Text: N. B. Fagin, “Chapter 02,” The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 1949, pp. 67-92 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 67:]

WHEN a shrewd judge of literary talent advises a young writer to turn his hand to the writing of farces for the stage, the compliment implied in his advice cannot be lightly dismissed. Surely John Pendleton Kennedy must have had good reason for assuming that Poe might be successful in producing farces, “after the manner of the French Vaudevilles,” good enough to sell to New York theatrical producers.(1) It may be that Kennedy, having received from Poe a pitiful letter, written in a mood when he was obsessed by “villainous blue devils,” merely wished to console him and to direct his mind toward a cheerful form of creative activity. Yet the fact remains that Kennedy believed Poe capable of writing successful theatrical pieces.[1]

On an earlier occasion Kennedy had dissuaded Poe from concentrating on the writing of a tragedy — presumably Politian — and turned him to drudging upon whatever might make money.[2] And while at the [page 68:] time Kennedy suggested attempting some farces Poe was financially in a more flourishing state, it is reasonable to assume that Kennedy did not entirely ignore the material benefits his young friend might derive from such an undertaking. The fact that Poe evidently did not follow Kennedy's advice — for no farces attributed to his authorship have thus far been discovered — does not minimize its importance. Is it possible that Kennedy judged Poe's ability on the basis of previous work which has been lost to us? Perhaps he had read early attempts at play-writing, possibly some of the “skits” with which Poe is said to have amused his fellow-cadets at West Point. They are said to have been clever satires of certain professors at the Academy.[3] We are not, of course, in a position to estimate their stage-worthiness; nor do we know that they were in dramatic form.

We can, however, venture a judgment as to Poe's flair for play-writing in general, based upon those of his writings which are available to us, and upon our knowledge of the man himself. On this basis one is tempted to say, almost with certainty, that creating drama for the theatre was not among the many talents with which Poe was gifted. Actors usually make but indifferent playwrights, and Poe, as we have seen, was essentially an actor. Now and then dramatic history provides an exception: Molière, for instance, to take a classical example; or Noel Coward, to come to our own day. Shakespeare and David Garrick seem to indicate the more normal record: a minor actor may become a great playwright; a great actor may become a minor playwright. This is explainable by the fact that the true talent of the actor lies in his ability to animate a character which is but half alive in the script. His technique calls for enlargement, [page 69:] amplification, and direct appeal. Contrary to popular belief, the actor never quite loses himself in his rôle; the greater he is the more he projects himself along with the character he represents. The playwright, on the other hand, employing a strictly objective medium, exists only as a living breath behind the work he has handed over to the producer; the greater he is the less he permits himself to be visible. In comparison with the actor he is usually a shrinking violet.

That Poe was no shrinking violet hardly needs to be stressed. He was first and foremost a Romantic poet, and few, if any, of the Romantic poets of his age were either reticent or self-effacing. Poe least of all was the type who could forget himself long enough to construct a play about characters who might take the center of the stage in their own right, thinking their own thoughts, speaking their own language, and feeling their own emotions. On the contrary, he was the kind of creator who insisted on being visible. He left no writing, with the exception of some pieces of literary and dramatic criticism, which is even approximately objective. Certainly he left no such play, not even a tragedy.

For it would have been logical for a poet with a gift for tragic eloquence to aspire to the mantle of his greatly admired forerunner, the lofty creator of Cain and Manfred. That is why the judgment of a seasoned playwright like Robert Montgomery Bird, who — according to contemporary testimony — was willing to collaborate with Poe in the writing of a tragedy, deserves more than a passing mention. Dr. Bird was a Philadelphia writer whose plays, notably Pelopidas and The Gladiator, were highly successful.[4] That such a man should honor Poe with either a bid or the willingness for collaboration [page 70:] indicates faith in Poe's potentialities as a writer of tragedy. The young editor of Burton's or Graham's — for we do not know just when the project was conceived — was, of course, clearly marked for tragedy. He carried the tragic air about him wherever he went; it was in his pale face, in the haughty carriage of his head, in his very gait. And as for eloquence, surely one could expect that to gush forth from a man whose very utterance was a carefully-modulated declamation. It is unfortunate that the scenario which Poe is reported to have sketched out for the collaboration has been lost.[5] The “scheme” itself, we are told, “never got beyond outlines and much talk.”[6] Nevertheless the scenario might have added to our information upon which to test the opinion of Monsieur Hughes the first man to translate part of Politian into French — that Poe “could have supplied the lack of an important American dramatist, had he turned his attention more to that field.”[7]

2

As it is we have Politian as Poe's sole contribution to the American drama. And we have several pieces — essay, story, skit — in dialogue form. Of these pieces three are complete “dialogues.” They are interesting as poetic prose, as philosophy, as mysticism, but they are hardly significant as drama. The best of them, “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” makes good reading only in the last pages when the dialogue has ceased and Eiros alone holds forth. The first part, the “conversation,” is brief and serves merely to introduce Eiros's monologue — or Poe's essay — on the destruction of the world. The one strong moment is the vivid word-picture [page 71:] of the last minutes of expiring mankind. This is effective but hardly dramatic.

“Eiros and Charmion” is prefaced by a quotation from Euripides; “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” by one from Sophocles. Both pieces are reminiscent of Plato's dialogues, but are far from Platonic in mood. Instead of the Greek calm we have, especially in “Eiros,” overcharged description and erudite speculation verging on melodramatic pedantry. The “Colloquy,” like “Eiros,” begins as a dialogue but soon turns into a monologue in which Monos tells the story of his own death and his sensations in the after-life. Professor Quinn calls this piece — “which is not meat for babes” — a short story, but it would hardly meet Poe's own requirements, as stated in his famous review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, of what a good short story should be. It may, like Eureka, have depths of thought and imagination, emotion-colored ideas about life and death and immortality and even, as Quinn suggests, about Jacksonian democracy,[8] but — unless one is specially interested in Poe's ideas on these subjects — it is, alas, not a little dull.

The dialogue on “The Power of Words” is the only one that does not degenerate into a monologue. It continues as a conversation to the very end. The two speakers, Oinos and Agathos, discuss God, creation, and the soul's thirst for knowledge. The setting is again “Aidenn” or the realm of disembodied spirits, but the contours of Aidenn are nowhere disclosed, not even in the vaguest of outline. The sense of place so essential for any dramatic presentation is completely lacking. The conversation is quiet and intellectual, with overtones of poetic prose. Of action in the dramatic sense there is no hint. [page 72:]

What is striking about all three of these pieces is that Poe's use of dialogue is only a device for the expression of ideas, of certain pet theories. It suggests the class room or lecture platform rather than the stage. Even Plato's discussions have more naturalness, and the typical medieval colloquy has greater casualness and simplicity. The speakers — for they can hardly be called “characters” — are not differentiated; not one is individualized by manner, diction, or specific — if not idiosyncratic — idea. The only theatricality these dialogues possess is in the shadowy figure of Poe himself behind the principal expounders, Eiros, Monos, and Agathos; it is he rather than they who does all the talking, exhibiting his abstruseness, ingenuity, philosophical comprehension, wide reading, and magnificent self-confidence.

Two other bits of dialogue deserve consideration. They are parts of the short stories “Mesmeric Revelation” and “Three Sundays in a Week.” Here Poe gives some indication of talent for the writing of stage dialogue. He manages to convey a sense of both place or scene and progression. His stage directions, in brackets, add gesture and tonal shadings. And although the speeches, especially in “Mesmeric Revelation,” tend to grow long they show some attempt at restriction to character and situation.

“Mesmeric Revelation” purports to be an account of an experiment. The narrator, Poe himself, hypnotizes a certain Mr. Vankirk and proceeds to interrogate him on the nature of God, matter, motion, etc. Mr. Vankirk's responses are profoundly oracular; they do magnificent justice to the ideas held, and expressed elsewhere many times, by Mr. Poe. The questions and answers are recorded as a dialogue between “P.” and “V.” They begin succinctly enough: [page 73:]

Thus they continue, almost as in a modern psycho analysis, as recorded by some of our contemporary pseudo-Freudian playwrights, until the examiner raises the question of “What, then, is God?” and the patient becomes verbose and sententious. From then on Mr. Vankirk has exchanged places with the brilliant author, who delivers himself of a learned monologue — except for a few distracting interruptions intended to maintain the fiction of the dialogue form — in a deeply solemn manner which, if spoken on the stage, might be appropriate for a dead pan cartoon of a certain kind of pedant. One sample will, I believe, suffice:

The matters of which man is cognizant escape the senses in gradation. We have, for example, a metal, a piece of wood, a drop of water, the atmosphere, a gas, caloric, electricity, the luminiferous ether. Now, we call all these things matter, and embrace all matter in one general definition; but in spite of this, there can be no two ideas more essentially distinct than that which we attach to a metal, and that which we attach to the luminiferous ether. When we reach the latter, we feel an almost irresistible inclination to class it with spirit, or with nihility. ...

“Three Sundays in a Week” is a whimsical story about an old gentleman who promises two young lovers that they will have his consent to their marriage when [page 74:] three Sundays come together in a week. In the conversation (in play form) with which Poe ends the story such an occurrence is contrived and the promise is kept. Herschel ‘s Treatise on Astronomy[9] and an article on circumnavigation which appeared in a Philadelphia paper[10] provided Poe with his dénouement. The story is not particularly noteworthy; it is one of Poe's attempts at humor which, somehow, nearly always miss fire, like those of an essentially serious person unbending to tell an anecdote and feeling ill at ease. What is noteworthy is the management of the dialogue, among five characters, each distinguished by characteristic diction and general tone. Their speech is economical and relevant to the plot; moreover, it is lively and, for Poe, ordinary enough to sound realistic. The stage directions — Jumping up eagerly; After a pause, — etc. indicate that the writer saw his characters in a definite place, behaving in a definite way, and saying the things that under the circumstances they might or would say.

Altogether, however, Poe's dialogue is far from impressive. His tendency to “talk” is too dominant for the necessary give and take of stage conversation. His lack of objectivity results in monotony of phrase and idea; on the rare occasions when he tries to report objective dialogue — as in his use of Negro dialect (“The Gold Bug ”), Irish (“Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling”), and German (“The Angel of the Odd”), — his ear fails him. No doubt he had sufficient ability, and knowledge and love of theatre, to learn the art of writing good dialogue, but the discipline of subordinating himself and his own type of mentally-passionate eloquence to the seemingly independent projections on the stage was not his. [page 75:]

3

Yet, there is Politian, Poe's one serious attempt at drama. Whether he intended it for the stage is not definitely known. Quinn believes that Poe thought of it simply as a poem,[11] because nowhere in his letters does he express a desire to have the play produced. Yet the revisions, including a rearrangement of scenes, indicate at least an unexpressed hope that the manuscript might some day receive a stage production. There is also Poe's view that “a ‘dramatic poem’ is ... a flat contradiction in terms ... a man of true genius [and Poe never denied that he was such a man] ... has no business with these hybrid and paradoxical compositions. Let a poem be a poem only; let a play be a play and nothing more.”[12] However, during the poet's lifetime only several scenes of Politian were published; other scenes appeared later; and the whole of what now constitutes the almost completed play, carefully edited by Professor T. O. Mabbott, was printed in 1923. Ten years later, and almost a hundred years after its writing, the play was produced by the Players of the University of Virginia, first in Richmond and a month later in Baltimore.

The effect of this romantic tragedy in the modern theatre can be fairly judged by the review it received in the Baltimore Sun. Dramatic critics are not, of course, infallible, yet Donald Kirkley's reactions deserve recording in more permanent form than the files of a daily newspaper. This is what Mr. Kirkley wrote in his column on February 19, 1933:

“Politian,” produced last night at Catherine Hooper Hall, Goucher College, for the first time in the city in which it was [page 76:] written one hundred years ago, showed what a bad playwright Edgar Allan Poe was, and what a good company of actors exists at the University of Virginia.

The Virginia Players revealed a mastery of all the branches of stagecraft which certainly would have brought out whatever hidden treasures might have lurked in this minor work of a major American poet.

The effort was a commendable one, fulfilling the highest function of that valuable branch of the theatre which is amateur in the best sense of that much-abused word.

“Politian” turned out to be a poorly constructed and inadequate play, judged even by the standards of Poe's own time. By the standards of today it is no more than a quaint example of the florid romanticism and artificial heroics of a period in American literature which, happily, has vanished. Such phrases as “the grave untimely yawning for a ruined maid” and Politian's request that Castiglione “arise and die” have become faintly ridiculous. “I cannot pawn my honor,” says Castiglione. “Wed a wanton? Never — no, never!”

These inflated phrases might be overlooked, but there are other faults, such as skimpy characterization, feeble attempts at humor and the failure of the plot to get well under way until many scenes have unfolded. Also one looks in vain for occasional lines of living poetry, until the final scene.

It is well that Poe's reputation does not depend on the quality of the poetry in the first ten episodes. Only in the Coliseum soliloquy, which deserves to be better known, does his genius manifest itself.

The fact that the critic liked the production adds weight to his impressions of the play. At least in this case the playwright could have had no comeback in the usual way on the grounds that his work was mutilated in production. We shall see later that Poe as a critic of drama in time came to hold views of plot construction, dialogue, and characterization not unlike those of Mr. Kirk ley. Undoubtedly his ideas of what constituted a good play had developed largely after his youthful attempt at [page 77:] playwriting, yet he republished several scenes of his play in his own magazine in 1845,[13] after he had delivered himself of such opinions as that “A closet drama is an anomaly a paradox ... and that” There should be no such things as closet-dramas.”[14] At any rate, it is very likely that had Politian been produced in 1845 Mr. Poe of the Broadway Journal might have condemned it even with greater gusto than Mr. Kirkley provided, of course, that the author of the play was not Mr. Poe. Playwrights are not, however, critics, any more than critics are playwrights. Mr. Poe the critic advocated realism on the stage and excoriated American writers of drama for using the wrong models, yet his own play is definitely indebted to the Byron school of Romantic tragedy. Politian is no more realistic than a play by Sheridan Knowles whom Poe denounced with unbridled severity.(2)

And yet Poe based his tragedy on one which had actually taken place in real life. He found the story in newspaper and other accounts of the murder of Solomon P. Sharp, a prominent Kentucky lawyer and political figure, by Jereboam Beauchamp, another Kentucky lawyer. Sharp had seduced Anne Cooke, who a few years later married Beauchamp on condition that he revenge her dishonor. On November 7, 1825, Beauchamp fulfilled the condition by killing Sharp, and, together with his wife, was convicted for murder.[16] The couple then attempted suicide, but only the wife was successful. Beauchamp lived on until July 7, 1826, [page 78:] when he was executed. The case received wide publicity and attracted the attention of many American novelists, poets, and playwrights. Poe, in reviewing Charles Fenno Hoffman's novel Greyslaer (1840), felt that the “incidents might be better woven into a tragedy.”[17] (Was he thinking of his unfinished Politian as just such a tragedy?) Later, in a review of William Gilmore Simms’ Beauchampe (1842), he expressed a belief that “No more thrilling, no more romantic tragedy did ever the brain of poet conceive than was the tragedy of Sharpe and Beauchampe.”[18] Still later, in another comment on the same novel, he was of the opinion that the facts in the case, or the historical truth, had “hampered and repressed” the natural strength of the novelist.[19]

Presumably it was to get away from the facts, to permit his imagination to soar, that he had placed the action of his play in Renaissance Rome. Politian, the young hero, is no less a personage than the Earl of Leicester, an infinitely more romantic character than a Kentucky lawyer named Jereboam Beauchamp. The villain is Castiglione, son and heir of a Duke and named after the famous author of The Book of the Courtier. The prosy Mr. or Col. Solomon P. Sharp could hardly have dreamed of a greater transformation. Anne Cooke becomes “Lalage,” a name possessing the requisite liquid sounds in which the poet elocutionist luxuriated: Ulalume, Ligeia, Lenore, Annabel Lee.[20] The other characters bear equally exotic names: Baldazzar, Jacinta, Alessandra, San Ozzo, etc.

With this remote setting and these strange names Poe sought to escape being hampered and repressed by the facts upon which he based his play. But the romantic tragedy he intended did not come to life. It has much [page 79:] sound and fury but its significance as drama is slight. Others have been inspired to playwriting by newspaper melodrama. Ibsen was able to create A Doll's House out of intrinsically less dramatic material. Dreiser based his novel An American Tragedy on the accounts of a contemporary murder case, and when dramatized — especially by Erwin Piscator — the novel became a stageworthy play. Maxwell Anderson found his Winterset — perhaps the most successful of modern poetic tragedies — in a study of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. All these writers and many others managed to create work which left far behind the factual germ out of which it grew. Poe's Politian still remains the Kentucky murder case — theatricalized; it is neither great drama nor great poetry; and it is decidedly not a stageworthy play.

The reasons for Poe's failure are fundamental to any understanding of the nature of his peculiar talents. Mrs. Weiss, recalling her memories of Poe, remarked that his insight into “personal character was quick and intuitive, but not deep.” It struck her that “in knowledge of human nature he was, for a man of his genius, strangely deficient.”[21] I am not sure that on the basis of all the evidence we now have, we can accept these statements as absolutely accurate judgments, yet the characters in Politian — the one tragedy Poe has left us — are so weak and unconvincing as to suggest that Mrs. Weiss's impressions deserve our respect. Not one of the principals is realized as a person. All make their costumed en trances, speak their labored eloquence, and make their exits. They pass out of memory or, at most, remain vague puppets. If, as the eminent critic, Mr. Poe, said categorically of the characters in Nathaniel Parker Willis's Tortesa the Usurer, that they were nobody, nothing, [page 80:] or less than nothing,[22] then what would Mr. Poe assuming — that he would be consistent — have said of Castiglione, Lalage, Politian, or Baldazzar?

The meagerly motivated villain, Castiglione, is a good illustration of the weakness of Poe's characters. Castiglione is neither a coward nor without a sense of honor, and there are lines in his speeches which suggest that he still retains his love for Lalage, yet he persists in his “dishonorable” course. He defends Lalage against the aspersions of his friend San Ozzo, in a passage that is theatrically effective and humanly understandable:

To which San Ozzo replies with heavy cynicism:

And that is sufficient to restore Castiglione's peace of mind and leave him to soliloquize that

The man who but less than thirty lines before ardently defended the purity and truth of Lalage and called himself a black villain and his behavior toward her black perfidy, now, but a minute later, left alone on the stage and facing only his conscience — and the audience — dismisses her tragedy and his deed as “this little matter.” The fact that he wishes that he were not

so that he might “dare be honest,” does not remedy the faulty motivation. If, as he confides to himself and the audience, “Di Broglio's haughty and time-honoured line” will not permit his marrying the “lowly born” Lalage, there is still no need for him to dismiss his “black perfidy” as a “little matter,” and to further neutralize his one plausible reason for rejecting her by such lines as

But it is futile to subject Poe's characters either to the test of verisimilitude or to that of dramatic consistency. In the main they are derivative, indebted to the very models which Mr. Poe so bravely and pontifically condemned.(3) The numerous similarities Professor Mabbott's scholarly researches have discovered between Politian — characters, lines, moments of mood and thought — and such plays as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King John, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, As You Like It, The Maid's Tragedy, [page 82:] Antonio and Mellida, The Duchess of Malfi, All for Love,[27] and many others are striking enough. In writing his play the young Poe had his eye neither on the characters in the Kentucky tragedy nor on any imaginary beings whom his poetic brain conjured, but on the stock characters in the many romantic plays he had read and seen. Dame Pope-Hennessy's conclusion that “Politian is a feeble imitation of the Cenci-Fazio type”[28] is justified. It is definitely an imitation, and certainly feeble.

4

A few other weaknesses of this play are equally illuminating. The man who as a literary and dramatic critic chastised many storytellers and playwrights on the score of lack of sound structure was himself unsuccessful in his one attempt to construct a dramatic plot. If, as he insisted — in italics — plot is “that in which no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole,”[29] then Politian is without plot. It would be possible, for instance, to omit all of Scene VIII, the long soliloquy of Jacinta, Lalage's villainous maid, without causing the slightest injury to the whole. If it was meant to be a contributing episode toward the dénouement it is out of all reasonable proportion and inconsequential. If, on the other hand, it was intended merely as a minor digression, for the sake of comic relief, then it is indeed — as one of Poe's French editors has expressed it — the work of an “icy humorist.”[30](4) Moreover, the scene adds to the general sense of inactivity of the plot. That Poe was [page 83:] aware of the “talkiness” of this scene is indicated by his efforts to inject some “action” into it. Jacinta carries a bandbox; looks at a watch; kicks the bandbox “to and fro”; other servants — Ugo, Benito, Rupert — cross and recross the stage; and finally Ugo inadvertently treads upon the bandbox and Jacinta strikes him. But all this activity is unrelated to the plot, immaterial and unimaginative digression.

When there is action — relevant or irrelevant — it is managed so badly as to be almost absurd. In the scene in which San Ozzo mocks Castiglione's melancholy he promises to send him sackcloth and ashes. He exits and, almost at once, the sackcloth and ashes are delivered. The timing is weirdly inept. Between San Ozzo's exit and the fulfillment of his jest, poor Castiglione has time to recite but twenty-three lines of iambic pentameter. The audience cannot fail to realize that the props were ready off-stage even at the moment San Ozzo conceived his amiable little notion.

Politian's greatest weakness still remains the dialogue. The numerous asides and interminable soliloquies indeed support the views of the more mature and eminent Mr. Poe. They do “utterly” destroy “verisimilitude.” But the soliloquizing of his characters is in itself not half as preposterous as what they say and how they say it. Mr. Kirkley found such phrases as “the grave untimely yawning for a ruined maid” and “arise and die” faintly ridiculous. What shall we say of such time-honored cliches as Politian's avowal of love on “bended knee ... Thro’ good and ill — thro’ weal and wo ...”; of his challenge to Castiglione, “Draw, villain” and of the latter's reply, “Ha! — draw? — and villain? have at thee then at once”; and of Castiglione's “Strike thou home [page 84:] (baring his bosom). Here is no let or hindrance to thy weapon Strike home”? We can only agree with Mr. Edward Shanks that Poe “was clearly a poor hand in dramatic dialogue.”[31]

The publicity used in advertising the performance of Politian in Baltimore featured this quotation: “If Poe had lived in a European center he might have become one of the world's greatest dramatists.”[32] The “might” seems to me hardly warranted. He might no more have become a great playwright than Sheridan Knowles, or Wordsworth, or Coleridge, or his admired Byron became one. Politian is a closet drama, and as such it suffers from all the ailments to which this genre is heir. These ailments have been perfectly described by T. S. Eliot (who has himself nevertheless managed to create poetic drama which is at once good poetry and effective theatre): “It is not primarily lack of plot, or lack of action and suspense, or imperfect realization of character, or lack of anything of what is called theatre,’ that makes these plays lifeless: it is primarily that their rhythm of speech is something that we cannot associate with any human being except a poetry reciter.”[33] Poe, we have seen, was exactly that. As a critic he was not in a position to indulge his talent; as a playwright the temptation was too great. At any rate, what he produced in Politian is no better than what he once accused another poet of having produced: “a theatrical world of mere verbiage, somewhat spaciously bedizened with a tinselly meaning.”[34]

5

But if Politian does not represent a great contribution to dramatic literature, it is nonetheless of considerable [page 85:] importance in helping us to understand Poe as a man and an artist. For it is, more than many of his poems and stories, a piece of self-revelation, an act of confession, and its failure as an actable play is due largely to his inability to forget himself.

Who is Politian, besides being a fictitious substitute for the Kentucky lawyer Jereboam Beauchamp? He is first and foremost the hero in a poetic tragedy written by a young Virginia gentleman who aspired to literary fame. But even before the noble youth ascends the stage to speak the lines written for him by the as yet unrecognized young genius, he begins to assume the lineaments of the author. We today cannot fail to recognize in the young hero the characteristic bearing, tone, and gestures of young Edgar Allan Poe. Politian is, says Duke Di Broglio,

The Duke's niece, Alessandra, and Castiglione, her betrothed, have heard other rumors: that the young man is “Gay, volatile and giddy,” that he is “As one who entered madly into life, Drinking the cup of pleasure to the dregs,” or that “He is a dreamer and a man shut out From common passions.”[35]

Politian is, in short, the kind of mysterious hero Edgar Allan Poe imagined himself to be. He is, to be sure, also a bit of Byron and many bits of heroes encountered in the romantic melodramas which cluttered the stages [page 86:] of England and America in Poe's time. But essentially he is strikingly like the heroes in many of Poe's short stories — melancholy, brave, learned, brilliant, aloof, satanic, perhaps more than a little mad, noble, contradictory, misunderstood. Mr. Hervey Allen believes that the description of the hero in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a pen-portrait of Poe himself and might be labelled Self Portrait of the Artist at the Age of Thirty.”[36] It would be difficult to label the sketch of Politian. No doubt it is, in part, a self portrait of the artist a little less than a decade earlier; but it is also, in greater part, a picture of the kind of hero the artist imagined himself to be — either then or in the future. Professor Mabbott has noted Politian's resemblance to the hero in Poe's early short story “The Assignation”:

Ill-fated and mysterious man! bewildered in the brilliancy of thine own imagination, and fallen in the flames of thine own youth ... squandering away a life of magnificent meditation in that city of dim visions, thine own Venice. ... Who then shall call thy conduct into question? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as a wasting away of life, which were but the overflowings of thine everlasting energies? ... the graceful person of a very young man, with the sound of whose name the greater part of Europe was then ringing.[37]

One may add similar resemblances with the heroes in other stories, especially “Ligeia” and “Eleonora.” The source from which Poe may have derived his plots matters little; his leading character is always a person who in many ways is what Poe was, thought himself to be, or wished to be. To be sure, the tendency to make himself the hero of his own work was not unique with Poe; most of the writers of the romantic school — Chateaubriand, Byron, Shelley, to name but a few — shared it; [page 87:] in fact, the performance of these writers supports Irving Babbitt's definition of the Romantic impulse as a man's “expansive eagerness to get his own uniqueness uttered.” But no one, not even the author of “Epipsychidion” and “Alastor” — as one British critic noted away back in 1901 — had such a gift for “arabesquing” and “transcendentalizing” himself as Poe.[38]

The contradictions in Politian's nature which the other characters perceive are part of the duality which Poe himself was to treat in “William Wilson” and which Poe's biographers were to point out again and again: the flashes of gaiety and spells of melancholy, his great charm and, at times, equally great insolence, his “normality” and “abnormality,” his haughtiness and self-immolation. He who passionately longed for fame could, in a moment of despondency, exclaim through Politian's lips “Speak not to me of glory! I hate I loathe the name; I do abhor /The unsatisfactory and ideal thing.” It is not only love which impels the noble hero to contemplate the possibility of going down into the dust “unhonored and forgotten”; it is also revulsion from that same world which has, alas, proved unappreciative of the true greatness of his creator.

The best lines in the play, the soliloquy in the Coliseum, were among the earliest written, since they were the poem he entered in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter contest. If it be true, as H. W. Wells thinks, that they “were apparently to be the heart of ... Politian,” they are also apparently the heart of young Edgar Poe. The lines were undoubtedly suggested by Byron's lines on the same subject in Manfred and Childe Harold. But while, continues Mr. Wells, “The sight of Rome invigorated and redeemed Byron's heroes; the dream of it [page 88:] unnerved Poe.”[39] The young man who as a boy had been brought “home” to “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome “now brooded upon the transience of fame. He asks:

Perhaps, since the lines were written in Baltimore, where Poe was living in a tiny house in great poverty, he was contemplating not only the impermanence, and hence the futility, of the fame that someday might be his but also the state of material glory that once was his in the home of Mr. Allan in Richmond. In the end, unnerved as he might be for the moment, fame still remained the spur. His belief in himself, in his genius, led him to hear prophetic voices. The boy who had written to Mr. Allan that “Since I have been able to think on any subject, my thoughts have aspired ... to eminence in public life”[41] never died in Poe. The grey stones of the Coliseum, Politian reassures himself, are not all that is left of the great and the colossal:

No, the stones of the Coliseum were not desolate. Nor was Poe. In one way or another the glory that was Rome spoke to him, and his desolation, of which he wrote constantly, was pretty much of a myth. Like the myth of his visit to Rome, which he encouraged the world to accept. At a meeting of the Humanitas Association held in April, 1945, an Italian writer, Filippo Donini, expressed his conviction that judging by “The Coliseum,” Poe had never visited the Eternal City. The poem is general and bookish in its description of local color. The only objects not found in Byron's or Lamar tine's lines on the ruins are a bat and some canes and thistles, and these are objects which are certainly not difficult to imagine as invading any ruins. Poe, concludes the reporter of the meeting, Pietro Paolo Trompeo, “has truly demonstrated that he has never put his foot in Rome.”[42] But it really matters little whether the lines on the Coliseum were based on direct observation, derived from other poets, or completely invented in Baltimore. They are part of the poetry that was Poe. They are also part of the drama that was Poe, and for this reason they are part of the feebleness of what was intended to be the drama of Politian.

6

It was M. Hughes who hazarded the surmise that Poe might have become an important American dramatist. Our study of Politian, its dialogues, and, in fact, Poe's handling of dialogue in general — even in his short stories — makes the surmise implausible. M. Hughes himself supplies one reason — the principal one — for doubt. “Edgar Poe,” he remarks, apropos of one of [page 90:] Politian's speeches, “endows the characters he has placed on the stage with his own personal sensations and sentiments.”[43]

In other words, Poe never left his characters alone. Very likely he never actually saw them, except as projections of himself. Living himself in a vague world of fancy and inarticulate desire, he permitted his imaginary personae to float in a similarly vague world, speaking rhythmically high words and noble phrases, and doing little except analyzing their souls. For a playwright all this is fatal. Except in fantasy, stage characters must be recognizable people, bearing a resemblance to our friends and neighbors, walking a substantial earth, acting and reacting upon each other in a manner which recalls common experience. Even the dreamy creations of a Maeterlinck — upon whom Poe is said to have exerted a strong influence[44] — have more substantiality than Poe's shadowy evocations.

D. H. Lawrence once remarked that Poe never saw anything in terms of life,[45] and while Lawrence's opinions on American literature were often tinged with malice, they were sometimes — as in this case — singularly acute. Poe seemingly had no ear for the speech of real people, nor did he seem to have either the curiosity or the patience to observe real people. Instead, he observed himself, patiently, everlastingly, fascinatedly. His characters are endowed not only with Poe's thoughts and emotions but with his physical characteristics and stage mannerisms as well. What is worse: after writing the “sides” for them, he pushed his Politians, Castigliones, Ushers, and “I's” aside, and walking onto the stage, stopped where the light was brightest — or romantically dimmest — and proceeded to deliver the lines himself. [page 91:] The very patterns of the speeches are in the elocutionary idiom of Edgar Poe, the actor rather than the playwright.

In the final analysis, Poe failed as a dramatist for the same reasons that Byron failed. It is worth recalling Baudelaire's description of Poe as “a Byron entangled in an evil world.”[46] Entangled he certainly was, but more with himself than the world. Had he read Macaulay's essay on Milton, especially the short digression in which the great Victorian attempted to explain Byron's shortcomings as a playwright, he might have profited by it. For Macaulay saw clearly that

The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken. The effect is as unpleasant as that which is produced on the stage by the voice of a prompter or the entrance of a scene shifter. Hence it was, that the tragedies of Byron were his least successful performances. ... In all the characters, patriots and tyrants, haters and lovers, the frown and sneer of Harold were discernible in an instant.[47]

It is possible, however, that Poe may have read these words of Macaulay — whom, incidentally, he admired both as a critic and stylist[48] — and could not profit by them. The species of egotism to which dramatists of the type of Byron and Poe succumb is not affected by logic or reason. It is an overmastering impulse to exhibit the ego, and only by yielding to it does such a writeractor live, breathe, and feel himself truly creative.

And, in truth, he is creative; if not as a great dramatist then as a great lyrist. The very entanglement with self which prevented Poe from creating a great — or even an acceptable drama — was his inspiration and strength as [page 92:] a poet. Remy de Gourmont had good reason for calling him “le plus subjectif des poetes subjectifs.”[49] In his lyrics he could dream, brood, lament, and exclaim all he wished. Mere overflow of the ego cannot, of course, produce poetry. The gift must be there. In Poe's case, as in Byron's, it was. But it was not the gift of the dramatist. He was totally incapable of obliterating himself, of losing himself completely in other lives, of hearing the accents of other people, of recording experience — real or imaginary — except his own. In the end, the romantic histrio smothered the playwright.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 77:]

1 Early in our own century, a more discerning student of Poe hazarded a similar guess but with one important difference. “Poe could have done perfectly,” wrote Padraic Colum, “a form of work which perhaps he had no models for at the time — the ‘thrill’ of the French vaudeville.” — Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 77:]

2 “... this ... dramatic feeling he has manifested in the most preposterous series of imitations of the Elizabethan drama, by which ever mankind were insulted and beguiled. Not only did he adhere to the old plots, the old characters, the old stage conventionalities throughout; but, he went even so far as to persist in the obsolete phraseologies of the Elizabethan period ...”[15]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 81:]

3“The first thing necessary is to burn or bury the ‘old models,’ and to forget, as quickly as possible, that ever a play has been penned.”[26]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 82:]

4 The expression used by M. Woestyn is “humoriste à froid,” which is a French idiom equivalent to “sham humorist.” Nevertheless, as applied to Poe, a more literal translation seems appropriate and justified.