The Stark County Democrat. [volume] (Canton, Ohio) 1833-1912, 1892-04-07
NYM CRENELES LETTER
"Colonei Carter of Cartersville"
a Delightful Stage Study.
ANOTHER GOOD SOUTHERN PLAY.
Augustus Thomas Has skillfuily Clothed
IT. Hopkinson Smiths Story in Scenery
and Grease Paint--''The Foresters," /" the
Circus and the Food Show.
Especial Correspoudence.l

Nircus anu tne fOOu snow
Especial Correspondence
NEW YORK, March 30.-"Colonel Carter
of Cartersville" is one Of those sketches Of
southern character that everybody has
heard of and knows in some degree. Every
state in the Union concentrates its local
peculiarities in individuals. Colonel Car
ter is as distinctively Virginian as Joshua
Whitcomb was distinctively New Hamp-
shire man. And both men are known in
story and song and caricature to the coun-
try. have heard stories of Kearnal Kear-
ter for the last twenty years. and here he is
at last in his delightful entirety.
Mr. +. Hopkinson Smith got him upon
paper from observation. He had no inten-
tiun of making play of him. But so vo-
racious is the stage for something new,
that every brochure and sketch that falls
from the press is caught up by the man
ager. Dramatic agents and job actors
carried this book on Broadway for months
trying to find somebody who would touch
II with dramatic wand and make a stage
Colonel Sellers of it.
1t fell to a clever man. Mr.. Augustus
Thomas knows the southern type; he is by
nature deft shaper Of material into the
atric cogency. He took the mere outlines
which the book furnished and padded them
into dramatic form.
The result is the play at Palmer's the
ater If indeed sketch of character idyl-
lically and humorously treated, without
situation or suspense, can be called play.
What the drama does is to place before
us n delightful combination of personal
qualities that cannot fail to interest us.
These qualities are the distinctive ones
seen only in the rural and isolated neigh
borhoods of the south, that overbearing
American egoism, that intense patriotism
and shabby antique chivalry so out of
keeping with the practical, matter Of act
age, and that patriarchal aristocracy Of
sentiment that seems to be the outcome Of
the vassalage that grew up in the south.
To these must be added an enthusiasm
that always goes off half cooked and an
impecuniosity that never interferes with
the widest fancies.
Such men in the south could never, any
more than a woman, weigh material forces.
They hurled themselves against the north
in the war with a magnificent arior, but
without any mathematics. They had q
sentiment, and they did not care to know
that numbers and resources were factors.
They fired the hearts with flame of rhet-
oric that had no equal in the teeming cities
of New England, but they had no ex-
chequer. These men reached Parnassus in
the person of John Randolph, and stood on
the peaks of fanaticism in the person of
Toombs. But they also in the old days of
the republic planted dauntless patriot
ism on our quarter decks and carried the
flag around the world with fighting in
stantaneousness that made it respected.
Let us concede all that the war has done
for the country in eliminating and solidi-
flying, and still there remains a sentimen-
tai pathos about the smoldering ruins of
its lost conditions. Minstrelsy went out
with slavery. The wild, sad strains of the
plantation crept over the world. The
southern darky was the father of our folk
songs, and the old patriarchal home was
the romantic vestige of sleepy and pleas
ant feudalism.
Colonel Carter comes back to US like
one of Tom Thorpe's sketches-now, alas
almost forgotten. 1t has the bHlmy tereben-
theme odor Of the southern pines. 1t takes
you out Of our acute conflict to drowsy,
ideal, far away conditions, where the old
mansion seems to suggest Dolly Madison
and Lafayette, and there is a smell of
wood fires clinging yet to the old walls, and
the mammies and pickaninnies furnish a
fitting shadow of mediaevalism. Some
balsamic breath Of vanished courtliness
in all this and a suggestion of Colonial
pride and simplicity and quaintness softly
blended.
Such is the atmosphere of Colonel Car
ter" and it is play of personal atmos-
phere, not of events. The thinnest kind of
q story meanders along like one of those
summer streams in the south, tepid and
sluggish, but it has banks Of semitropical
suggestiveness where the mocking bird
sings and the oriole flashes a flaming wing.
Having said all this, the fact remains
that Colonel Carter" is not play for the
populace. 1t is prerequisite that you take
some sentiment with you to the theater in
order to enjoy it. Your real popular play
expects you to bring nothing with you but
your optic nerve and your girl. 1t sup
plies everything-imagination, fancy, poe
try, spirituality, by means of restlessness
and paint pot and orchestra.
Mr.. DAILY is just now doing this with
Lord Tennyson's play Of "Tke Foresters." I"
His argument is something like this
''Do you doubt that Tennyson is great
poet-ask my scene painter; that The
Foresters' is the greatest drama of the
age has been proved by Sullivan's music.
The people come to see Mr.. Daly's produc-
stract poetry"
OF course there is ideality and sentiment
and beauty in "The Foresters." So there
is in great many other things that will not
adapt themselves to the theater. have
even found them in patent Office report,
but never tried to arrange them into acts.
/ neser saw the Sermon ON the Mount
carved in marble, and / don't think it
would be ei1icacious presented that way
Whatever else Lord Tennyson may be he
Is not poet who appeals to the democracy,
and somehow you can't keep the democ-
facy out OF the theater any more than you
can keep Mr.. DAILY out of Westminster
abbey If he goes on this way.
"Colonel Carter" is the only novelty in
town. Mr.. Mansfield is playing under q
bushel at the Garden theater. Whenever
this brilliant actor resorts to his repertory
You may know he is medtating a new
play. 'Merry Gotham, at the Lyceum, is
not very merry and does not exactly fit the
creed Of the house. It's like a western
Methodist in an eastern Episcopal pulpit
Dramatic gossip concentrates itself on the
forthcoming fair at the Madison Square
garden, where Mrs. Kendall and Miss Cay
van are to be on exhibition. Price, fifty
cents
Barnum's circus has possession of the
garden at this moment and keeps on sue
cessfully killing all public interest in the
circus by making quantity take the place
Of quality. 1t reminds me of the three
ringed Sunday journalism which nobody
can read without derrick
Mr.. Crane gives up the rather thin "For
Money" and on the 2Sth begins to do some.
thing for credit. He calls 1t "The Ameri-
can Minister"
/ ought TO mention the extraordinary
hoc -