A Note on Edgar Saltus

An American Author Who Is Altogether Too Little Appreciated

ARTHUR SYMONS

IT seems to me that Edgar Saltus is an American writer altogether too little read. He owes much of his bizarre talent to his mixed origin, for he is of Dutch and American extraction; indeed, for much of what I might call his rather unholy genius. His pages exhale a kind of exotic and often abnormal perfume of colours, colours of sensations, of heats, of crowded atmospheres. He gives his women baneful and baleful names, such as Stella Sixmouth, Shom Wyvell; these vampire's and wicked creatures who ruin men's lives as cruelly as they ruin their own. His men have prodigious nerves, even more than his women: they commit all sorts of crimes, assassinations, poisonings, out of sheer malice and out of over-excited imaginations.

Of that most terrible of tragedies, the tragedy of a soul, he is for the most part utterly unconscious; and the very abracadabra of his art is in a sense—a curious enough and ultramodern sense—lifted from the Elizabethan Dramatists. In them—as in many of his pages —a fine situationfoiist have a murder in it, and some haveifceir characters ruined by another more stealthy kind of obliteration. But, when he gives one-a passing shudder, he leaves nothing behind it; yet in his perverted characters there can be found sensitiveness, hallucinations, obsessions: and some have that lassitude which is more than mere contempt. Some go solemnly on the path of blood, with no returning by a way so thronged with worse than memories. Some have imagination that stands in the place of virtue; some, as in the case of Lady Macbeth, still keep the sensation of blood on their guilty hands.

Saltus's Mary of Magdala (1891) is a vain attempt to do what Flaubert had done before in his Herodias and what Wilde has done in Salome, a drama that has a strange, not easily defined fascination, which I cannot dissociate from Beardsley's illustrations, in which what is icily perverse in the dialogue (it cannot be designated drama) becomes in the ironical designs pictorial, a series of poses. To Wilde passion was a thing to talk about with elaborate and coloured words. Salome is a doll, as many have imagined her, soulless, set in motion by some pitiless destiny, personified momentarily by her mother; Herod is a nodding mandarin in a Chinese grotesque.

In one page of Saltus's Oscar Wilde: an Idler's Impressions (1917), he evokes, with his cynical sense of the immense disproportion of things in this world and the next, the very innermost secret of Wilde. They dine in a restaurant in London and Wilde reads his MS. "Suddenly his eyes lifted, his mouth contracted, a spasm of pain—or was it dread?— had gripped him, a moment only. 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 damned. In his hand was a manuscript, and we were supping on Salome."

Mr. Incoul's Misfortune seems to have its origin in some strange story of Poe's; for it gives one the sense of a monster, diabolical, inhuman, malevolent and merciless, who, after a mock marriage, abnormally sets himself to the devil's business of ruining his wife's lover's life, and of giving his wife a sudden death in three hideous forms: a drug to make her sleep, the gas turned on, and the door locked with a nameless instrument.

The Truth About Tristram Varick (1888) is based on social problems of the most unaccountable kind. It has something strangely convincing in both conception and execution; It has suspense, ugly enough, and uglier crises; and that the unlucky Varick is supposed to be partially insane is part of the finely-woven plot, which is concerned with strange and perilous incidents and accidents; and which is based on his passionate pursuit of the ravishing Viola Raritan; the pursuit, really, of the chimera of his imagination.

And among the hazards comes one, of an evil kind—such as I have often experienced in foreign cities—that, in turning down one street instead of the next, a man's existence, and not his only, may be thereby changed. To have stopped one's rival's lying mouth and his lying life at the same instant is to have done something original—it is done by a poisoned pin's point. Then, this Orestes having found no Electra to return his love, but finding her vile, he lets himself disappear out of life in an almost incredible fashion, leaving the woman who never loved him to say: "I will come to see him sentenced": a sentence which writes her down a modem Clytemnestra.

What Saltus says of Gonfalcon can almost be said of Saltus. "With a set of people that fancied themselves in possession of advanced views and were still in the Middle Ages, he achieved the impossible: he not only consoled, he flattered, he persuaded and fascinated as well." Saltus cannot console, he can sometimes persuade; but he can flatter and fascinate his public, as with

"A breeze of fame made manifest."

The novelist is the comedian of the pen: it is his duty to amuse, to entertain—or else to hold his peace: to one in his trade nothing imaginable comes amiss. It is not sin that appals him, but the consequences of sin; such as the fact that few sinners have ever turned into saints. In a word, Saltus writes with his nerves.

Take, for instance, A Transaction in Hearts (1887), one of the queerest novels ever written and written with a kind of deliberate malice. Gonfalcon, who becomes a bishop, falls passionately in love with an ardent and insolent girl who is his wife's sister; and before her beauty everything vanishes: virtue, genius, everything. "For a second that was an eternity he was conscious of her emollient mouth on his, her fingers intertwined with his own. For that second he really lived—perhaps he really lived." One wonders why Saltus uses so many ugly phrases—a kind of decadent French fashion of transposing words; such as the one I have quoted, together with "Ruedelapaixia" (meant to describe a dress); "Rafflesia", "Mashed grasshoppers baked in saffron": phrases chosen at random which are too frequently scattered in much too obvious a profusion over much too luxurious pages. I read somewhere that Oscar Wilde said to Amelie Rives: "In Edgar Saltus's work passion struggles with grammar on every page," which is certainly one of Wilde's finest paradoxes

Imperial Purple (1906) shows the zenith of Saltus's talent, not in conceiving imaginary beings, but in giving modern conceptions of the most amazing creatures in the Roman Decadence, and in lyrical prose, which ought to have had for motto Verlaine's stanza:

"Je suis l'Empire a la fin de la decadence, Qui regarde passer les grands barbares blancs En composant des acrostiches indolents D'un style d'or ou la langueur du soleil danse."

Only Saltus is not Tacitus, in spite of having delved into his pages: for Tacitus had immense genius and a magnificent style, and the creatures he evokes, often so cruelly, writhe, convulse, conspire, expire before one's astonished vision.