A
THE COURIER.
f
k
A-
y
Y
h
x
A
wishes them success and some new
type. Realizing The Courier's need
of a new dress, the editor regrets the
more to see a new idea in old clothes
it is unhiblical. but there may be
reasons for it in Omaha as in Lincoln.
The editors &eem tc have ability.
The quality we all strive for and
which is so far away and by most of
us unattainable, vaguely known as
distinction, is not altogether lacking.
The cover is in rouge et noir. Site who
wrote Taderewski at Lincoln has surely
taken the course in visualization at
the university. "For three quarters
of an hour we were swallowed up in a
most fearful crowd, jut moving
ahead by inches. I had a squashy,
fat man behind me and a woman with
a terrible fur cape in front of me; my
mouth and nose were full of hair and
I couldn't get my hands up to relieve
the situation. Every once in a while
it would come over me that I was in
Lincoln having my life squeezed out
in the cause of Art, and that would
brace me for a few more mouthfuls of
fur.
At last the crowd parted and we
were fairly shot thro' the door and
landed high and dry in the lobby.
A few minutes past nine Taderewski
walked upon the stage. He has the
most remarkable, compelling person
ality I ever felt. He make me think
of Bagheera. Kipling's black panther.
His physique is line and be has a
courtly, graceful bearing; there is a
peculiar charm about his head, as
everybody knows.
The first part of the program was
marred by thh most irritating and
blasphemous noises. It was incon
ceivable how they were all perpetrat
ed. Poor Paderewski had no chance
at all. I could feel him becoming
more enraged at every interruption.
The sounds seemed to give him posi
tive physical pain. When the radi
ator began to thump, his cup of bit
terness was full. He relieved his feel
ings by a most vicious preliminary
bang and a glare of outraged feeling.
His pedaling is unique. I never saw
anything that approached it. His
feet are nearly as active as an organ
ist's. At times he strikes from the
thigh, lifting his whole leg. This is
particularly noticeable when he gets
into a part witli lots of dash and
swing. He makes the rythm in this
startling way.
The Stotsenburg Fund.
Previously reported 101.00
Comptroller Charles G. Dawes. . . 5.00
Mr. John Witter, late corporal Co.
G, First Nebraska Volunteers.. 5.00
Poverty.
Fair my estate at morn to see,
I had at eve the selfsame store ;
Yet fate that day had beggared me,
Since hope could I count mine no more.
Axlo Bates, in March Century.
The Same Combination.
"Winter and summer women's inter
ests are always the same," said Belhng
ham to Frisbio."
"Specify, please."
"In the winter she is interested in
beaux and boas, and in the summer her
interest centers in beaux and bowB."
Town Topics.
That Was the Secret.
Hewitt I don't see how you manage
to stand off your creditors bo well.
Jewett I have a dog that knows his
business. Town. Topics.
"Do you think doctors ought to help
an incurable patient to die?''
"If he can't die without medical
assistance, yes." Detroit Journal.
: THE passing show:
? VVILLACATHER J
toOOOOOOOOIIIOOOOOOOOOMOOOOOOOtO 0001
After their long absence tho Kendals
appeared here in a play, novel in plot
and refreshingly simple and wholesome
in sentiment. All the people in this
play are persons whom one could ask
to dine at one's house, yet they are not
stupid; none of the episodes of the play
are within the province of the police
courts, yet the play is not dull. On the
whole it is rather invigorating to see
respectability get in a few innings oc
casionally.' "I he Elder Miss Blossom''
is by no means a remarkable comedy,
though it has fallen into excellent
hands. The dialogue is not unusually
good, and the first act is certainly a
trifle slow. But one thing, the play un
blushingly possesses sentiment, and it
tells a quite pathetic story about people
who are ordinarily good, and ordinarily
attractive and makes it interesting. It is
its humanity, not its cleverness, that
saves "The'Elder Miss Blossom." The
story of the play concerns itself with a
noted explorer, who on the night before
his departure for the Cannibal islands
meets a pretty girl of seventeen at a
hall and falls head over heels in love
with hfT, after the crazy manner of ad
vanced bachelors. The chit's name is
"Sylvia Blossom," but the young lady
had borrowed her aunt's lace handker
chief for the ball, and the mouchoir
was marked "Dorothy." When the
enamored explorer, whom Mr. Kenda!
portrays with exquisite humor, started
for the man-eating isles, he wrote a
hasty proposal of marriage to the Miss
in short skirts who had shattered his
ascetic ideals in a dance or two. He
directs the missive to "Miss Dorothy
Blossom," and is accepted by the ma
ture aunt on his caption and he never
knows the difference, sailing for the
tropics engaged to one woman and be
lieving himself loved by her younger
brother's daughter.
On his return to England he finds
the elder Mies Blo38om waiting for him,
her wedding clothes ready, her home
full of wedding presents, the village
church decorated. The scene in which
the distracted man undeceives her is the
scene in which both Mr. and Mrs. Ken
dale do their best work. It is a cruel sort
of situation even in a play. The woman's
self-respect is so completely broken,
the loneliness and hunger of her heart,
the wealth of love that lay hidden in
this calm, thin, English spinster are
too pitifully laid bare. It is like an
Indian summer lured into roses and
second buddings and grossly betrayed
into winter. The woman's humiliation
and dejection at losing again and for
the last time that illusive love dream
that had always tied trom her, are pe
culially within the scope of Mrs. Ken
dal's delightful and discriminating art.
Always more refined than brilliant in
her work, she makes this cruel study
in heartache noble as well as pathetic.
When her lover, who has never loved
her, leaves her alone, the idiotic young
rector begins to practice on the wed
ding chimes. The theatricalness of the
incident may be overlooked for the
acting which accompanies it when Mrs.
Kendal rushes to the windows and
closes them and holds her hands over
her ears to shut out the hateful sound.
Incidentally, I should like to see Min
nie Maddern Fiske play "The Elder
Miss Blossom." The comparison would
give one food for thought.
Mr. Kendal has always been, in my
opinion, quite as excellent a player as
his wife, though less ambitious. His
comedy in the first scene with the
younger Miss Blossom was delicious.
The end of the play is an Indian
summer touch that the playwrights
may well be proud of. Tho explorer
marries off his infant cbargo to the
curate, and as for himself, he takes tho
elder Miss Blossom, for in the moment
of her grief and humiliation she threw
off her reserve, and ho saw the rich
hoart of her and tho greatness of what
sho had to give.
Miss Mary Johnston's "To Havo and
to Hold" has just boen completed in tho
Atlantic and issued in book form.
At last an historical novel worth hav
ing and holding. Since the days of
Hawthorne attempts to utilize Ameri
can history in fiction have, for the moat
part, miscarried. Historical novels we
have had in generous measuro, but they
have been histories without accuracy
and romances without romance. Re
cently Mr. Paul Leicester Ford has so
vulgarized history and bo caricatured
human nature that it takes some cour
age to set out upon the reading of a
novel that has anything to do with the
history of the colonies. One haB not
traveled very far with Miss Johnson,
however, before he discovers that he
has quite another sort of authorship to
consider, and a work which must be
taken seriously. Miss Johnston dis
plays again the qualities that stood out
so prominently in her former novel,
"The Prisoners of Hope;" an illumina
tive imagination and a deep vein of
sensitive romanticism. The historical
novel is the field for which she is pe
culiarly and eminently fitted. In no
other department of letters is a heated
imagination more necessary, and no
where is it more rare. In these deplor
able days when Knighthood is in
Flower to the tune of half a million
copies, and when novels of the same
literary fibre as "Molly Bawu" and "Red
as a Rose is She" are tricked out in
crinoline and powdered hair and odds-bodikins-whatever
those may be and
sent forth heralds of the revival of
Romance, it is a pleasant experience to
encounter such a novel as Miss John
ston's bearing the stamp of a superior
mentality and of an individuality strong
enough to do freshly and well what has
been done often and badly.
Because Miss Johnston does not sink
history into the slough of sentiment
ality I do not mean to say that she haB
written an historical commentary. If
she has "read up" she has the grace
not to show it, and she has spared us
her cross references.
The history of Colonial Virginia is
peculiarly rich in romantic suggestson.
The state was settled by gentlemen,
men of birth and education with a thiret
for adventure and, many of them, with
the wanderlust in their blood. Unlike
their New England neighbors they were
not reformers and had no mind to take
the color out of life by an ascetic morali
ty or to reduce existence into a grey uni
formity of exacting social codes. They
lived for this world and were not averse
to pleasure. They were of the element
which had made the picturesqueness
of English history under Elizabeth.
Some of them had left romantic pasts
behind them, and a romantic disposi
tion is like a bad reputation; a man may
leave a good deal of it wherever he goes,
but he always takes more of it with him.
To such a likely source Mies Johnston
has gone lor her material. For the per
sons of her drama she has selected a Cap
tain of tho Low Country wars, a ward
of James I who had fled the court to
escape a distasteful marriage and come
in disguise into the Virginia Wilder
ness, the king's favorite, "Lord Camel,"
as handsome and dissolute a villain as
heart could wish, John Rolfe, and a
giant of a play actor who had turned
preacher but who still sang Master
Shakspere's songs on sunny days in
summer To how much historical ac
curacy Miss Johnston may lay claim 1
cannot say. But certainly she has a
kind of spiritual verity, a faculty of
making other times and other condi
tions stand forth in their beautiful
perspective, of calling back forgotten
tragedies across tho years like tho
strains of distant music. Sho has tho
instinct of contrast, the fooling for
color, tho sense of values that goes to
make up tho truo romantic novelist.
What a stroko of art it is to bring "Lord
Ctrnol," with his Venetian goblots and
cloth of gold, his Italian physician and
courtiers ways and tho king's favor
like a visible nimbus about his hand
some head into this storn, dark Virginia
wilderness. There is something about
Miss Johnston's way of dealing with
these "old, unhappy, far off things"
that minds ino not a little of Charles
Kingsley and bidB mo turn to "West
ward Ho!" again. Her use of tho
physical features of Virginia is a source
of perpetual charm throughout tho
book. There is a high quality of im
agination about it that at times is al
most lyric. Miss Johnston'p Indians
are lees like those of the tobacconists
than any that I have previously on
countered in fiction. Indeed I can
think of no other novel since Cooper in
which the Glorious Red man has been
lifted much above the Old Sleuth series.
The heroine of the talo is worthy her
setting, picturesque enough to grace
any romance or turn the head of any
captain, though she seldom condesconds
to step out of ber canvas and one feels
her presence most when she is silent
and seen only through Captain Percy's
eyes. As for Mies Johnston's hero, I
suppose he is the sort of man that wo
men would have peopled tho world
with, though I havo a sad conviction
that Buch a one never fought and lived
and loved in the old Virginia colony,
and I think he acquits himself best and
is more of a man when ho is away from
bis lady and in the forest with"Diccon."
Miss Johnston has succeeded better
with the men whom she cherished less,
"Diccon" and the inimitable Mas -ter
Sparrow, preacher and play actor,
and even with that attractive villain,
"Lord Camel." In depying them some
of the virtues she has given them a
more than compensating humanity and
blood that we know tho color of. Cer
tainly Miss Johnston has struck a new
note in American fiction, remote and
plaintive and sweet, and from her voy
aginga into the past she has brought
a richer cargo than all the plate and
cloth of gold and Venice glass of my
Lord Camel's ship.
The Too Sure Presidential Faction.
Mr. William M. Reedy, editor of the
St. Louis Mirror, a democrat, and one
of the cleverest and most interesting
writers in this country, Bays of the pres
ent political situation:
"Tho republican party, or, at least the
greater pait of it, which may be known
as the presidential faction, is too sure
of the result of next November's elec
tion. As one who cannot consistently
support Mr. Bryan, I may say that the
friends of the president are in grave
danger of underestimating opposition.
With silver put out of the way by the
gold standard legislation, with no pros
pect of a silver majority in the senate
for many years, Mr. Bryan, paradoxical
though it seems, may be stronger this
year than four years ago. The disaf
fection of republican tariff reformers
with the Porto Rican bill is very great.
Resentment against the project of levy
ing tariff against our own territory is
general and bitter, especially as the
president surrendered his free trade
views as to the island, at the demand of
the protected industries. Ruling our
possessions outside and above and be
yond the constitution is something
which strikes all thinking persons as
genuine imperialism, and a ptactical re
pudiation, not only of the constitution