Wheeler saw the New York debut performance of The Gilded Age, and published a lengthy criticism of it in his New York World “Amusements” column on 17 September 1874. Clemens expressed his pleasure that Wheeler had done “that thing up so thoroughly & handsomely” in a telegram of 18 September 1874 to Jerome B. Stillsonclick to open link.

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The Park Theatre, closed to anything like reputable theatric endeavor since its rather unfortunate Fechter season,1explanatory note was thrown open to the public last night, and the assemblage there of a brilliant audience of literary people indicated unmistakably the interest which the intelligent public felt in the new venture. Mr. Samuel L. Clemens (“Mark Twain”) is too well known as a successful author and humorist not to create a flutter of this kind by his sudden entree upon the boards as a playwright, and aside from the promise of his previous work it must be remembered that the New York public has for a long time been looking vaguely but anxiously for a native dramatist to arise and assert his sovereignty over the hucksters who have possession of the stage. There is no doubt that almost every sin would be forgiven that playwright who shall furnish the least evidence of genuine creative ability. And there was every reason in the world to expect this kind of ability from “Mark Twain.” At all events the intelligent expectancy and curiosity of the audience at the Park Theatre last evening were altogether unusual and quite noticeable.

The play of “Colonel Sellers,” or, as it is called by the management, “The Gilded Age,” is a drama in five acts with twelve personages involved in the story. The plot deals with a family, the Hawkinses, who have emigrated from East Tennessee to Missouri in obedience to the advice of Colonel Sellers, a visionary, speculative, and grandiloquent Southern gentleman with a very large heart, an active brain, and a sanguine disposition, but without any money or any practical executive ability. The play opens with a scene showing the Hawkins family in the new country discussing their prospects and plans. Si Hawkins, the head of this family, has two children, Lafayette and Emily, and an adopted son and daughter, Clay and Laura. The other members of his family are Mrs. Si Hawkins and an old negro servant, Uncle Dan’l. The act deals entirely with the domestic affairs of this family. Colonel Sellers has invested a large portion of Si Hawkins’s money in a new steamboat which is expected up the river momentarily, and Laura has a lover in the person of Colonel Selby, an ex-rebel officer. The act closes with the approach of the steamer, which is seen to be racing with another boat. For a few moments the interest of the party is entirely engrossed in the speed of the vessels, and Colonel Sellers becomes inordinately enthusiastic about his investment. Suddenly the favorite explodes, and the curtain falls upon a scene of consternation.

Nothing, however, can discourage the hopeful and enthusiastic Sellers. He sees a fortune in mules, in hogs, in land improvements, and devises magnificent schemes involving millions. Hawkins, involved and almost destitute, struggles on hopefully. And Laura is discovered to be the wife of Colonel Selby, secretly married. The arrival of her brother Clay exposes Selby’s real character. He already has a wife in New Orleans. The discovery of this secret and its attendant misery end the second act.

We then have an episodical scene in Colonel Sellers’s house, a scene of infinite character and humor. The place is shabbily furnished, indicating the proprietor’s poverty. The rickety stove has a lighted candle in it, doing illusive service for a fire, and the broken door is propped up with a poker. In the midst of this distress Colonel Sellers preserves his grandiose hopefulness and his show of pecuniary ability. His hospitality is boundless, though there is nothing in the house to eat. His plans are princely, but he is without a cent. Clay Hawkins has called upon him in the interest of the family, and his practical, doubting disposition comes out in strong contrast with the effusive and visionary character of his host. He knocks down the poker and exposes the candle. But the Colonel is equal to the emergency, and explains the circumstance away with easy extravagance. He even invites Clay to dinner, and Mrs. Sellers announces that there is nothing in the house but raw turnips and water. The gracious ingenuity of Sellers at this discovery is inimitable.

“Oh, never mind,” he exclaims, “raw turnips and water will do, if it’s a good article of water. But provide the best. Provide the best the market affords, Polly. It’s a close place, but cheer up, girl, cheer up. Providence will tide us over the scrape somehow. Don’t let us weaken on Providence, sweetheart.

“We always dine simply on Thursdays,” he says to Clay as they sit down. “But it’s a healthy diet. Let me tell you, Clay, things are working pretty bright now. The air is full of money. I wouldn’t take three fortunes for one little operation I’ve got on hand now.

“Anything from the casters? No? You’re right, perfectly right. Some people prefer mustard with turnips, but I take them plain. None of your embellishments for Mulberry Sellers. High living kills our best men. Take some more water. There’s plenty of it; help yourself. How does the fruit strike you?”

The strenuously affable efforts of the Colonel to cover his wretchedness with hospitable words, and the desire of Clay to avoid offending his sensibilities, make this scene intensely ludicrous. Following we have an angry interview between Laura and Colonel Selby, in which the woman’s passion for the man, her anguish at his deception, and her shame and indignation are sketched rather than painted. The scene then shifts to the national capital. We are given to understand that Colonel Sellers has projected a vast scheme by which the Government is to purchase a large tract of unavailable land in East Tennessee belonging to the Hawkinses, and there found a national university and farm for the emancipated negroes. To hasten the appropriation all the family have gone to Washington. Laura has become the belle of the town. Senators and Cabinet officers dangle in her train. She is using all her influence to work the appropriation. But her passion for Colonel Selby interferes with all her plans. In an angry altercation with him she discovers his coldness, and in a fit of rage and despair draws a pistol and shoots him. The fifth act furnishes a trial scene, in which Laura is the prisoner. There is nothing distinctly novel in the scene except the character of Colonel Sellers. His actions, his testimony, his sincere emotion, and his whimsical earnestness and humor are evenly preserved and stand out vividly in an otherwise barren finale.

It is not possible to admire this plot. It bears all the evidences of having been fabricated round Colonel Sellers and worked out laboriously under exigent stage demands. What it lacks is the fluent, coherent, and natural growth of interest which alone would give it symmetry and strength. It abounds with humor of the peculiar flavor that we detect in all of Mark Twain’s writings. Its characterization is strong and its narration is made in simple and effective language, but it is essentially undramatic as a whole. There is no adequate motive until Laura kills Colonel Selby, and that event does not take place until two-thirds of the play has been presented. Previous to that the interest is held mainly, if not altogether, by the play of character and not by the progress of events, which is an aesthetic defect. For after all a play must be a story in motion, and the laws of the drama, no less than the desires of the spectators, demand that the motion shall be instantaneous and continuous. To understand how absolutely the personages dominated the dramatist to the exclusion of circumstances, and how much more anxious he was to portray his favorite characters than to weave events into interesting contrast, we have only to remark that the first three acts show us nothing but the uneventful distress which is the natural consequence of Colonel Sellers’s monomania, and the last act leaves everybody in the same condition that he was in at the opening of the play—the passive victim of the one weak-minded enthusiast. The one exception is Laura, who may be called the heroine of the play, and she is left under sentence of death.

We do not think that it is from any lack of creative power that the play is thus amenable to criticism. It is rather the want of constructive art in the writer. Its incidents are plentiful. They are also fresh enough, made so unquestionably by the playwright’s skill in portraying in dialogue the idiosyncracies of his people, but they do not bear a close dramatic relation to each other. We see and feel that it is good work straggling and floundering after effects, whereas the effects would grow sequentially and easily out of a good plot. The one remaining impression when the curtain falls has been made by Colonel Sellers. We do not connect him with the circumstances that have been narrated; we remember only with a keen sense of delight his personal peculiarities, his sincerity of self-deceit, his gentlemanly poverty, his egregious folly, wrapped about by his amiability and homely courtliness. Even in the court scene that was the gleam which irradiated it, he is called upon to testify as to the character of Laura, and his kindly desire to make it appear that she was insane takes the shape of irresistible humor.

“What seemed to be the peculiar form of her mania?” asks the lawyer. “Anxiety to find her father,” replies the Colonel; “her other father, the author of her being. Well, sir, she’d never seen him. There were some old letters that described him as being a man with one eye and a lame leg. The sight of a stranger bearing these peculiar trade-marks, so to speak, always set her wild. She never could look at a one-eyed man without emotion. She never could contemplate a game-leg without whirlwinds of joy. Let her flush a stranger with one eye and a gameleg, and she’d hound that cripple to the ends of the earth. A sound man was a sorrow to her; but, sir, to her gentle spirit there was a charm, almost a green patch and a patent leg, that——.”

Of course this is the uncontrollable humor of the sketch-writer, with a keen eye for the eccentricities and weaknesses of his fellows. As it is all centred upon Colonel Sellers, that character must be accepted as a distinct creation. Of the representation it is possible to speak with praise. The impersonation of Colonel Sellers by Mr. John T. Raymond must, we think, be accepted as a contribution at once valuable and unique to the American stage. Its humor was recognized instantly, and the audience was kept in a continual state of boisterous merriment during his presence in the scenes. To Mr. Raymond’s credit it should be stated that, with all the temptations such a part offers for burlesque, he not once departed from the duty of clear, consistent, and rational portrayal of an eccentric but possible personage. His top-loftical manner of advocating his schemes was marked by a sincerity that gave it half its value, and his effusive generosity and quaint volubility met with the hearty recognition which only a creation commands. Seldom have we witnessed such continuous and hearty enjoyment in a theatre as this one part caused. Naturally the other parts fell off by contrast. The playwright had too plainly expended himself upon it. Mr. Raymond has not a very strong company to assist him, but in the part of Laura Hawkins Miss Gertrude Kellogg succeeded in rendering very efficient support. Her acting was intelligent, forcible, and finished. Mrs. Hind as Mrs. Hawkins, Mr. Welsh Edwards, who made an excellent district-attorney, and Mr. John Burnett, who played Uncle Daniel, were the only noticeable parts of the cast.2explanatory note The performance owed its success mainly to Mr. Raymond. The piece was very prettily set, and its ensemble and general business were remarkably complete and smooth for a first night. At the end of the fourth act, after Mr. Raymond had been called to the front, Mr. Clemens himself appeared in response to a call and spoke as follows:

Howells attended a performance of the play at the Globe Theatre in Boston on 1 May 1875. On 10 May, he sent Clemens the proofsheets of his review, scheduled for the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly (Howells 1875; see 7 May 75click to open link and 12 May 75click to open link, both to Howells). The words underlined in the proofs in pencil are shown with underlines below. In addition, there are three vertical pencil lines in the margin next to the words “that though . . . showing it.” at 654.21–28, in the penultimate paragraph.

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Whoever failed to see Mr. Raymond in Mr. Clemens’s (Mark Twain’s) play of The Gilded Age, during the recent season at the Globe Theatre, missed a great pleasure. In this drama a player last year almost unknown takes rank at once with the masters of his art, and adds another to the group of realistic actors whom we shall be slow to believe less fine than the finest who have charmed the theatre-going world. One must hereafter name Mr. John T. Raymond in Colonel Sellers with Sothern in Lord Dundreary, with Jefferson in Rip Van Winkle, with Salvini in La Morte Civile,1explanatory note with Fechter in Hamlet. Like them he does not merely represent; he becomes, he impersonates, the character he plays. The effect is instant; he is almost never Raymond from the moment he steps upon the stage till he leaves it. His assumption of Sellers is so perfect that at some regrettable points where Colonel Sellers pushes matters a little beyond (as where he comments to Laura Hawkins on the beauty of the speech her attorney is making in her defense), we found ourselves wishing that Sellers—not Mr. Raymond—would not overdo it in that way.

The readers of Messrs. Clemens’s and Warner’s novel of The Gilded Age will easily recall Colonel Sellers, who in the drama is the same character as in the book. The action of the piece has scarcely anything to do with him, and yet, as it happens, it is his constant opportunity to make all his qualities felt. It is scarcely more than a sketch, a framework almost as naked as that which the Italians used to clothe on with their commedia d’arte; and it is as unlike good literature as many other excellent acting-plays. Yet any one who should judge it from the literary standpoint, and not with an artistic sense greater and more than literary, would misjudge it. The play is true, in its broad way, to American conditions, and is a fair and just satire upon our generally recognized social and political corruptions. The story is simply that of the good old Tennessee farmer and his wife who come to Missouri at the invitation of Colonel Sellers, and through his speculative friendship lose everything but the farm on the barren knobs in East Tennessee, which they had not sold. Their adopted daughter, a beautiful and ambitious girl, is deceived into marriage with an ex-Confederate officer who has another wife at New Orleans, and they are in the lowest misery when Colonel Sellers (an ex-rebel, who “goes in for the Old Flag—and an appropriation”) conceives his great idea that Congress shall buy the Hawkins farm in East Tennessee, and found a freedman’s university on it. Laura’s beauty is believed to be essential to the success of the bill in Congress, and she and her adoptive sister go to Washington to visit the family of Senator Dilworthy, who is engineering the appropriation. There one day Laura is met and insultingly renounced by her betrayer, who tells her that he is a gentleman born, and, even if his wife were not living, would never marry her: she shoots him dead, and the play closes with her trial and acquittal, and the presumed failure of Senator Dilworthy’s bill. It is merely an episode, but it is strong and new to the stage, however stale to fact, and it appeals to the spectator’s imagination so successfully throughout, that he does not mind how very sketchy an episode it is. The betrayer of Laura Hawkins is necessarily a little cheap,—betrayers always are,—but the rest of the character-material is simple, natural, and good, and in the play the Western quality of the people is always clearly accented without ever being overcharged; they are of the quarter of the world to which all things are still possible, and Sellers is but the highest expression of the hopeful and confiding mood in which they exist. The delightfulness of his disasters consists in the ardor with which he rises above them and enters into a new and more glorious speculation, which even as he talks of it becomes just a side speculation,—“to keep your money moving,”—while his mind develops a yet larger scheme. If he wrecks the fortunes of his friends, it is out of pure zeal and love for them, and he is always ready to share the last dollar with them, whether it is his or theirs. Mr. Raymond nicely indicates the shades of the author’s intention in his Sellers, and so delicately distinguishes between him and the vulgar, selfish speculator, that it is with a sort of remorse one laughs at his dire poverty in the scene where the door drops from the stove and betrays the lighted candle which had imparted a ruddy glow and an apparent warmth from within; or again where he makes his friend stay to dine on turnips and water, having first assured himself from his dismayed wife that the water is good. The warm, caressing, affectionate nature of the man charms you in Mr. Raymond’s performance, and any one who felt the worth of his worthlessness in the novel will feel it the more in the play. It is a personality rarely imagined by the author and interpreted without loss by the actor. Only one point we must except, and we suspect it is not the author’s lapse; that is where the colonel borrows ten dollars of Clay Hawkins, and being asked not to mention the return of it, stops on his way out and with a glance of low cunning at the audience says, “Well, I won’t!” This is thoroughly false and bad, and the stupid laugh it raises ought to make Mr. Raymond ashamed. Colonel Sellers is always serious, and apart from what he considers his legitimate designs upon the public purse is as high-souled and chivalrous as Don Quixote.

Some extremely good suggestions give the ease and composure with which these Missourian ex-slaveholders adapt themselves to the splendors of Washington: once the first people in their own neighborhood, they are of the first people anywhere, and in arriving at luxury they have merely come into their own. But the greatest scenes are in that last act, where Colonel Sellers appears as witness for the defense of Laura Hawkins: as he mounts the stand, he affably recognizes and shakes hands with several acquaintances among the jury; he delivers his testimony in the form of a stump speech; he helplessly overrides all the protests, exceptions, and interruptions of the prosecution; from time to time, he irresistibly turns and addresses the jury, and can scarcely be silenced; while the attorneys are wrangling together, he has seized a juryman by the coat-lapel, and is earnestly exhorting him in whisper. The effect is irresistibly ludicrous. It is farce, and not farce, for however extravagantly improbable the situation is, the man in it is deliciously true to himself. There is one bit of pathos, where Sellers tells how he knew Laura as a little girl, and implies that though she might have killed a man she could not have done murder, which is of great value; if Mr. Clemens or Mr. Raymond could work this vein further it would be an immense gain for the piece; Sellers is not a mere glare of absurdity; you do not want to be laughing at him all the time; and Mr. Raymond might trust the sympathy of his audience in showing all the tenderness of the man’s heart. We are loath to believe that he is not himself equal to showing it.

He was very tolerably supported. There are two ways of playing such a character as Laura Hawkins, and Miss Marie Gordon chose the conventional way, but in that way she was decidedly effective. It is always surprising that actors with such a piece of nature before them as Mr. Raymond’s Sellers, or Mr. Jefferson’s Rip, should prefer tradition, but they do—or it prefers them, perhaps. Mr. Murdock as Clay Hawkins had a fresher ideal of his part than Miss Gordon, and played more simply; one might say he played very well.

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