3

Ximenes: The Modern Abraham

Though in December 1813 Polidori proclaimed his intention to win glory

by wielding a sword rather than a pen, he later would claim that he had
started writing poetry in his eighteenth year - that is, before September
1813.1 And though he told his father that the Greeks and Romans, rather
than Abraham or David, were his heroes, he had already chosen Abra-
ham as a tragic hero. His account of why he decided to turn to poetry,
though it presents the decision as the result of more conscious reasoning
than seems likely, is nevertheless highly characteristic, particularly in its
confession of mental restlessness, which, in this literary context, begins
to look like the characteristically Romantic attribute that Byron would
call mobility: 'Idleness to a young active mind, is a poison that proves but
too powerful a sapper of the mind's life to be indulged in.'
In his search for an antidote, Polidori first considers, and dismisses,
athletics:
Manual exercises pall and tire when once gone through, and
when the utmost that one's frame and strength of body will
allow to be executed has been discovered: - to leap always the
same height, to receive the same number of blows at a sparring
match, to gain the same number of notches at cricket, to fence,
to dance, to ride, - all pall; for when a certain degree of excel-
lence has been gained, the boundary becomes visible, and
nothing more remaining to be attained, the ambitious mind
droops.
Next he considers mathematics, science, and history. His comments on
them are acute, but he is clearly no longer thinking of them as mere
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26 Before Byron: 1795-1816

Mathematics and positive abstract science, require years of

constant uninterrupted study and application before there is
even a possibility of going beyond a Newton or a La Place
by one thousandth part of their knowledge, and before an
individual gains a name like theirs, centuries must elapse,
while thousands of martyrs perish in the study, after spending
their lives in merely suggesting hints, of which, at last, some
more fortunate genius obtains the credit, by merely showing
his mastery in the arrangement of the fasces formed from these
of themselves weak branches.
Where then to look for a relaxation from the severer duties of
attending the poor in sickness, of hearing their complaints in
convalescence? History requires so much minute criticism, and
sobriety of judgment, as seldom attend the earlier years of man:
- and what is at last gained?

Poetry turns out to be the ideal solution: it

offers a relaxation requiring no continuous exertion and no
engrossing application; - it can be laid down when severer
studies require attention, and resumed when a vacant moment
arrives ... It is upon this principle that the author has made
poetry his mistress. - It is for the love of fame and for the sake
of asserting a rank above the herd whom, with Horace, odit
profanum et arcet [he hates as vulgar and shuns], that he has
made the whisperings of his mistress public. 2

Poetry seems to ask so little, and yet to offer so much. It does not 'require
years of constant uninterrupted study and application,' which would be
irksome to the mobile mind, but 'can be laid down when severer studies
require attention, and resumed when a vacant moment arrives.' It does
not even call for 'minute criticism, and sobriety of judgement,' and yet it
offers, unlike athletics, the opportunity for unlimited achievement and,
unlike mathematics or science, the opportunity for unlimited fame. It
offers a rank above the herd without requiring that one do much to
deserve it.
Polidori's first substantial poetic work was a tragedy, eventually pub-
lished as Ximenes, but originally entitled Count Orlando; or, The Modern
Abraham.3 It is somewhat better than one would expect from a seven-
teen-year-old author with such an attitude towards poetry (Polidori
may, of course, have revised the work before he published it in 1819);
certainly it is not without interest.4 It turns on the twin themes of remorse
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X i m e n e s : T h e M o d e r n A b r ah m 27

and revenge. Francesco has seduced Eliza, the beloved of his friend
Count Orlando of Florence; in the process, he has murdered Orlando's
father, who tried to stop him. Now Eliza is dead, and Francesco, who is
racked by remorse for his double crime, has taken the name Gustavus to
hide from Orlando's revenge and is living with his son, Anselmo, on a
Greek island ruled by the Turks. There he is eventually found by
Orlando, who has taken the name Ximenes and disguised himself as a
priest to further his revenge.
To achieve his revenge, Ximenes plays upon Gustavus's 'superstition
mingling with remorse.'5 Anselmo is in love with Euphemia, a Turkish
maiden. By speaking at Gustavus's window at night, Ximenes makes
Gustavus think that God has spoken to him in a dream, commanding
him - like a modern Abraham - to sacrifice his son rather than allow him
to marry a Moslem. Gustavus, after much anguish, tries to obey, but at
the last moment, his 'heart begins to yearn - / [his] hand grows nerve-
less,' and he only wounds Anselmo.6 Then he stabs himself, neatly
illustrating Freud's contention that suicide results from the internaliza-
tion of 'murderous impulses against others.'7 As Gustavus lies dying.
Ximenes reveals himself as his enemy Orlando. The Turkish authorities
take Ximenes to prison, where he internalizes his own murderous im-
pulses and poisons himself.
In his preface, Polidori argues: 'A young author must in many cases be
a plagiarist, his personal experience is limited - he must therefore copy
the feelings of others, and his imagination must fill up the shading where
the original has only given the bold outline.'8 And in some ways,
Ximenes is a very derivative piece. The Oriental setting and some of the
characters - the man tormented by remorse, the man relentlessly seek-
ing revenge, the naive and loving Eastern maiden - seem to be taken
from Byron (who by September 1813 had published the first two cantos
of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and The Giaour). The plot seems to be taken
partly from Brockden Brown's Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), in
which an irresponsible ventriloquist inadvertently inspires Wieland to
slaughter his whole family by making him think that he has heard the
voice of God (when Wieland realizes his error, he stabs himself, like
Gustavus). Many of the big speeches are modelled on Hamlet and
Measure for Measure.
But Ximenes is also based on Polidori's personal experience, though in
1813 this was still largely limited to his experience of family relations.
Perhaps trivially, the motif of filicide recalls the old woman's threat 'to
kill a lille child wich she had in her hand,' described in his first surviving
letter home. Not trivially at all, it recalls his anguished relationship with
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28 Before Byron: 1795-1816

his father. Even before he realizes that he must kill Anselmo, Gustavus
threatens repeatedly and explicitly to disown him, as Gaetano had
threatened repeatedly, though implicitly, to do to Polidori.9 But the play
recalls the relationship between Gaetano and Polidori mostly to invert it:
Gustavus's attempted filicide is the image of the attempted emotional
parricide of which Gaetano had accused Polidori. And Gustavus, like
Polidori, is anguished, uncertain, ineffectual; Anselmo, like Gaetano, is
self-confident and resolute. The prospect of a mixed marriage does not
daunt him any more than it did Gaetano: 'But no - still, still may love
unite us both - / She may adore Mahomet - I my Christ';10 if Anselmo
and Euphemia have children presumably they can bring up the girls as
Moslems and the boys as Christians. Anselmo knows that Euphemia is
worthy of his love: he has sworn to marry her, and he does not intend to
break his oath. He dismisses his father's objections as mental aberrations
(as Gaetano had dismissed his son's ambitions), and (as Gaetano had
directed his son to the medical profession) suggests that his father see a
doctor.11 Polidori seems to have been speculating about how he and
Gaetano would behave in each other's place - or perhaps simply about
what a son strong enough to defy his father might be like.
Polidori also gave Gustavus his own lifelong preoccupation with
suicide - Byron would later recall that 'he was always talking of Prussic
acid, oil of amber, blowing into veins, suffocating by charcoal, and
compounding poisons ,..'12 Perhaps because the play's treatment of
suicide is based on Polidori's own preoccupations, it is, if not exactly
original, surprisingly independent of the traditional literary and moral
treatments of the subject. Gustavus's metaphorical and Ximenes's literal
imprisonment do seem to allude to Socrates's argument in the Phaedo,
'that we men are in some sort of prison, and that one ought not to release
oneself from it or run away.'13 Donne takes up the image both in the
preface to Biathanatos (1608), his essay on suicide in which he confesses
that 'whensoever any affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of
the prison in mine own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to
my heart as mine own sword' and in a sermon of 1626 in which he agrees
with Socrates: 'My body is my prison, and I would be so obedient to the
law as not to break prison.'14 Neither of Polidori's suicides even consid-
ers obedience to this law: they both fear that punishment could follow
them beyond death, but not that they could be punished further for the
manner of their death.
Donne also cites Abraham's willingness to kill Isaac as evidence that
an apparently evil act (such as filicide, and, by analogy, suicide) can be
committed without sin.15
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Ximenes: The Modern Abraham 29

made a more direct connection between the two acts: he tried to kill
himself under the delusion 'that it was the will of God, [that] he should,
after the example of Abraham, perform an expensive act of obedience,
and offer, not a son, but himself.'16 None of Polidori's characters makes
the connection at all; though they think about suicide a good deal, they
think about it in a strikingly literal-minded and business-like way.
Before the action begins, Gustavus, overcome with grief, has at-
tempted suicide at Eliza's funeral; in the course of the play, he considers
suicide as an escape from his remorse and from God's command to
sacrifice his son. Ximenes worries about the consequences of revealing
himself to Gustavus when he has accomplished his revenge: 'His hand
would instant end his hated life,' and so cut his sufferings disappoint-
ingly short.17 As it turns out, Gustavus stabs himself even before he
learns who Ximenes is. If suicide is, in part, an introversion of aggression,
then the play's reversal of the roles of father and son undoes the
introversion, directing the aggression back at the father. Gaetano may
have been right to detect a touch of the parricide in his son.
Polidori treats the play's other major paternal figure with equal
firmness. As often happens in revenge plots, Ximenes is strangely like
his victim; he too loved Anselmo's mother, and he has to struggle against
a paternal love for Anselmo. In the last scene, in some of the play's most
eloquent (and most transparently imitative) lines, he too weighs the pros
and cons of suicide. Gustavus hoped to escape the punishment of his
own remorse; Ximenes hopes to escape the punishment of the civil
authorities for his plot against Gustavus. He is thinking about his im-
pending trial while holding a vial of poison:

But shall they then expose Orlando, me!

To wrinkled hags and old grey sinning heads?
No! here is, what can speedily do more,
Than 1 dare name. Oh death! of what art thou
The harbinger? - Whither do these wide gates
Open to entrance lead - Eternity!
But why dread that? Already with dark wings
It hovered o'er my birth, my youth, my life -
Eternity waits not for death, to spread
Its influence o'er our soul - It ne'er begun
As it ne'er ends - But why dream thus? tis folly -
This little draught will ease my aching heart
Of all its rankling cares. But with these weeds
The soil is carried too - It will end all -
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30 Before Byron: 1795-1816

All! what annihilate this very self?

Oh then shall nought remain, but this vile corse
And that too food for worms? Oh, that swift time
Might back revolve and bring again those dreams,
Which once would cheer me under fancied ills;
Oh, dreams of immortality! why hence!
But can I wish they should to me return?
Eternity! eternity of pain!
Some little time from hence and then, Orlando
Will be no more - His name too gone, or worse;
Known but as a foul meteor of the night,
On which, from dark sulphureous caves below,
Pale Hecate with her blasting spells might ride.
Peace! peace! thou silly babbler conscience! peace!
(He drinks the poison.)
Already do I feel it working here;
Creation soon shall all be lost to me -
Soon shall I wrapt in sleep have all forgot,
In sleep so sound, that none disturb my rest;
For what is death but sleep, whence none can wake?18
This speech (even apart from some skilful enjambments) is successfully
dramatic in its vacillations - between a sense of eternity so large that it
engulfs temporal life and a sense of immortality as a mere dream,
between Claudio's dread of annihilation and Hamlet's longing for it.
The pairing of Gustavus and Ximenes is confirmed and developed in a
strange series of images. Early in the play, Gustavus enjoys a vision of
his entry into eternity and his impending reunion with his beloved Eliza.
But it is interrupted by the spectre of his enemy Orlando, who cries:
'Vain is thy search! To thee Eliza's lost!
I am thy partner! Hell thy bridal bed!
I am thy fiend, and stand by thee for ever!'
And in the last scene, as soon as Polidori has brought Ximenes to long for
annihilation, he briskly denies it him: the dying Ximenes sees the ghost
of Gustavus and cries: 'Ah! (starts) but thou wilt not suffer peace to reach
me, / Thou beckonest me away - I come, I come.' Ximenes has claimed
to be 'wedded' to revenge.19 It would be more accurate to say that crime
and revenge have wedded these two mirror-images of each other to each
other - fatally. The fatal marriage of images will recur, in another form,
in Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus.20
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