Edgar Saltus 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 colors, color of sensations, of heats, of
crowded atmospheres. He gives his women baneful and baleful names, such
as Stella Sixmouth, Shorn Wyvell; these vampires 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
overexcited 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
situation must have a murder in it, and some odious character removed 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. "No need for more crime," such men have cried,
and for such reasons reaped the bitter harvest of tormenting dreams.
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.
_Mary of Magdala_ (1891) is a vain attempt to do what Flaubert had done
before Saltus in his _Hérodias_, and what Wilde has done after him in
_Salome_, a drama that has a strange not easily defined fascination,
which I can not dissociate from Beardsley's illustrations, in which what
is icily perverse in the dialogue (it can not 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 colored 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 Tristan 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 modern Clytemnestra.
What Saltus says of Gonfallon 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 can
not 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 appeals him, but the
consequences of sin; such as the fact that few sinners have ever turned
into saints. In a word, he writes with his nerves.
Take, for instance, _A Transaction of Hearts_ (1887), one of the
queerest novels ever written and written with a kind of deliberate
malice. Gonfallon, 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 Amélie Rives: "In Edgar Saltus's work passion
struggles with grammar on every page," which is certainly one of Wilde's
finest paradoxes. I "cap this"--as Dowson often said to me in jest--with
Léon Bloy's admirable phrase on Huysmans: "That he drags his images by
the heels or the hair upside down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified
syntax."
_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 Victoria's stanza:--
_Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la décadence,
Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs,
En composant des acrostiches indolents,
D'un style d'or où la langueur du soleil danse._
Only Saltus is not Tacitus, in spite of having delved into his
pages.