Dramatist and diplomat, b. Philadelphia, Penn., 6 Oct., 1823; d. there, 2 Jan., 1890. Graduated at Princeton, and, after a period of travel in Europe, made his permanent home in Philadelphia. His first volume of verse, “The Lesson of Life, and Other Poems,” was issued in 1847. It was succeeded the following year by “Calaynos,” a blank-verse tragedy, which was successfully produced in 1849 at a London theatre. “Franceses da Rimini” is now the best known of the metrical dramas which, with his miscellaneous poems, were published in two volumes, “Plays and Poems,” 1856. Mr. Boker was secretary of the Union League of Philadelphia from 1861 to 1871, and was actively patriotic during the Civil War. “Poems of the War,” containing some lyrics widely familiar, appeared in 1864. Later volumes are “Königsmark, and Other Poems,” 1869; “The Book of the Dead,” 1882; and “Sonnets,” 1886. He was U. S. minister to Turkey from 1871 to 1875, and to Russia from 1875 to 1879. Throughout his literary career he was closely associated with Bayard Taylor and R. H. Stoddard. To represent Boker with fairness, extracts should be given from the dramatic work to which he devoted his best powers, and for which the repeated success of “Calaynos” and “Francesca da Rimini” showed that he possessed both literary and practical equipments. The ballads, sonnets, etc., to which this Anthology is restricted, exhibit his lyrical strength and quality.
Personal
Young Boker, author of the tragedy of “Calaynos,” a most remarkable work, is here on a visit, and spent several hours tonight with me. He is another hero,—a most noble, 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.
An early portrait of Boker bears strong resemblance to Nathaniel Hawthorne in his manly prime. But passing decades, while they have not bent the tall, erect figure, have whitened the thick, military-looking moustache and short curling hair that contrast strikingly with a firm, ruddy complexion. His commanding presence and distinguished appearance are as well known in Philadelphia as his sturdy personality and polished manners are.
He had one quality which is the distinction of most great writers, of masterminds, like Shakespeare, Byron, Scott, and Browning,—fecundity of conception and rapidity of execution,—and beyond all other American poet’s creation was necessary to his intellectual well-being.
George H. Boker had a great influence on me. We were in a way connected, for my uncle Amos had married his aunt, and my cousin, Benjamin Godfrey, his cousin. He was exactly six feet high, with the form of an Apollo, and a head which was the very counterpart of the bust of Byron. A few years later N. P. Willis described him in the “Home Journal” as the handsomest man in America. He had been from boyhood as precociously a man of the world as I was the opposite. He was par éminence the poet of our college, and in a quiet, gentlemanly way its “swell.” I passed a great deal of my time in his rooms reading Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, the last named being his ideal.
This rare man, born to fortune and to a fashionable position which he enjoyed, kept up his classics and his literary work to the end…. There was something of the grandeur and gloom of Hawthorne about Mr. Boker when he was serious. At a dinner he preferred to be humorous. His temperament was changeful, as is always the case with children of genius. He was a gifted creature, and most generous to poor authors, for whom he drew many a check…. I know no man who seemed to me to have led more nobly the dual life of man of the world and man of the library. He had a beautiful head and the manners of Lord Chesterfield.
Excellent as some of his work has been, especially in his sonnets, it is undeniable that Boker’s work has not been taken with entire seriousness; the division of his abilities between two such divergent exactions explains in part his lack of a fast reputation. He was versatile beyond question, even attaining to high degree of skill as a mechanic. His personal appearance had something to do with his successes. Early in his life Willis had declared him “the handsomest man in America.” He was six feet in height, and Leland calls him “distingué,” and, again, “the American Sidney of his time.” Modesty was characteristic of him, and he never was first to allude to his writings. In his shyness he has been compared to Hawthorne…. As a representative American abroad he was irreproachable, and in attainments and social training he has been favorably compared with Motley. “Respectability” may have proved his bane in literature, though it was the mainspring of his social and political life.
General
Stoddard spent Saturday night with me, and we read the “Song of the Earth” together. He was rapturous in his praises as we went along, swinging on your dactyls, marching through your files of iambics, and sliding over your anapests. He has the soul to comprehend the grandeur of the thing, and not a drop of that damnable spirit of depreciation which curses half our authors.
Our only American dramatic poet in its highest sense—George H. Boker.
Among the dramas which were the fruit of his youth, “Calaynos” and “Francesca da Rimini” achieved a great success, both in England and in this country. The revival of “Francesca da Rimini” at the hand of Lawrence Barrett, and its run of two or three seasons, thirty years after its first production, is one of the most remarkable events in the history of the American stage. Nor should it be forgotten that Daniel Webster valued one of Boker’s sonnets so much, that he kept it in memory, to recite; and that Leigh Hunt selected Boker as one of the best exponents of mastery in the perfect sonnet.
In the desert of the American drama the work of Boker, then, is doubly welcome. It is not “indigenous” or new or indispensable; it merely offers somewhat of the strength of the word, the flame of color, the intensity of act, of the earlier or later English makers of plays, to whom the bloody pages of mediæval history have been so rich an inspiration.
He was the creator of our Poetic Drama, which began with “Calaynos” and ended with “Königsmark.” That his tragedies were capable of effective representation was known to those of us who saw Mr. Davenport and Miss Dean in “Francesca da Rimini” years ago, and is known to those of us who have since seen Mr. Barrett and Miss Wainwright in the same play. The conception of his tragedies and comedies, their development, their movement, and their catastrophies, are dramatic. Poetical, they are not overweighted with poetry; emotional and passionate, their language is naturally figurative, and the blank verse rises and falls as the occasion demands. One feels in reading them that the writer had studied the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and that they harmed as well as helped him. If he could have forgotten them, and remembered only his own genius, his work would have been more original. A born dramatist, he was a genuine balladist, as I could prove by comparing his ballads with those of Macaulay, and a born sonneteer, as I could prove by comparing his sonnets with those of Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, and Shakespeare.
While “classical” in form, his works are refreshingly free from the high-stepping twaddle to which at one time our tragic muse seemed hopelessly wedded. It may be said of all his plays that they possess the essentials of true drama,—life, action, and feeling. The best known of these doubtless owes much of its popularity to its fine interpretation on the stage by Lawrence Barrett.
Perhaps our lack of a vigorous dramatic literature is not mainly chargeable to our poets. Certainly, even when merely read carefully, Boker’s “Francesca” seems a very remarkably strong play. The versification, and the character drawing, though both lack the dreamy mysterious charm of Stephen Phillips’s recent “Francesca,” are strong, masculine, and clear. Indeed, Boker’s plays are probably the best yet produced among us.
