Text: N. B. Fagin, “Chapter 03,” The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 1949, pp. 93-132 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 93:]

THERE is a story to the effect that one cold night in December of 1844 Cornelius Mathews went to the Park Theatre and found himself seated next to Mr. Poe. Mathews, with a modicum of encouragement, told the distinguished poet, story-teller, and critic about a new play, Witchcraft, upon which he was then at work, and Poe, “in his low, melodious voice,” suggested that the fourth act might gain in effectiveness if a raven, that bird of ill-omen, were to flit across the stage over the head of the hero's mother, who is suspected of being a witch.[1]

This story — even though it contains a dubious account of Poe's scribbling away on “The Raven” under a lamp post, on the corner of Bleecker Street and Broad way — is important because it is one of the few definite records we have of Poe's physical presence in a theatre. Unless we accept as further evidence his vivid description of the interior of a theatre, during a performance, in such a story as “The Spectacles.” A few months after his meeting with Mathews Poe became a professional dramatic critic and was, of course, in attendance at various New York theatres on opening nights. He [page 94:] wrote his judgments of the new plays — in the positive, summary manner traditional with the craft — for the Broadway Journal, a weekly of less than a thousand circulation.

It is not easy to account for the qualifications of dramatic critics, neither in Poe's day nor, for that matter, in our own. We are, however, justified in entertaining a few assumptions. One is: that anyone who undertakes to inform the theatre-going public on what is occurring in the theatre is himself part of that public; that, in other words, he is familiar with the practices, habits, customs, and “climate” of the theatre; that, in brief, he has been himself an habitual theatregoer. To be sure, other qualifications are necessary, but without a direct knowledge, a store of vivid memories, of the living stage nothing else is of great significance.

Did Poe bring to his task as dramatic critic such knowledge, such a store of memories? Was a love of the theatre, of its color and stimulation, of the variety and intensity of experience it provides, part of his equipment? We know that he respected the art of acting. We remember his eloquent defense of Mrs. Mowatt's appearance on the stage and his pride in his mother's career. We remember his attempt at playwriting. And we have his numerous reviews of published plays to testify to his life-long interest in drama as literature. But none of these offers us more than an inkling of how much of the living theatre of his day Poe actually knew.

Although it is not likely that, as a child in Richmond, he was taken to see theatrical performances, we know that he was taught dancing and dramatic recitation, with which he was expected to entertain special company in the Allans's drawing-room. We also know that as a [page 95:] school-boy he founded a Thespian Society which met and gave performances at 6th and Marshall Streets. Whether the active professional theatre in Richmond, especially after 1820, “inspired the play-acting of Poe and his boyhood friends,” as Miss Bondurant suggests, cannot be proved,[2] but the probability is strong that as Poe grew older he took advantage of the fashion among the best people and visited the local theatre. The best families supported it, as was indicated the evening of the great fire, December 26, 1811, when seventy-two persons, among them Governor Smith, lost their lives. “The family of John Allan, who had recently taken Edgar Poe into his home,” writes Miss Bondurant, “was spending the holidays out of town. Otherwise they, too, might have suffered from the fire.”[3] A new theatre was built in 1819, and here a lover of drama might have seen the most popular plays of the day presented by actors and actresses well-known in both England and America.[4]

After Poe left home to enter the University of Virginia his chances of seeing plays were, if anything, improved, because now he was at last free of Mr. Allan's supervision. Nor is there any reason to assume that he did not visit the theatre in Boston, where he spent some little time waiting to get his first volume of poems published and where he finally enlisted in the United States Army, unless poverty prevented him. The same obstacle existed during his West Point days, and throughout the rest of his life in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Yet his writings, and those of his friends, record specific instances of his attendance at the theatre, especially in the latter two cities. These do not necessarily prove that he was an habitual patron, but they at least [page 96:] indicate that, whenever his financial circumstances permitted, the call of the theatre found him responsive.

I have already noted the large number of playwrights and actors among Poe's friends. These often supplied him with theatre passes. It can therefore be said that in at least one respect he possessed the necessary equipment for the profession of dramatic critic: the ability to pass the box-office.(1) But no matter how he got in, the theatre was no unexplored country to Poe, for, as one Philadelphian who had had occasion to observe him expressed it: “Poe was a play-goer” and “admired the drama.”[5]

2

Play-going and admiring the drama are not, however, enough to make a dramatic critic. At least one other assumption becomes unavoidable. It is: that anyone undertaking to pass judgment on drama possesses a wide knowledge of dramatic literature. In Poe's case, this assumption appears to be justified the moment one dips into his writings. They bristle with references to play wrights, great and small; with apt quotations from plays, ancient and modern; and with allusions to plots and characters that are part of the history of world drama. It is true that Poe often pretended to more knowledge than he possessed, that he liked to quote from obscure, and sometimes mythical, writers, and that he made a little learning pass for much and profound erudition. But it is equally true that all his life he was an eager and persistent reader. Professor Killis Campbell's finding of areas of literature of which Poe apparently fails to reflect [page 97:] awareness[6] does not absolutely prove unawareness, for display of scholarship is not always an index of acquaintance with literature, nor of understanding or appreciation. Nor does Professor F. C. Prescott's surmise that Poe got some of his knowledge — and “perhaps most of his knowledge” — of Greek and later dramatic literature from A. W. Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature[7] exclude the possibility that Poe had read and continued to read widely in the dramatic literature itself.(2) In the less scholarly mind these surmises and “perhapses” have become certainties. It was from Coleridge, says Dame Pope-Hennessy, that Poe learned to appreciate Schlegel's Lectures, and it was from the Lectures that he derived his allusions to Crebillon, Corneille, and other authors “whose works he had not read.”[9]

Yet a man does not quote from one play (Hamlet) thirty-eight times without having read that play. And if ten years before he became a dramatic critic, in reviewing three volumes of Greek plays — “the whole of Euripides” — he spiced his observation with quotations from Schlegel, we are still not justified in concluding that he did not read some or all of the plays. The fact is that not even Poe, clever and presumptuous as he was, could have discussed the drama with such assurance and intimate detail as he shows in his numerous reviews, essays, brief notations, offhand comments and judgments, unless he had read it first-hand. [page 98:]

Thus he cites The Clouds of Aristophanes as an example of the antiquity of rhyming and the Antigone of Sophocles as an example of the dramatic crudity of the ancients. One of his short stories, “Thou Art the Man” begins with the sentence: “I will now play the Oedipus to the Rattleborough enigma ”; another, “Eleonora” attempts to allay the reader's possible incredulity by urging him to “play unto its riddle the Oedipus”; and in still another place he subjects the Oedipus to a detailed analysis in an attempt to prove that it served as a source for Lear. He cites the Eumenides of Aeschylus and Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles(3) as tragedies of happy termination. “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” is prefaced by a quotation from Sophocles's Antigone and “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” by one from Euripides's Andromache. He confessed himself to be an ardent admirer of Euripides, whom he thought “truly great,” but only when compared with many of the “moderns.” As compared, however, with his own immediate predecessors, Euripides fell short of true greatness. Aeschylus alone, whose Prometheus Poe believed to be immortal, and in whom he found verse most strictly married to music, seemingly had no disadvantageous comparisons; and both Sophocles and Euripides were echoes of him. Altogether he refers to Aeschylus thirteen times; to Sophocles, seven times; and to Euripides, six times.

Poe had much less to say of Roman drama. His abhorrence of imitativeness is well-known, and he considered the Roman playwrights the most imitative of all. Even Terence, he pointed out, was only Menander and “nothing [page 99:] beyond,” and the tragedies of Seneca — “a puerile writer” — were mere copies of Greek subjects.

Shakespeare and his Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan colleagues loom large in Poe's awareness. Almost at the very beginning of his career, in his famous “Letter to B — ,” Poe held up to scorn the type of person who thinks Shakespeare a great poet, but who has nevertheless not read Shakespeare. He himself preferred to be among the “few gifted individuals who kneel around the summit, beholding, face to face, the master spirit who stands upon the pinnacle.” Some years later, in a review of a book on the Elizabethan dramatists, he urged the procuring of a copy of this work by “every person who has a copy of Shakespeare, (that is to say, by the world at large.)”[10] When, in August of the year in which he became a dramatic critic, he reviewed Hazlitt's The Characters of Shakespeare, he displayed an acquaintance with the character creations of the greatest of English dramatists which he could have attained only by constant and close reading of the plays themselves.[11]

His analysis of Hamlet especially indicates long and profound thought. And no wonder. He had lived with the great tragedy of the Danish prince since his earliest childhood, a copy of the play having been bequeathed to him by his mother.[12] His review of Hazlitt's book is largely an attempt to differentiate between Hamlet the man, created by God, and the dramatic character, created by Shakespeare. It is significant that Poe should attribute the inconsistencies of the character to the playwright's impulsion to exaggerate: because it is one more illustration of Poe's habit to formulate theories based upon his own creative practices and impulses. Neither this idea about Shakespeare, nor the speculation on the [page 100:] extent of the Bard's identification with Hamlet, is in Hazlitt or Schlegel. But there are other betrayals of Poe's intimacy with the play. Although such an allusion as “out-Heroded Herod” (used at least three times)[13] may be merely the employment of common currency, the ease with which phrases, lines, and names from the play spring to his mind is unmistakable.

Besides Hamlet, the “Letter to B—” mentions the Tempest, Midsummer Night's Dream, and some of their characters: Prospero, Oberon, Titania. “Al Aaraaf” contains a paraphrase of a line from The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the short story “The Angel of the Odd” contains a character who reminds Poe of Falstaff. He is also reminded of Falstaff — “so life-like a character that it seems as if we had drunk canary with [him] at the Boar's Head” — while reviewing Bulwer's novel Zanoni. Politian reverberates with memories of Shakespeare. Here we find a reference to Cleopatra and her two attendants, Eiros and Charmian (whose names, we have already noticed, he was to use as the title of a dialogue). Here we find glory personified as “trumpet-tongued,” like the virtues which Macbeth heard plead, like angels, against the murder of Duncan. Here we find an imitation of the moonlight scene in the fifth act of the Merchant of Venice. And here we find, in three separate scenes, echoes of passages from King John. ...[14] In another short story, “Four Beasts in One,” Poe indulges in a quotation from Twelfth Night, three lines apparently recalled from memory, for they are full of tiny lapses from the original text. In a review of a play by Willis he notes that an incident “seems adopted from the ‘Winter's Tale.’ ”[15] Another review, of an obscure poet's work, calls attention to the lifting of a [page 101:] scene from Romeo and Juliet.[16] Sometimes his assimilation of a Shakespearean character is so complete that he can discuss it in terms of historical accuracy, without even taking the trouble to identify the play in which it occurs. In a paper on Robert T. Conrad he compares the character of Jack Cade as treated by Judge Conrad in his popular tragedy Aylmere and by Shakespeare, presumably in the second part of Henry VI, coming to the conclusion that Shakespeare's account of the English rebel was historically unjustified.[17] There can be no question that he knew the plays of the master at whose summit he knelt, knew them minutely, reflectively, and appreciatively.

Yet, kneeling though he might be, he was no blind worshipper. “Your hero-worshippers,” he exclaims in a comment on Carlyle's Hero-Worship, “what do they know of Shakespeare? They worship him — rant about him — lecture about him — ... for no other reason than that he is utterly beyond their comprehension. They have arrived at an idea of his greatness from the pertinacity with which men have called him great. As for their own opinion about him — they really have none at all.”[18] He apparently had an opinion and, high as it might be, it was his own. No better summary of his enthusiasm for Shakespeare is needed than his own statement — made in spite of his strange belief that Lear owed its plot to the Oedipus — that “If all the dramatists of antiquity were combined in one, they would not be found worthy to touch the hem of his garment.”[19]

Equally unmistakable is Poe's knowledge of other Elizabethan and seventeenth-century dramatists. It colors his writing and thinking; it creeps into his pages in oblique allusions to, or direct quotations from, such [page 102:] plays as Gorboduc, Marlowe's Faustus, Peele's David and Bethsabe, Chapman's Bussy d’Ambois, Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, Webster's Duchess of Malfi, Marston's Malcontent and Antonio and Mellida, Shirley's Example, Milton's Comus, and Dryden's Assignation and All for Love. References to later English plays and playwrights are even more numerous. At the slightest opportunity his mind is ready to supply names, plots, and lines from eighteenth and nineteenth century English drama. The number of non-English “moderns” of whom he shows awareness is no less respectable. In his early story, “The Assignation,” the hero reads “Politian's beautiful tragedy, “The Orfeo,’ (the first native Italian tragedy).” Politian is, of course, Angelo Poliziano, the fifteenth century poet and scholar. In at least two of his many discussions of plot he refers to the intrigue in which the plays of Cervantes and Calderon abound; in a third, he quotes a passage from Calderon; and in a fourth, he recalls the innumerable comedies of intrigue attributed to Calderon and Lope de Vega. Other references, scattered through his writings, are to Corneille (“The Man That Was Used Up”) and Racine (“Pinakidia”), to Molière's M. Jourdain (“Murders in the Rue Morgue”), to Voltaire's Brutus and Mort de Cesar (Marginalia), Hugo's Hernani (“Masque of the Red Death”) and Cromwell (Marginalia), to Crébillon, to Goethe(4) and Schiller. ...

It is quite clear that Poe's knowledge of dramatic literature was considerable. The field is vast and it is only natural that certain areas should have remained [page 103:] unreflected in the writings of a man who did not, after all, devote himself exclusively or even mainly to drama. We cannot, however, be certain that because these areas have remained unreflected in his writings they also remained beyond his orbit of exploration or interest. At any rate, we are safe in crediting him with a knowledge of drama much wider than that possessed by the average reporter of Broadway entertainment in his day. And — what is more important — out of this knowledge he had evolved a philosophy of dramatic excellence and theatrical effectiveness by which to judge the product being offered the American theatre public in the year 1845.

3

What this philosophy of excellence amounted to was to become clear from his application of it to the living drama. He had apparently watched the state of theatrical reviewing for a long time, and had formed some definite ideas about its appalling shortcomings. Almost a decade before assuming his position as a molder of dramatic taste, he had insisted, in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger,[21] on the necessity of rescuing American stage criticism from the control of illiterate mountebanks, and had advocated placing it in the hands of gentlemen and scholars. And now at last his own chance had come, the chance for a gentleman and scholar to show what could be done.

That his standards were high is obvious; they obliged him to be cantankerous and cruel; and they involved him in much unpleasantness and — like his literary criticism — made bitter enemies for him. Even when he wished to be kind, the result was sometimes unavoidably embarrassing. Thus he comments on a new play by, apparently, [page 104:] some friend whose name he thoughtfully with holds: “And this is the American Drama” of — ! Well! — that Conscience which makes cowards of us all’ will permit me to say, in praise of the performance, only that it is not quite so bad as I expected it to be. But then,”“ he adds, “I always expect too much?”[22] We may be sure that, despite the critics thoughtfulness, the play wright was not grateful. And certainly no playwright could be expected to harbor the slightest inclination toward gratitude for a comment such as this: “L— is busy in attempting to prove that his play was not fairly d—d — that it is only scotched, not killed”; but if the poor Play could speak from the tomb, I fancy it would sing with the Opera heroine: The flattering error cease to prove! Oh, let me be deceased!’ ”[23] Poe's statement that he expected too much may not have been the whole truth, but it was true enough as a cause of his difficulties. He did expect much; and in the theatre of his day that was rarely to be found.

What the producers thought of the Broadway Journal's dramatic critic can best be judged from the actions of one of them. On April 7th Palmo's Opera House presented Sophocles's Antigone with music by Mendelssohn. Poe's review appeared five days later, and the next week his publication printed a scorching protest which it had received from the producer, W. Dinneford. The angry gentleman accused Mr. Poe of being ill-natured and unjust, and informed him that

In Justice ... to MYSELF, I have withdrawn your name from the free list. I am always prepar’d to submit, as a caterer for public amusement, to any just remarks, though they may be severe, but I do not feel MYSELF called upon to offer facilities to any one, to do me injury by animadversions evidently marked by ill feeling. [page 105:]

Mr. Poe's reply, entitled “Achilles’ Wrath,” and printed in the same issue of the Journal, is that of a scholar — courageous in the defense of his right to independence of judgment — but hardly that of a gentleman. It begins by attacking the producer's luxuriously elegant style of living (at the Astor House), complains that the letter of protest was sent without payment of postage, and proceeds to derive amusement from Mr. Dinneford's “shockingly bad hand,” bad punctuation, and eccentric underscoring. These betrayals of ill-temper are unfortunate, and detract from the substance of the reply, which, however, remains unimpaired. For in substance, Poe's reply constitutes a sort of manifesto, a brave, uncompromising declaration of the duty of the critic to remain uninfluenced in his judgments by considerations of self-interest.

We are not wasting words on this Quinneford(5) — it is the public to whom we speak — to the editorial corps in especial. We wish to call their attention to the peculiar character of the conditions which managers such as these have the impudence to avow, as attached to the privilege of the free list. No puff no privilege, is the contract. That is to say, an editor, when admitted to the theatre, is to be understood as leaving his conscience in the street. He is admitted not to judge — not to criticize — but to adulate.

Strangely enough, the review which provoked “Achilles’ Wrath” is, for Poe, rather tame. It begins with a dignified expression of the opinion that the Antigone of Sophocles is inferior to any of the plays of Aeschylus, [page 106:] and that, in general, the idea of reproducing a Greek play before a modern audience is that of a pedant. The “insufferable baldness” of Greek drama, verging on the platitudinous, was not the result of a “studied and supremely artistic simplicity” but rather of artistic inexperience. Drama as an art form, Poe suggests, demands “the long and painful progressive experience of the ages,” which the Greek playwrights had not had to the same extent as the “moderns.” To make matters worse, the production at Palmo's is not at all in the Greek manner and tends to become a burlesque of the original. He was therefore not surprised to observe that while on opening night a “very respectable” audience was present, the second night brought only less than a hundred paying spectators. He then proceeds to praise one of the actors, Mr. Vandenhoff, as a capital “elocutionist” — which in Poe's vocabulary was a word of commendation and synonymous with “actor”(6) — to bestow some superlatives upon Mendelssohn for his music, and to condemn the execution of the choruses:

a large number of men are paraded upon the stage, scarcely one third of them singing correctly, while the other two thirds either do not sing at all, or vamp the words and music. ... Indeed, the whole of the musical arrangements reflect but little credit upon Mr. Loder's reputation as an energetic and skillful conductor.[25]

It is true that, as Professor Percy H. Boynton once charged, Poe was a literary “swashbuckler, cutting and [page 107:] thrusting, and strutting about a stage on which he played the villain to his complete satisfaction.”[26] Still, there is no reason to assume that his judgments, even in the case of Vandenhoff, were not sincere. How seriously he took his task of reviewing plays is indicated by his reference to both the first and second night audiences. He apparently saw the play twice. And in the case of another play, Mrs. Mowatt's Fashion, he claimed to have seen it ten times, besides having read it in manuscript. Such an attitude toward current drama was unknown among American critics at the time, as it is uncommon today. Poe may have enjoyed his rôle of castigator, of stern judge and merciless exposer of sham and shoddy; he may even have mistaken, as Lowell suggested, his phial of prussic acid for his inkstand[27]; but all this is unimportant beside the fact that he brought to stage criticism a sense of responsibility as well as dignity and scholarship. He had pledged himself to “honest and fearless opinion”[28] and, like the great reviewers in the British journals which he read regularly — Jeffrey, North, Hazlitt, Macaulay — he felt that severity was inseparable from honesty and fearlessness. But even if his method was at times ungentlemanly, it was wholesomely prophylactic at a time when puffery and sentimentality were rampant along Broadway.

4

The review of the Antigone production is a typical sample of Poes “executionery” skill, but not of his method of critical procedure. Generally his reviews beg in with a synopsis or sketch of the plot, continue with a statement of the dramatic principles by which [page 108:] the reviewer chooses to be guided, and end with an application of those principles to the play and production under review. The last step involves detailed analysis, comment, and judgment. While he abhorred the prevalent type of eulogy which passed for criticism, he was equally opposed to the purely impressionistic attack; his ideal was a judicious weighing of good and bad points, and more often than not he achieved his ideal.

It is in his synopses that Poe's training as “magazinist” makes itself felt. Each synopsis is clear, objective, and, despite seeming length, to the point. Even when he intends to tear the play down, the summary of the action is generally just and unclouded by his intention. All relevant details and complications are deftly and economically given, so that his discussion can be followed by a reader who may not have seen or read the play. Sometimes it would seem that the amount of space devoted to a retelling of the plot is out of proportion to the rest of the review. Thus his first report on Fashion[29] consists of seven paragraphs of synopsis and eight of comment.(7) But since so much of what he has to say revolves either around the plot or the action of the characters, his lengthy synopsis is a logical necessity.

It is both logical and necessary because for Poe — as for Aristotle — no play existed unless it had a plot. His definition of plot as a “construction” in which “no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole” we have already noted. Here his elaboration of the definition [page 109:] deserves our attention. It is “a building so dependently constructed, that to change the position of a single brick is to overthrow the entire fabric.”[30] He believed this to be true of the novel as well as of the drama, and repeated his definition, in but slightly different words, on many occasions. “A plot,” he wrote in an article on American drama, “is perfect only inasmuch as we shall find ourselves unable to detach from it or disarrange any single incident involved, without destruction to the mass.”[31] He was consistent in his Aristotelian assertion that any literary composition must be an organic whole. And in consistently demanding that the dramatists of his day meet his definition he found himself obliged to pass adverse judgment on practically all the plays he reviewed. For the American theatre of 1845 was not the theatre of Ibsen, not even of Dumas fils; it was rather the theatre of Sheridan Knowles, Bulwer-Lytton, and Dion Boucicault.

Poe's first objection to Mrs. Mowatt's play is on the ground of the unoriginality of its plot. “Had it ... been designed,” he remarks, “as a burlesque upon the arrant conventionality of stage incidents in general, we should have regarded it as a palpable hit.” And, indeed, his summary of the hoary complications Fashion utilizes reads like a page in the writings of our own contemporary satirist of Times Square antics, George Jean Nathan. “Their hackneyism,” exclaims Poe, “is no longer to be endured. The day has at length arrived when men demand rationalities in place of conventionalities.”[32]

In his second review[33] of this play he modifies somewhat his strictures on the score of unoriginality of plot. Now that he has seen several performances he is [page 110:] not quite sure that Mrs. Mowatt's “thesis” is not an original one. The idea of satirizing fashion as fashion, rather than specific fashionable foibles, appeals to him. He realizes, however, that this is a distinction too nice to be of any practical value, and that he can really let himself go only so far as to admit “some pretension to originality of plot,” a mere shadow of originality, and even that vanishes in the presentation.

A more detailed development of his ideas on the subject of dramatic plot is embodied in his review of Nathaniel Parker Willis's Tortesa, the Usurer. Since this contribution to the American Whig Review[34] is part of a general survey of American drama, rather than a hasty report of a theatrical performance, Poe formulates his thoughts carefully. Again we have the detailed synopsis of the action, but we are warned that the story makes better sense in this form “than in the words of the play itself.” For Tortesa, as a play, is cluttered with irrelevant intrigue, introduced for the sake of “action,” “business,” or “vivacity.” Willis evidently did not know that “a mere succession of incidents, even the most spirited, will no more constitute a plot, than a multiplication of zeros, even the most infinite, will result in the production of a unit.” A plot, Poe repeats, is an organic whole; it can be said to exist only “when no one of its component parts” is “susceptible of removal without detriment to the whole.”

In other words, we are once more with Poe's favorite principle of unity. Only a unified plot is capable of imparting pleasure. Not that he would rule out all illustrative incident, or even digressive episodes; for in the hands of a skilful artist, such as Shakespeare, they become consequential underplots. In the hands of a Willis, [page 111:] in however, they remain nothing but overloading, pure “fuss,” and cause weariness and unintelligibility. Three fourths of Tortesa's plot could be removed and not missed. Besides being, like Mrs. Mowatt, unoriginal and uninventive, Willis commits the even greater sin of permitting much of his hackneyed dramatic action to remain unmotivated. “In fact,” concludes Poe, “the whole drama is exceedingly ill motivirt.” This could not have happened had the author submitted his plot to the discipline of structure. For every plot, Poe tells us in “The Philosophy of Composition,” if it is to be worth the name, “must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation. ...”(8) Apparently neither Willis nor Mrs. Mowatt had the knowledge and skill to manage it.

And certainly not Longfellow in his feeble bid for dramatic attention. For his Spanish Student has no construction at all. It, of course, has other faults. Imitative ness is one; it constantly reminds us of something we have seen before. Bookishness is another; it abounds in literary allusions which require explanatory notes, and are objectionable because the drama, Poe reminds us, “demands that everything be ... instantaneously evident”; notes to a play impress him only with the fact that their author is desirous of showing his reading. Then there is the matter of Longfellow's style, which is both tautological and ungrammatical. But these are admittedly [page 112:] minor faults. The major trouble with the Spanish Student is that it is not a play at all. It may have some merit as a poem, but as a play it does not exist. In two final sentences Poe disposes of Longfellow's dramatic effort tersely and neatly: “Let a poem be a poem only; let a play be a play and nothing more. As for ‘The Spanish Student,’ its thesis is unoriginal; its incidents are antique; its plot is not plot; its characters have no character: in short, it is little better than a play upon words, to style it ‘A Play’ at all.”[36]

He knew of but one test for a play: that it be actable. This is clear from the complimentary letter he wrote to Sarah Josepha Hale in January, 1846. He has re-read her Ormond Grosvenor, he tells her, and has become confirmed in his first impression of the play's “vigor and dramaticism. I not only think highly of this individual play, but deduce ... that with earnest endeavor in this walk of Literature, you would succeed far better than any American in the composition of that rare work of art, an effective acting play.”[37] He then proceeds to advise her to curtail some of her dialogue.

5

Poe has been accused of permitting at times personal prejudice or expediency to influence his critical writings. In the case of a few of his reviews of current books, especially poetry, there is some truth in the accusation, but it cannot apply to his writings on drama. Personal motives did betray him once in a while to a digression, or a non sequitur — as in his reference to Mrs. Ellet's embonpoint[38] — but even in these cases the play he was reviewing was, generally, bad and deserved the castigation to which he subjected it. Certainly his charge [page 113:] against Longfellow's characters cannot be ascribed to mere dislike of an eminent “Frogpondian.” It is rather the expression of a judgment based on a cherished critical principle. Stage characters for Poe had to be human beings, consistent in behavior, plausible, “natural”; in other words, they had to be what we have since come to understand by the term “realistic.” In this sense, Par rington's statement that Poe was the first of our critics is indeed true. For it was Poe who first rebelled against the conventional puppets with which the American playwright populated the stage. “There is not one particle of any nature,” he wrote of Fashion, “beyond green-room nature in it. ... Our fault finding,” he added, “is on the score of deficiency in verisimilitude — in natural art — that is to say, in art based in the natural laws of man's heart and understanding.”

These “natural laws “require, of course, that behavior on the stage be convincing, an end which a playwright can achieve only when his characters act in conformity with their natures. The weakness of Willis's characters is not only that they are negative — “The Duke is no body; Falcone, nothing; Zippa, less than nothing” — but also that they are made to do things which violate their natures. The leading character, for instance, reforms in the end, without any preparation for such a change. The fact that the transformation is brought about by a dramatic twist which is older than the hills is reprehensible enough, but even more reprehensible is the lack of character motivation. “When,” Poe says, “in the course of the dénouement, the usurer bursts forth into an eloquence virtue-inspired, we cannot sympathize heartily in his fine speeches, since they proceed from the mouth of the self-same egotist who ... uttered so 9 [page 114:] many sotticisms ... in the earlier passages of the play.”

Poe cannot bring himself to accept violations of the principle of naturalism even where he obviously wishes to be generous. His sentiments toward Mrs. Frances Osgood are by now well-known and, as we have seen, involved him in embarrassing and unhappy situations. It was, therefore, only natural that he should begin a review of a work of hers with a tribute to her personal character, which is “one perpetual poem.” But the work under review, Elfrida, bears the subtitle, “a Dramatic Poem, in five acts,” and Poe could no more accept such an impossible combination from Mrs. Osgood than from Mr. Longfellow. Moreover, as drama — the embarrassed critic is obliged to admit — it is “faulty in the extreme,” full of impossible situations and inconsequential incidents. And although the leading character is forcefully portrayed, the force displayed by the author is poetic rather than dramatic. Elfrida and the events narrated are not integrated to produce the singleness of effect which the good dramatist must strive for. “The object of poetry,” Poe gently informs Mrs. Osgood, “is beauty ”; while the object of drama “is the portraiture of nature in human action and earthly incident.”[39]

Nor does the moral which the play attempts to preach redeem it as a work of art. Poe reminds Mrs. Osgood of the old adage that “there is a time for all things,” and adds that it is not the office of drama — nor of poetry, for that matter — “to inculcate truth or virtue, unless incidentally.” He then proceeds to lecture to the lady — and to the readers of Godey's — on the relationship between moral preachment and dramatic art. His lecture is so much a part of his persistent, almost single handed [page 115:] effort to remove the “curse of the didactic” which afflicted the drama of his day — and, in fact, American literature in general — that the following quotation, lengthy though it be, seems unavoidable:

Now, the conveying of what is absurdly termed, “a moral,” ... should be left to the essayist and preacher. Those who uphold the value, in a moral point of view, of such absurdities as “George Barnwell,” seem to us strangely paradoxical in their demands and expectations. “George Barnwell” is applauded for its “moral” — that is to say, for the impressiveness with which it conveys the truth that dissipation leads to crime and crime to punishment; but we are at a loss to understand how this truth, or how any truth can be conveyed by that which is in itself confessedly a lie. Does the fact that a dramatist invented a fiction that one George Barnwell was hung for robbing his uncle, tend to prove in any way that every man who robs his uncle will actually be hung? It is not in the power of any fiction to inculcate any truth. The truthfulness, the indispensable truthfulness of drama, has reference only to the fidelity with which it should depict nature, so far as regards her points, first, and, secondly, her general intention. Her arrangement or combination of points may be improved — that is to say, a greater number of striking points than are ever seen closely conjoined in reality, may, for artificial purposes be gathered into the action of a drama — provided always that there be no absolute controversion of nature's general intention. But all this is very different from the inculcation of truth. The drama, in a word, must be truthful without conveying the true — just as the brain, although the seat of sensation, is nearly, if not altogether, insensible itself.

It is clear that Poe was an early advocate of naturalism, of “fidelity “in depicting life on the stage; it is, however, equally clear that he was far from advocating the brand of naturalism which came into vogue some decades after Poe and has confined so much of the drama of our own day to photographic literalism. Poe never made the [page 116:] mistake of confusing the reality of art with that of life. “Arrangement,” “combination,” “artistical purposes” — these are terms which in the modern revolt against photographic sterility in the drama have become heated slogans. It is as if the critic of the 1840's, while leading a movement for a more naturalistic drama, one that would break with the conventions of Romantic melodrama and the theatricalities of Dion Boucicault, was at the same time adumbrating the many anti-naturalistic movements of the Twentieth century, the latest of which is being led, in the 1940's, by the Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.

It is only in the light of Poe's fullest statement of his critical criteria that we can begin to understand his enthusiasm for such a second-rate play as Bulwer-Lytton's The Lady of Lyons. Here was a tremendously popular melodrama which moved “rapidly and consequentially “and whose incidents were “skillfully wrought into execution.” Its characters had the merit of being “natural,” although, Poe admitted, they showed no marked individuality. Except one, Pauline, whom he defends against the charge made by other critics that she is weak, mercenary, and ignoble. What if she is? he asks. “We are not dealing with Clarissa Harlow. Bulwer has painted a woman.” But the highest compliment he bestows upon Pauline is not that she possesses verisimilitude, but that she has been drawn with imagination, that she is a creation, one that would have done no dishonor to Shakespeare himself.[40] We may smile today at this implied comparison, but the fact remains that in the theatre of his day Poe could find but few examples of character portrayal combining dramatic shill with a semblance of reality. [page 117:]

The major trouble with the drama of the day, as Poe saw it, was its traditional imitativeness. Again and again he commented on the fact that while all the other arts had made an effort to retain some measure of originality and to develop new forms, the drama alone had remained stationary, “prating about Aeschylus and the Chorus, or mouthing Euphuism.” This view he expressed most vigorously in an editorial article contributed to the New York Evening Mirror early in January, 1845,[41] under the title, “Does the Drama of the Day Deserve Support? “His answer was, of course, a categorical negative. Dramatic art being essentially imitative, one drama was apt to be fashioned too nearly after another; consequently, “there is less originality — less independence — less thought ... less effort to keep up with the general movement of the time ... more rank and arrant conventionality in the drama, than in any single thing in existence which aspires to the dignity of art.” He would not admit that the drama had “declined it had simply not kept pace, like the other arts, with the spirit of the times.

He had but one remedy to suggest: The American playwright must discard all the old models. He must come to a realization that no public could be expected to continue supporting a drama teeming with absurd conventionalities and “monstrous inartisticalities.” He must dare to bring his own thought to his craft, to apply “principles of dramatic composition founded in Nature, and in common sense.” For “the common sense, even of the mob,” Poe exclaims, “can no longer be affronted, night after night, with impunity.”

More specifically, the two anachronisms of the soliloquy and the “aside,” inherited from the Elizabethan [page 118:] theatre, must be abandoned. And it is with an attack on these, expressed in his most characteristic “magazinist” style, that Poe ends his editorial:

If, for example, a playwright will persist in making a hero deliver a soliloquy upon the stage, such as no human being ever soliloquised in ordinary life, — ranting transcendentalism at the audience as nothing conceivable ever before ranted, short of a Piankitank candidate for Congress — splitting the ears of the house, and endangering the lives of the orchestra, the while that a confidential friend who holds him by the shoulder is supposed not to overhear a single syllable of all that is said: — if the playwright, we say, will persist in perpetrating these atrocities, and a hundred infinitely worse, for no better reason than that there were people silly enough to perpetrate them four or five hundred years ago if he will do this, and will not do anything else to the end of Time what right has he ... to look any honest man in the face and talk to him about ... “the decline of the drama?”

That he felt keenly on the subject is indicated by the fact that when he came to review Fashion some three months after the Mirror article, he continued to write in the same vein: “Will our playwrights never learn,” he asked rhetorically, “that an audience under no circumstances can or will be brought to conceive that what is sonorous in their own ears at a distance of fifty feet from the speaker cannot be heard by an actor at the distance of one or two?”[42] And five months still later he began a marginal note in Godey's with the statement: “When I call to mind the preposterous ‘asides’ and soliloquies of the drama among civilized nations, the shifts employed by the Chinese playwrights appear altogether respectable.”[43]

One cannot help recalling Poe's own play, Politian, which contains both soliloquies and “asides,” and which [page 119:] he could have used as an illustration of all the absurdities against which he inveighed. Apparently in the decade between his attempt at playwriting and his work as dramatic critic he had thought much on the subject of the American drama and had evolved his naturalistic principles. Of the deeper possibilities of the soliloquy in dramatic technique he had no inkling. In spite of his intimate knowledge of Hamlet, he had overlooked its use by Shakespeare as a device for revealing the profoundest thoughts and impulses of character. There is not the slightest foreshadowing of its employment by, say, such a novelist as Melville, only half a decade later, in Moby Dick, in a way which, after Joyce, would become established as “the interior monologue.”[44] And he surely did not envisage the possibility that three-quarters of a century later an American playwright, Eugene O’Neill, in Strange Interlude, would combine both the soliloquy and the “aside” into a new medium, adding a whole dimension to character portrayal on the stage.

For his own day, however, Poe was the critic the American stage needed at the moment. The fight for a realistic drama was just beginning, and required the ser vices of a fearless, vigorous pen. Even Dion Boucicault, whose plays were one of Poe's pet aversions, had just made a contribution toward the “naturalizing” of the drama. His London Assurance — which Poe called “the most inane and utterly despicable of all modem come dies”[45] — had been produced with a ceiling over the stage, making the set look like a real room. Realism was beating behind the canvas walls, and plays with the breath and idiom of ordinary human experience were desperately needed. It seems strange that the man who [page 120:] in his own creative work showed all the tendencies toward a movement which we in our century have come to recognize as “Expressionism” the man who peopled his poems and stories with typically expressionistic forms, should, as a critic, champion realistic drama. Yet strange as it seems, it is nevertheless true that Edgar Allan Poe, the poet of Tamerlanes, Israfels, Conquering Worms, and misty mid-regions of Weir, was a capable accoucheur of the drama of commonsense and everyday life.

6

Poe's comments on production and acting were equally thoughtful and far in advance of the practices in the theatres of his day. He objected to the rectangular crossings and recrossings of characters on the stage; to their coming down to the footlights when important communications were to be made; to the reading of private letters in loud rhetorical tones.[46] In other words, he objected to the entire style of pre-naturalistic theatre. It was for this reason that he welcomed innovations in realistic staging; for, by creating the illusion of reality, such innovations sometimes succeeded in saving a bad play. “If,” he predicted in his first review of Fashion, the play should succeed, “it will owe the greater portion of its success to the very carpets, the very ottomans, the very chandeliers, and the very conservatories” that made popular even such a play as Boucicault's London Assurance. He was discerning enough to differentiate between the dramatic qualities of a play and those imparted to it by an effective production. The fact that Boucicault's comedy had survived five hundred performances in a lavish mounting did not blind him to its insignificance as a play.[47] [page 121:]

Professor Odell, the annalist of the New York stage, has remarked that Poe reviewed Fashion with the effect of breaking a butterfly on the wheel.[48] The effect has evidently been greatly exaggerated, like the effect of dramatic criticism in general on the success or failure of plays in our own day. Fashion was a huge success in 1845, was revived professionally as recently as 1929, and is still being played from time to time in our community and college theatres. This, of course, constitutes no reflection on Poe's judgment, any more than the popularity of Abie's Irish Rose, a short while ago, was a reflection on contemporary dramatic critics, nearly all of whom felt that this stage confection could hardly be called a specimen of noble drama. Nor was the effect of Poe's other “animadversions “as catastrophic as we may be inclined to suppose. It is certain that The Taming of the Shrew has survived, in spite of Poe's belief that the whole design of Shakespeare's comedy was “not only unnatural but an arrant impossibility — “because, ex plained Poe, “The heart of no woman could ever have been reached by brute violence.”[49] It would seem that this was spoken by the Virginia gentleman of the 1840's no less than by the dramatic critic. However, an imitation of Shakespeare's Shrew, produced at Niblo's under the title of Katharine and Petruchio, has not survived. The Broadway Journal's critic dismissed it as “absolutely beneath contempt — a mere jumble of un meaning rant, fuss, whip-smacking, crockery-cracking, and other Tom-Foolery of a similar kind.”[50]

That Poe's interest in theatrical production was not a sudden acquisition, in maturity, is indicated by some of the items he included in “Pinakidia,” published in the Southern Literary Messenger as early as 1836. In one [page 122:] such item he noted Von Raumers mention of an optical representation of the banquet scene in Macbeth by means of a shadowy figure thrown into the chair of Banquo. The idea had been conceived by Enslen, a German optician, and Poe mentioned it with approval because it could be “accomplished without difficulty” and because it produced an “intense effect upon the audience.” In another item he took Voltaire to task for boasting of having introduced the Roman senate on the stage in red mantles and for having misunderstood the Greek use of masks.[51] It is logical to assume that Poe's interest in production methods and effects antedated the writing of “Pinakidia.” Very likely it went as far back as his school-days, for surely the boy Edgar who had founded and directed a Thespian society could not have been without curiosity about ways and means of staging plays. From those early days to the days of his maturity his interest in production remained fresh and enthusiastic. As an established critic he testified that “the usual outcry against stage-effects,’ as being meretricious, has no foundation in reason.”[52]

For the mature dramatic critic, however, the play came first; then, the production; and, finally, the acting. He was ready to defend acting as a profession and as high art on every occasion, but no actor could hope to receive his commendation unless he possessed talent. “The actor of talent,” he wrote in his famous defense of Mrs. Mowatt, “is poor at heart, indeed, if he do not look with contempt upon the mediocrity even of a king.”[53] On the other hand, the actor of no talent, like Mrs. Mowatt's leading man, could expect nothing but contempt from Mr. Poe. “In Ruy Gomez,” he wrote, “Mr. Crisp was intolerable.” This referred to the leading [page 123:] character in Planché's Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady. Mr. Crisp was intolerable because he had failed to understand the character he was presumed to represent. According to Poe, Ruy Gomez, “as designed by Planché, is a dashing, ardent, chivalric cavalier, urged to extreme audacity by the madness of his passion, but preserving through all a true dignity,” while Mr. Crisp “makes him an impudent trickster — at times even a vulgar chuckling mountebank — occasionally a simpering buffoon.”[54]

Lack of understanding, and, consequently, doing violence to the playwright's conception, was the un forgivable crime. The opposite was therefore deserving of the award of merit. The first of Mrs. Mowatt's virtues as an actress is that her “conceptions of character are good.” This is indispensable but, of course, not enough. Mrs. Mowatt is also dowered with excellent elocution, with an expressive countenance, general beauty, marvellous self possession, a queenly step, and a grace of manner which, in Poe's opinion, has never been equalled on the stage. Above all, she possesses the essential quality of enthusiasm — which is “an unaffected freshness of the heart, the capacity not only to think but to feel.”[55]

This was his considered judgment after observing her acting a number of times. When he had first seen her, as Pauline in Bulwer-Lytton's The Lady of Lyons, he noted down minor qualities of physical and temperamental equipment for the stage. Her figure, slight but eminently graceful”; her not unintellectual forehead; her grey, brilliant, and expressive eyes; her well-formed Roman nose(9) and energetic chin; her largish mouth, [page 124:] brilliant and even teeth, and flexible, expressive lips; her radiantly beautiful smile, the like of which he did not remember ever having seen before; and, finally, her profusion of rich auburn hair.[56] That this appreciation of sheer physical beauty was not confined to the appeal of a particular woman is clear from Poe's remarks about other actresses, such as this comment about Miss Horne, one of the performers in Fashion: “She sets at naught all criticism in winning all hearts. There is about her lovely countenance a radiant earnestness of expression which is sure to play a Circean trick with the judgment of every person who beholds it.”[57] And even more than feminine beauty, Poe, like all critics of acting, could not help appreciating the importance to an actor of an adequate physical equipment for his exacting career. Thus among the talents for which he admired his friend Murdoch — talents which included the comprehension of “the whole rationale of elocution,” — he was careful to list the possession of physical powers which enabled Murdoch to give effect to his conceptions. Although Poe realized that this “best elocutionist in America” was “somewhat” deficient in naturalness, there was ample compensation in his “effective delivery and grace of gesture.”[58]

These laudatory comments run counter to the popular belief that Poe was always a bitter, mean, and cantankerous [page 125:] critic, a belief based mainly on Griswold's spiteful Memoir.(10) They show a man with definite enthusiasms, with the capacity — in his own phrase — “not only to think but to feel.” It is true, however, that his services to the American drama and theatre were perhaps greater by virtue of his indignant rejection of the cheap, the meretricious, and the mediocre. His vocabulary in dispraise of the talentless and unworthy was pointed and picturesque. We have already noted his dismissal of Mr. Crisp with the one massive word “intolerable.” Similarly he polished off an actress at Niblo's with the one statement that “Miss Taylor spoke and stepped more like a chambermaid than a princess.”[59]

And sometimes his keenest shafts were aimed not at the actors, nor at the production, but at the one element in the theatre which critics dared not then — nor often dare today — attack: the public. He was sure that Willis's Tortesa was a bad play but he predicted a successful run for it nevertheless, because it had many points “well calculated to tell with a conventional audience.”[60] The Honeymoon, he remarked in another review, “is a wretched affair, which has been unluckily saved to the stage (for its sins) by a number of sparkling points well adapted to tell with audiences too ill-cultivated to estimate merit otherwise than in detail.”[61] Or he wrote a dead-pan one-sentence review, such as this “At the Chatham, a vast number of [page 126:] people without coats [this review appeared in August], have been thrown into raptures by the representation of The Female Horsethief,’ in which the leading character is one Margaret Catchpole, and the leading incident her riding en homme a very lazy and very stupid little horse.”[62]

7

Poe's interests were wide and varied and his self confidence was abundant. The theatre, as he understood it, included many artistic activities besides the production of drama. It included, at the lower level, vaudeville and the circus, and, at the higher level, music, ballet, and grand opera. Thus he reports that at Castle Garden the public is well entertained by Herr Cline performing on a tight rope.[63] At the same theatre, he reports on another occasion, “the chief attraction has been the admirable dancing of Mademoiselle Desjardins. Since Ellsler,” he adds, “we have had no one more graceful.”[64] Of another dancer he wrote: “I should not say, of Taglioni, exactly that she dances, but that she laughs with her arms and legs.”[65]

We have seen that, in his review of Antigone, he did not hesitate to pass judgment on the music of Mendelssohn, the conducting of Loder, and the singing of the chorus. If, at times, he seemed modest enough to con tent himself with a general comment on the production of an opera, and to refer the reader to the music department for more specialized criticism — as in the case of La Juive, presented at the Park Theatre by a French troupe[66] — it was because there was a clear understanding on the Broadway Journal that Mr. Henry C. Watson was “in entire control of the Musical department.”[67] Even Mr. Poe — or, perhaps, especially [page 127:] Mr. Poe — must have known by this time that the toes of department heads — literary, theatrical or musical — were very sensitive. Yet he managed to wedge in a musical remark now and then, such as that Pico was singing at Castle Garden, “delightfully, of course.”[68](11)

Besides, there were other publications and other departments in which he could express his opinions, general and specific, on music. In at least two marginal notes he expounds his philosophy of indefiniteness as an essential element of “true musical expression.”[70] In another note, contributed to the Democratic Review, he discusses the philosophy and science of music. He admits that his acquaintance with eminent composers is limited, but it is sufficient to convince him that few of the “so-called scientific musicians “know anything about acoustics and mathematical deductions. They look blank when such a well-informed person as himself happens to mention the mechanism of the Sirène or to allude to the oval vibrations at right angles.[71] In still another note, published in the Southern Literary Messenger, he quotes Mozart's death-bed statement that he “began to see what may be done in music “and remarks that “it is to be hoped that De Meyer and the rest of the spasmodists will, eventually, begin to understand what may not be done in this particular branch of the Fine Arts.”[72] [page 128:]

It is important to add that for Poe music was related to acting in that it was essentially a collaborative, or public, activity. Much as he loved music — and he often referred to it as one of his “passions” — he did not believe that a musician, anymore than an actor, could derive the fullest satisfaction from performing, unless there was an audience to hear him. Coming upon a statement of Marmontel's that music is the only talent which an artist can enjoy by himself, Poe adds: “No more than any other talent, is that for music susceptible of complete enjoyment, where there is no second party to appreciate its exercise.”[73]

It was this “second party” which Poe found essential to the well-being, to the very existence of the artist — musical, literary, or dramatic. This view was undoubtedly a reflection of Poe's own habit as an artist: before he himself could function creatively he always envisaged an audience. In a way, it was an audience which was the real instrument upon which he played. He had played upon it as a boy Thespian, as a lieutenant in the Richmond Volunteers, as an orator at the University of Virginia, as a Drum-Major at West Point, and as a literary histrio afterwards. He now played upon it as a dramatic critic, as a lecturer at Lyceums, and as an elocutionist in literary salons. It may be said of him with justice that all of his creative activities partook of the theatre and colored his principles and philosophy of art.

For the theatre has no existence without an audience. And not alone for the performer — who has only a public life, in the Henry Jamesian sense — but for the listener as well. Half of the latter's pleasure, Poe pointed out, is derived not from the performance but from his consciousness [page 129:] of being part of an audience. Poe illustrated his point by means of an incident which had occurred at the Park Theatre when an eccentric gentleman found himself the solitary occupant of box, pit, and gallery. Had he been permitted to remain he would have derived “but little enjoyment from his visit,” said Poe. “It was an act of mercy to turn him out.”[40] And without audience response, participation, effect, Poe's own work is not completely understandable. He once wrote a little essay on the art of conversation, an art of which, we have observed, he was a proficient practitioner. “To converse well,” the little item begins, “we need the cool tact of talent — to talk well the glowing abandon of genius.” There is no question as to which qualification he believed himself to possess. Nevertheless he was aware that his own talk was not always the performance of genius. That was apparently when his particular audience at the moment was not cooperating. Perhaps this offers an explanation, partially at least, of the contradictory reports about him we have received from his contemporaries: on the one hand, enthusiastic testimony and of his sparkling conversation, of his brilliance warmth; on the other hand, no less authentic but equally positive testimony of his aloofness and sullenness. “Men of very high genius,” he wrote in his short essay, “talk at one time very well, at another very ill: — well, when they have full time, full scope, and a sympathetic listener.”[75] The last was obviously essential to a performer like Poe.

8

But to return to the scholarly gentleman who aspired to rescue American stage criticism from the hands of [page 130:] those who were neither scholarly nor gentlemen. A modern essayist has characterized Poe as “the Mencken and Nathan and Burton Rascoe of his day all mixed together in one hell's brew.”[76] This is clever and contains a certain amount of truth, but it is not entirely fair to Poe. He was, like the three gentlemen mentioned, a severe critic with a sharp style; in some instances, he may even have justified the complaint of his friend and admirer, Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers, that he, Poe, used the tomahawk instead of the pruning-knife, with which he not only lopped off redundant limbs but eradicated the entire tree.[77] Poe, I am sure, like the three modern critics of tomahawk-wielding propensities, might have countered that, in some instances eradication of the entire tree was precisely what was needed. At any rate, as a dramatic critic Poe was in many ways a prophet and a champion of the type of drama and theatre we have, at their best, today, and his dramatic reviews were indeed, as one historian of American literary criticism has noted, “easily seventy-five years in advance of his time.”[78]

He believed in realistic drama, containing plots whose plausibility could be tested by experience in real rather than stage life. He demanded characters that should be human beings rather than stage puppets. He advocated the abandonment of outworn dramaturgic traditions and models which no longer had any validity for a theatre which had changed both physically and intellectually. At a time when our native drama was held in contempt by critics and public alike, he preached the doctrine that “to Americans the American drama is the special point of interest,”[79] and if the American drama today is accorded the critical dignity of being accepted as a reflection [page 131:] of American life, no little credit is due to the vision and courage of the plain-speaking Mr. Poe.(12)

Another and perhaps keener type of vision was required to foresee the ultimate emergence of a type of stage vehicle which, Poe predicted, might have to be designated merely as “a play,” because the older classifications — “tragedy, comedy, farce, opera, pantomime, melodrama, or spectacle” — would no longer apply to it. He welcomed this phenomenon in anticipation, believing that such a play would be able to “retain some portion of the idiosyncratic excellencies of each “of the other genres, while introducing “a new class of excellence as yet unnamed because as yet undreamed of in the world.”[81] One is justified in assuming that Poe would have greeted heartily such “a play “as Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, which the author called a comedy but which the public insists on accepting as a tragedy, or Maxwell Anderson's Knickerbocker Holiday, which the author called a musical comedy but which the public thinks of as a serious drama.

He insisted on acting based on direct observation of nature rather than on hackneyed theatrical routine. Had he been able to he would have cleared the temple of tricksters and pretenders. He believed that acting was “a profession which ... embraces all that can elevate and ennoble,”[82] and if the American actor today finds himself respected as the practitioner of a dignified art, we must again grant a certain measure of credit to the “atrabiliar “Mr. Poe. [page 132:]

Here too — in the art of acting — his clear vision enabled him to foresee future developments. In fact, he adumbrated some of the theories, now widely practiced in the theatres of the world, of Constantin Stanislavsky. The great charm which Mrs. Mowatt's acting had for him he attributed to her naturalism and to her ability to speak and move with “a well-controlled impulsiveness as different as can be conceived from the customary rant and cant — the hack conventionality of the stage/’[83] His vocabulary of acting values — “naturalism,” “well controlled,” “seeming impulsiveness” — reads as though it appeared in My Life in Art, which John Gielgud has called the modern actor's Bible.

Critics of Poe have found many shortcomings in his poetry, fiction, and literary essays; they have accused him of overestimating his creative powers and accomplishments. Only a few of them, however, have taken the precaution to examine his dramatic criticism. They could not fail to be impressed with his services to the American stage. He once remarked that the business of the critic is “so to soar that he shall see the sun, even though its orb be far below the horizon.”[84] Here at least, in the field of dramatic criticism, he did not overestimate himself. In the light of both what preceded him and what followed him, it is clear that when Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, son of strolling players, but proud gentleman of Virginia nonetheless, walked along Broadway he saw the sun.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 96:]

1 There still remains Col. T. H. Ellis's statement — mentioned in an earlier chapter — that Poe “was on the stage in Boston.” If this be true, then, for a while at least, the box-office was no problem at all.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 97:]

2 In connection with the unflattering surmises regarding Poe's “borrowed” knowledge, it seems only fair, on occasion, to let the accused speak for himself; for instance: “I hold Macaulay to possess more of the true critical spirit than Augustus William and Frederick Schlegel combined.” — Marginalia. And again: “For much of all this [the cant in current discussion of dramatic principle], we are indebted to the somewhat overprofound criticism of Augustus William Schlegel.”[8]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 98:]

3 Which, incidentally, he attributes to Aeschylus, thus indicating that he felt sure enough of his knowledge of the play to rely on his memory.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 101:]

4 One Germanic scholar has even accused Poe of borrowing from Goethe for a few scenes in Politian.[20]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 105:]

5 Although Poe here pretends that he is possibly misreading Mr. Dinneford's wretched signature, his deliberate use of this device for satirical purposes is typical. Thus he referred to Thomas Dunn English as “Thomas Dunn Brown” similarly, he once referred to Dr. Griswold as “Dr. Driswold.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 106:]

6 As in his comment on Mrs. Mowatt's performance in Bulwer-Lytton's The Lady of Lyons: “indeed all her movements evince the practiced elocutionist.” — Broadway Journal, July 19, 1845. Incidentally, George Vandenhoff was the gentleman who included “The Raven” in a text book on elocution, and was thus responsible for the first appearance of the poem in book form.[24]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 108:]

7 One device sometimes resorted to by present-day dramatic reviewers, in cases where they have no favorable comment to make and are not in a position to speak out unfavorably, is to devote the entire space allotted to them to a non-committal rehash of the plot. Poe, however, sooner or later always committed himself.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 111:]

8 Another statement seems even more revealing of Poe's philosophy of composition: “I believe it is Montaigne who says — ‘People talk about thinking, but, for my part, I never begin to think until I sit down to write.’ A better plan for him would have been, never to sit down to write until he had made an end of thinking.”[35]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 123, running to the bottom of page 124:]

9 Apparently a well-formed nose, “with the Roman curve” was for [page 124:] Poe an indication of more than energy; it also bespoke high-born quality, and was aesthetically beautiful. He used the terms “Roman” and “Hebrew” interchangeably. Thus the heroine of what he considered his best story, “Ligeia,” is the possessor of a nose of such perfection as to remind him of “the graceful medallions of the Hebrews.” And Roderick Usher, the hero of what critics generally consider his best story, is endowed with a nose “of a delicate Hebrew model.” Usher, it is also interesting to note, is just as generally accepted as a self-portrait of the author.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 125:]

10 See, for instance, Poe as a Literary Critic, by the Virginia novelist John Esten Cooke, a manuscript recently discovered in a private collection and published by the Johns Hopkins Press (1946) for the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. This essay is obviously founded on Griswold, but revisions indicate that as more objective knowledge of Poe became available Mr. Cooke, an honest gentleman, felt impelled to tone down his earlier Griswoldian harshness.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 127:]

11 He had had a better chance as a book reviewer in this respect. When, for instance, half a decade earlier, he reviewed the Memoirs and Letters of Madame Malibran for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, he spread himself on the subject of singing, discussing learnedly such matters as the range of Malibran's voice, embracing “three complete octaves, extending from the contralto D to the upper soprano D,” and the effect of melodic transitions “from the voce di petto to the voce di’ testa.” He pronounced the cantatrice unequaled as an actress because of her apparent absence of acting.[69]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 131:]

12 Of the obligation on the part of the American critic to be plainspoken, Poe's own words are a sufficient justification: “It is folly to assert, as some at present are fond of asserting, that the Literature of any nation or age was ever injured by plain speaking. ... As for American Letters, plain-speaking about them is, simply, the one thing needed.”[80]