the piece is the hero's self-sacrifice, and that seems rather his fault than the author's.