The Birmingham age-herald., 1915-06-16
DOLLY DALRYMPLE IN SERIES OF STORIES TELLS OF SOME THINGS SHE SAW AND
 HEARD ON RECENT VISIT TO NEW YORK

North America. Its further progress is closely related to varied phases of the slavery question and its bearing upon the history of the United States. In the wake or the abolition movement comes the civ4f war. with its terrific battles and the toll or death and broken hearts; Sherman's march to the sea; the burning of Atlanta; tho downfall of Petersburg: Lees surren- der to Grant at Appomattox; the assas- sination of Abraham Lincoln; the ordeal of the reconstruction period; the Ku klux Klan's solution of the problem; the establishment of an everlasting peace in the end. These historic scenes are given in accurate detail.
 When I saw The Birth of a Naion'' was so overwhelmed by its immensity, so overcome by its spectacular effect so wrought up by it's vivideness and beauty that l said to myself:
 Tt makes the biggest achievements of the real stage look like mere child's play: IL reduces to littleness the hughest things the theatre has ever done or can ever hope to do."
 Of course, size has little to do with art.
 That's true we all admit a perfect stat uette like one of the exquisite figures of Tanagra is as great in a sense as the Vat lcan; a fiawless sonnet of Byrons need not yield It's place to great epic like Dante's 'Inferno;" 8 short story of de Maupassant's has nothing to fear from
 
 the "Suwanee River anything to be afraid of from Wagnerian troiogy
 And yet, the spectator after seeing The Birth of Nation" cannot help feeling that higher power has created the larger work, since the larger work in- cludes the problems of the smaller and countless others.
 ''The Birth of a Nation Is a choral symphony of light-light in all of it's mag ic; the sun flashing through A Tit of brown black lace. and giving immortal beauty to its pattern; quivering n a pair of eyes, or on snowdrift of bridal veil, on a moonlit brook or 8 moun- tain side.
 The leagues of film uncoil ard uncoi1 and pour fourth beauty of scene and face and expression. beauty of fabric and ate titude and motion
 Here Is the epic of a proud brave pso- pie beaten Into the dust but refusing to stay there.
 E The pictures shift from huge canvasses with hundreds and hundreds of the white capped ku Klux Klan charging and laundering and rearing and galloping on superb horses, with heart quickening glory of speed down road and lane. through flying waters, now the thrill of a charge or a plunging steed caught back on his launches in sudden arrest-now the terror of bestial mob, the hurrah of rescue, streets filled with panic and with carnival.
 A moment later we see Abraham Lin- coin breeding over his Emancipation Proclama tion," another moment and na Is yielding to mothers tears -poors wretched, broken, tired Mrs. Cameron begging for her boy-the Little Colonel;" later we are in & crowded theatre, watch. ing the assassin making his way to and from the awful deed.
 What could the stage give to rival this2
 
 Nothing-everything else. music, poetry, song, depreciate into mere nothingness in comparison to such marvellous DO 'tf 4yal of life and love and honor and patrirtism.
 Here we have hundreds of scenes in place of four or five; thousands of actors in place of a score armies in landscape
 instead of squads of supers jostlinS on a platform among canvas screens; here was the evolution of a people the living chron- icle of statesmen, civil war, a racial problem, rising gradually to a puzzle yet unsolved; here was a whole gallery of scenery of humanity, of still life, aud life in its widest career. Here were portraits of things, of furniture of streets, of homes, of wilderness; pictures of conven- tions. cabinets. senates. mobs, festivals, bathrooms, flower gardens. hypocrisy, jeal- ousy, pride, Humiliation, battlefeds, hos- pitals, 1irtations, anguish devotion, treachery, self-sacrifice and tyranny; here were the luxurious southern homes, the wind-swept cotton fields; here were the dancers, and the soldiers riding away to battle. the soldiers trudging home de- feated, cast down, with poverty ahead of them, and new and ghastly diff culties arising at every handl
 There is little left to tell after all this. To Ben Cameron and Elsie Stoneman, Phil Stoneman and Margaret Cameron, the sweethearts of the story, the sequel was beautiful double honeymoon by the sea-to the American people it was the outcome of four years of frar cdal strife; the nightmare of reconstruction, (Continued on Page Tens