Part 2 (2/2)
Saltus's _cliche_ for the Demon Rum, was the original t.i.tle of this ”Fifth Avenue Incident.” Romance and Realism consort lovingly together in its pages. There is an unforgetable pa.s.sage descriptive of a young man ridding himself of his mistress. He interrupts his flow of explanation to hand her a card case, which she promptly throws out of the window.
”'That is an agreeable way of getting rid of twelve thousand dollars,'
he remarked.
”Yet, however lightly he affected to speak, the action annoyed him.
Like all men of large means he was close. It seemed to him beastly to lose such a sum. He got up, went to the window and looked down. He could not see the case and he much wanted to go and look for it. But that for the moment Marie prevented.”
”The Pomps of Satan”[27] is replete with grace and graciousness, and full of charm, a quality more valuable to its possessor than juvenility, our author tells us in a chapter concerning the lost elixir of youth. Neither form nor matter a.s.sume ponderous shape in this volume, which in the quality of its contents reminds one faintly of Franz Blei's lady's breviary, ”The Powder Puff,” but Saltus's book is the more ingratiating of the two. Satan's pomps are varied; the author exposes his whims, his ideas, images the past, forecasts the future, deplores the present. There is a chapter on cooking and we learn that Saltus does not care for food prepared in the German style ... nor yet in the American. He forbids us champagne: ”Champagne is not a wine. It is a beverage, lighter indeed than brandy and soda, but, like cologne, fit only for demi-reps.” But he seems untrue to himself in an essay condemning the use of perfumes. His own books are heavily scented. With the rare prescience and clairvoyance of an artist he includes the German Kaiser in a chapter on hyenas (in 1906!); therein stalk the blood-stained shadows of Caligula, Caracalla, Atilla, Tamerlane, Cesare Borgia, Philip II, and Ivan the Terrible. The paragraph is worth quoting: ”Power consists in having a million bayonets behind you. Its diffusion is not general. But there are people who possess it. For one, the German Kaiser. Not long since somebody or other diagnosed in him the habitual criminal. We doubt that he is that. But we suspect that, were it not for the press, he would show more of primitive man than he has thus far thought judicious.” Has Mme. de Thebes done better? Saltus also foresaw Gertrude Stein. Peering into the future he wrote: ”When that day comes the models of literary excellence will not be the long and windy sentences of accredited bores, but ample brevities, such as the 'N' on Napoleon's tomb, in which, in less than a syllable, an epoch, and the glory of it, is resumed.” Saltus forsakes his previous choice from Bellini and installs _Tu che a Dio_ as his favourite Italian opera air. Here is another flash of self-revealment: ”Byzance is rumoured to have been the sewer of every sin, yet such was its beauty that it is the canker of our heart we could not have lived there.” Always this turning to the far past, this delving in rosetta stones and palimpsests, this preoccupation with the sights and sins of the ancient G.o.ds and kings. A chapter on poisons, another on Gille de Retz, which probably owes something to ”La Bas,” betray this preference. He playfully suggests that the Academy of Arts and Letters be filled up with young n.o.bodies: ”They have, indeed, done nothing yet. But therein is their charm. An academy composed of young people who have done nothing yet would be more alluring than one made up of fossils who are unable to do anything more.” Herein are contained enough aphorisms and epigrams to make up a new book of Solomonic wisdom. Hardly as evenly inspired as ”Imperial Purple,” ”The Pomps of Satan” is more das.h.i.+ng and more varied. It is also more tired.
”Vanity Square”[28] in Stella Sixmuth boasts such a ”vampire” as even Theda Bara is seldom called upon to portray. Not until the final chapters of this mystery story do we discover that this lady has been poisoning a rich man's wife, with an eye on the rich man's heart and hand. Oraere is this slow and subtle poison which leaves no subsequent trace. She is thwarted but in a subsequent attempt she is successful.
Robert Hichens has used this theme in ”Bella Donna.” There is a suicide by pistol. An exciting story but little else, this book contains fewer references to the G.o.ds and the caesars than is usual with Saltus. To compensate there are long discussions about phobias, dual personalities (a girl with six is described) and theories about future existence. Vanity Square, we are told, is bounded by Central Park, Madison Avenue, Seventy-second Street and the Plaza.
It will be remembered that Tancred Ennever was at work on ”Historia Amoris”[29] in 1895, which would seem to indicate that Saltus had begun to collect material for it himself at that time. The t.i.tle is a literal description of the contents of the book: it is a history of love. Such a work might have been made purely anecdotal or scientific, but Saltus's purpose has been at once more serious and more graceful, to show how the love currents flowed through the centuries, to show what effect period life had on love and what effect love had on period life. Beginning with Babylon and pa.s.sing on through the ”Song of Songs” we meet Helen of Troy, Scheherazade (though but briefly), Sappho (to whom an entire chapter is devoted), Cleopatra (whom Heine called ”_cette reine entretenue_”), Mary Magdalen, Helose.... The Courts of Love are described and deductions are drawn as to the effect of the Renaissance on the Gay Science. ”Historia Amoris” is concluded by a Schopenhauerian essay on ”The Law of Attraction.” Cicisbeism is not treated in extenso, as it should be, and I also missed the fragrant name of Sophie Arnould. Readers of ”Love and Lore,” ”The Pomps of Satan,” ”Imperial Purple,” and ”The Lords of the Ghostland”
will find much of their material adjusted to the purposes of this History of Love, which, nevertheless, no one interested in Saltus can afford to miss.
In ”The Lords of the Ghostland, a history of the ideal,”[30] Saltus returns to the theme of ”The Anatomy of Negation.” The newer work is both more cynical and more charming. It is, of course, a history and a comparison of religions. With Reinach Saltus believes that Christianity owes much to its ancestors. Brahma, Ormuzd, Amon-Ra, Bel-Marduk, Jehovah, Zeus, Jupiter, and many lesser deities parade before us in defile. Prejudice, intolerance, tolerance even are lacking from this book, as they were from ”Imperial Purple.” ”The Lords of the Ghostland” is neither reverent nor irreverent, it is unreverent. Mr. Saltus finds joy in writing about the G.o.ds, the joy of a poet, and if his chiefest pleasure is to extol the G.o.ds of Greece that is only what might be expected of this truly pagan spirit.
Students of comparative theology can learn much from these pages, but they will learn it unwittingly, for the poet supersedes the teacher.
Saltus is never professorial. The scientific spirit is never to the fore; no marshalling of dull facts for their own sakes. Nevertheless I suspect that the book contains more absorbing information than any similar volume on the subject. With a fascinating and guileful style this divine devil of an author leads us on to the spot where he can point out to us that the only original feature of Christianity is the crucifixion, and even that is foreshadowed in Hindoo legend, in which Krishna dies, nailed by arrows to a tree. This book should be required reading for the first cla.s.s in isogogies.
Most of the scenes of ”Daughters of the Rich”[31] are laid in Paris.
The plot hinges on mistaken ident.i.ty and the whole is a very ingenious detective story. The book begins rather than ends with a murder, but that is because the tale is told backward. Through lies, deceit, and treachery the woman in the case, one Sallie Malakoff, betrays the hero into marriage with her. When he discovers her perfidy he cheerfully cuts her throat from ear to ear and goes to join the lady from whom he has been estranged. She receives him with open arms and suggests wedding bells. No woman, she a.s.serts, could resist a man who has killed another woman for her sake. This is decidedly a Roman point of view! Some of the action takes place in a house on the Avenue Malakoff, which must have been near the _hotel_ of the Princesse de Sagan and the apartment occupied by Miss Mary Garden.... A fat manufacturer's wife confronts the proposal of a mercenary duke with an epic rejoinder: ”Pay a man a million dollars to sleep with my daughter! Never!”... Again Saltus demonstrates how completely he is master of the story-telling gift, how surely he possesses the power to compel breathless attention.
”The Monster”[32] is fiction, incredible, insane fiction. The monster is incest, in this instance _inceste manque_ because it doesn't come off. On the eve of a runaway marriage Leilah Ogsten is informed by her father that her intended husband is her own brother (he inculpates her mother in the scandal). Leilah disappears and to put barriers between her and the man she loves becomes the bride of another.
Verplank pursues. There are two fabulous duels and a scene in which our hero is mangled by dogs. The stage (for we are always in some extravagant theatre) is frequently set in Paris and the familiar scenes of the capital are in turn exposed to our view. It is all mad, full of purple patches and crimson splotches and yet, once opened, it is impossible to lay the book down until it is completed. From this novel Mr. Saltus fas.h.i.+oned his only play, _The Gates of Life_, which he sent to Charles Frohman and which Mr. Frohman returned. The piece has neither been produced nor published.
Last year (1917) the Brothers of the Book in Chicago published privately an extremely limited edition (474 copies) of a book by Edgar Saltus ent.i.tled, ”Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impression,” which contains only twenty-six pages, but those twenty-six pages are very beautiful.
They evoke a spirit from the dead. Indeed, I doubt if even Saltus has done better than his description of a strange occurrence in a Regent Street Restaurant on a certain night when he was supping with Wilde and Wilde was reading _Salome_ to him: ”apropos of nothing, or rather with what to me at the time was curious irrelevance, Oscar, while tossing off gla.s.s after gla.s.s of liquor, spoke of Pheme, a G.o.ddess rare even in mythology, who after appearing twice in Homer, flashed through a verse of Hesiod and vanished behind a page of Herodotus. In telling of her, suddenly his eyes lifted, his mouth contracted, a spasm of pain--or was it dread?--had gripped him. A moment only. His face relaxed. It had gone.
”I have since wondered, could he have evoked the G.o.ddess then? For Pheme typified what modern occultism terms the impact--the premonition that surges and warns. It was Wilde's fate to die three times--to die in the dock, to die in prison, to die all along the boulevards of Paris. Often since I have wondered could the G.o.ddess have been lifting, however slightly, some fringe of the crimson curtain, behind which, in all its horror, his destiny crouched. If so, he braved it.
”I had looked away. I looked again. Before me was a fat pauper, florid and over-dressed, who, in the voice of an immortal, was reading the fantasies of the d.a.m.ned. In his hand was a ma.n.u.script, and we were supping on _Salome_.”
Edgar Saltus began with Balzac in 1884 and he has reached Oscar Wilde in 1917. His other literary essays, on Gautier and Merimee in ”Tales Before Supper,” on Barbey d'Aurevilly in ”The Story Without a Name,”
and on Victor Hugo in ”The Forum” (June, 1912,) all display the finest qualities of his genius. Pervaded with his rare charm they are clairvoyant and illuminating, more than that arresting. They should be brought together in one volume, especially as they are at present absolutely inaccessible, terrifyingly so, every one of them. And if they are to be thus collected may we not hope for one or two new essays with, say, for subjects, Flaubert and Huysmans?
It is, you may perceive, as an essayist, a historian, an amateur philosopher that Saltus excels, but his fiction should not be underrated on that account. His novels indeed are half essays, just as his essays are half novels. Even the worst of them contains charming pages, delightful and unexpected interruptions. His series of fables suggests a vast _Comedie Inhumaine_ but this statement must not be regarded as dispraise: it is merely description. You will find something of the same quality in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, but Saltus has more grace and charm than Poe, if less intensity. After one dip into realism (”Mr. Incoul's Misadventure”) Saltus became an incorrigible romantic. All his characters are the inventions of an errant fancy; scarcely one of them suggests a human being, but they are none the less creations of art. This, perhaps, was a daring procedure in an era devoted to the exploitation in fiction of the facts of hearth and home.... After all, however, his way may be the better way. Personally I may say that my pa.s.sion for realism is on the wane.
In these strange tales we pa.s.s through the familiar haunts of metropolitan life, but the creatures are amazingly unfamiliar. They have horns and hoofs, halos and wings, or fins and tails. An esoteric band of fabulous monsters these: harpies and vampires take tea at Sherry's; succubi and incubbi are observed buying opal rings at Tiffany's; fairies, angels, dwarfs, and elves, bearing branches of asphodel, trip lightly down Waverly Place; peris, amshaspahands, aesir, izeds, and goblins sleep at the Brevoort; seraphim and cherubim decorate drawing rooms on Irving Place; griffons, chimeras, and sphynxes take courses in philosophy at Harvard; willis and sylphs sing airs from _Lucia di Lammermoor_ and _Le Nozze di Figaro_; naiads and mermaids embark on the Cunard Line; centaurs and amazons drive in the Florentine Cascine; kobolds, gnomes, and trolls stab, shoot, and poison one another; and a satyr meets the martichoras in Gramercy Park. No such pictures of monstrous, diverting, sensuous existence can be found elsewhere save in the paintings of Arnold Bocklin, Franz von Stuck, and above all those of Gustave Moreau. If he had done nothing else Edgar Saltus should be famous for having given New York a mythology of its own!
_January 12, 1918._
The New Art of the Singer
”_It's the law of life that nothing new can come into the world without pain._”
Karen Borneman.
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