Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini | Page 2

to serve him in good stead during his diplomatic years, but which he threw over for the stronger pull of poetry, whose Muse he could court without the necessity of driving it hard for support. Yet he was concerned about literature as a paying profession for others. On April 26, 1851, he wrote to Stoddard: "Alas! alas! Dick, is it not sad that an American author cannot live by magazine writing? And this is wholly owing to the want of our international copyright law. Of course it is little to me whether magazine writers get paid or not; but it is so much to you, and to a thousand others." The time, until 1847, was spent in foreign travel, but it is interesting to note, as indication of no mean literary attainment in the interim, that Princeton, during this period, bestowed on him the degree of M.A., for merit in letters.
1848 was a red-letter year for Boker. It witnessed the publication of his first volume of verse, "The Lessons of Life, and other Poems," and it introduced him to Bayard Taylor and to R.H. Stoddard. Of the occasion, Taylor writes on October 13, to Mary Agnew:
Young Boker, author of the tragedy, "Calaynos," a most remarkable work, is here on a visit, and spent several hours to-night with me. He is another hero,--a most notable, glorious mortal! He is one of our band, and is, I think, destined to high renown as an author. He is nearly my own age, perhaps a year or two older, and he has lived through the same sensations, fought the same fight, and now stands up with the same defiant spirit.
This friendship was one of excellent spiritual sympathy and remarkable external similarities and contrasts. One authority has written of their late years:
In certain ways, he and his friend, Bayard Taylor, made an interesting contrast with each other. Here was Boker [circa 1878] who had just come back from diplomatic service abroad; and here, too, was Taylor, who was just going abroad as minister to Berlin. Both were poets; they were fellow-Pennsylvanians and friends; and they were men of large mould physically, and of impressive presence; yet they were very dissimilar types. Boker, though massive and with a trace of the phlegmatic in his manner (perhaps derived from his Holland ancestors, the B?chers, who had come thither from France, and had then sent a branch into England, from which the American family sprang), was courtly, polished, slightly reserved. His English forefathers had belonged to the Society of Friends, as had also Taylor's family in Pennsylvania,--another point in common. But Taylor's appearance, as his friends will remember, was somewhat bluff and rugged; his manner was hearty and open.
Launched in the literary life, therefore, Boker began to write assiduously. "Calaynos," the tragedy referred to by Taylor, went into two editions during 1848, and the following year was played by Samuel Phelps at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London, May 10. From the New York Tribune office, on May 29, 1849, Taylor wrote:
Your welcome letter came this morning, and from the bottom of my heart was I rejoiced by it. I can well imagine your feeling of triumph at this earnest of fame.... I instantly hunted up the London "Times" and found "Calaynos" advertised for performance,--second night. I showed it to Griswold, who was nearly as much surprised and delighted as myself. Of course he will make good mention of it in his book. It will sell immensely for you, and especially just now, when you are coming out with "Anne Bullen" [sic.]. I shall not fail to have a notice of it in to-morrow morning's "Tribune."
Some authorities state that it was given by Phelps without Boker's consent. Another, who examined Boker's manuscripts, in possession of the poet's daughter-in-law, Mrs. George Boker, records that Barrett made cuts in the play, preparatory to giving it, Boker, even, revising it in part. The American premi��re was reserved for James E. Murdoch, at the Philadelphia Walnut Street Theater, January 20, 1851, and it was revived at the same playhouse in April, 1855, by E.L. Davenport. As Stoddard says of it, one "should know something--the more the better--about the plays that Dr. Bird and Judge Conrad wrote for Forrest and his successors, about Poe's 'Politian', Sargent's 'Velasco', Longfellow's 'Spanish Student'."
His choice of subject, in this, his first drama, indicated the romantic aloofness of Boker's mind, for he was always anxious to escape what Leland describes him as saying was a "practical, soulless, Gradgrind age." In fact, Boker had not as yet found himself; he was more the book-lover than the student of men he afterwards became.
"Read Chaucer for strength," he advises Stoddard on January 7, 1850, "read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read Milton for sublimity and thought, read Shakespeare for all these things, and