but little of the lady in the 251 pages of this "Fifth Avenue Story";
her character is exposed to us through the experiences of her poor
fool husband, who colloquially would be called a simp, by denizens of
the Low World a boob. He redeems himself to some extent by sending
Madam Sapphira a belated bouquet of cyanide of potassium. On the
whole, though characters and phrases in his work might be brought
forward to prove the contrary, Mr. Saltus obviously has a low opinion
of women and thinks that men do better without them. The greater part
of the time he appears to agree with Posthumus:
"Could I find out
The woman's part in me! For there's no motion
That tends to vice in man but I affirm
It is the woman's part; be it lying, note it
The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
Ambitions, covetings, changes of prides, disdain,
Nice longings, slanders, mutability,
All faults that may be named, nay that hell knows,
Why, hers, in part or all; but rather, all;
For even to vice
They are not constant, but are changing still
One vice of a minute old for one
Not half so old as that. I'll write against them,
Detest them, curse them.--Yet 'tis greater skill
In a true hate, to pray they have their will:
The very devils cannot plague them better."
"Enthralled, a story of international life setting forth the curious
circumstances concerning Lord Cloden and Oswald Quain":[23] a mad
_opus_ this, an insane phantasmagoria of crime, avarice, and murder.
For the second time in this author's novels incest plays a role. This
time it is real. Quain is indeed the half-brother of the lady who
desires to marry him. He is as vile and virulent a villain as any who
stalks through the pages of Ann Ker, Eliza Bromley, or Mrs. Radcliffe.
A Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde motive is sounded. An ugly man comes back
from London a handsome fellow after visits to a certain doctor who
rearranges the lines of his face. The transformation is effected every
day now (some of our prominent actresses are said to have benefited
by this operation), but in 1894 the mechanism of the trick must have
been appallingly creaky. This story, indeed, borders on the burlesque
and has almost as much claim to the title as "The Green Carnation."
Was the author laughing at the Eighteen Nineties? The period is subtly
evoked in one detail, constantly reiterated in Saltus's early books:
ladies and gentlemen when they leave a room "push aside the
portieres." Sometimes the "rings jingle." He has in most instances
mercifully spared us further descriptions of the interiors of New York
houses at this epoch.... At a dinner party one of the guests refers to
Howells as the "foremost novelist who is never read." The book is
dedicated to "Cherubina, _dulcissime rerum_." Saltus returned to the
central theme of "Enthralled" in a story called "The Impostor,"
printed in "Ainslee's" for May, 1917.
"When Dreams Come True"[24] again brings us in touch with Tancred
Ennever, the stupid hero of "The Transient Guest." In the meantime he
has become an almost intolerable prig. It is probable that Saltus
meant more by this fable than he has let appear. The roar of the waves
on the coast of Lesbos is distinctly audible for a time and the
denoument seems to belong to quite another story.... Ennever has
turned author. We are informed that he has completed studies on
Huysmans and Leconte de Lisle; he is also engaged on a "Historia
Amoris." There is an interesting passage relating to the names of
great writers. Alphabet Jones assures us that they are always "in two
syllables with the accent on the first. Oyez: Homer, Sappho, Horace,
Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Hugo, Swinburne ... Balzac,
Flaubert, Huysmans, Michelet, Renan." The reader is permitted to add
... "Saltus"!
"Purple and Fine Women"[25] is a misnamed book. It should be called
"Philosophic Fables." The first two stories are French in form. Paul
Bourget himself is the hero of one of them! In "The Princess of the
Sun" we are offered a new and fantastic version of the Coppelia story.
"The Dear Departed" finds Saltus in a murderous amorous mood again. In
"The Princess of the Golden Isles" a new poison is introduced,
muscarine. Alchemy furnishes the theme for one tale; the protagonist
seeks an alcahest, a human victim for his crucible. We are left in
doubt as to whether he chooses his wife, who wears a diamond set in
one of her teeth, or a gorilla. There are dramas of dual personality
and of death. Metaphysics and spiritualism rise dimly out of the charm
of this book. There is a duchess who mews like a cat and somewhere we
are assured that _Perche non posso odiarte_ from _La Sonnnambula_ is
the most beautiful aria in the Italian repertory. Here is a true and
soul-revealing epigram: "The best way to master a subject of which you
are ignorant is to write it up." Certainly not Saltus at his best,
this _opus_, but far from his worst.
"The Perfume of Eros"[26] is frenzied fiction again; amnesia,
drunkenness, white slavery, sex, are its mingled themes. There is a
pretty picture, recognizable in any smart community, of a witty woman
of fashion, and a full-length portrait of a bounder. "The Yellow Fay,"
Saltus's _cliche_ for the Demon Rum, was the original title of this
"Fifth Avenue Incident." Romance and Realism consort lovingly together
in its pages. There is an unforgetable passage 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 assume 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 gods 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 nobodies: "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 dashing 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 gods 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 title 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 passing 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, Heloise.... 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 gods, the joy of
a poet, and if his chiefest pleasure is to extol the gods 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 class in isogogies.
Most of the scenes of "Daughters of the Rich"[31] are laid in Paris.
The plot hinges on mistaken identity 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 asserts, 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 fashioned 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 entitled, "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 glass after glass of liquor, spoke of Pheme, a goddess
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 goddess 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 goddess 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 damned. In his hand was a manuscript, 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 passion for realism is on the
wane.
In these strange tales we pass 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.
The New Art of the Singer
The art of vocalization is retarding the progress of the modern music
drama. That is the simple fact although, doubtless, you are as
accustomed as I am to hearing it expressed _a rebours_. How many times
have we read that the art of singing is in its decadence, that soon
there would not be one artist left fitted to deliver vocal music in
public. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe wrote something of the sort in 1825
for he found the great Catalani but a sorry travesty of his early
favourites, Pacchierotti and Banti. I protest against this
misconception. Any one who asserts that there are laws which govern
singing, physical, scientific laws, must pay court to other ears than
mine. I have heard this same man for twenty years shouting in the
market place that a piece without action was not a play (usually the
drama he referred to had more real action than that which decorates
the progress of _Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model_), that a
composition without melody (meaning something by Richard Wagner,
Robert Franz, or even Edvard Grieg) was not music, that verse without
rhyme was not poetry. This same type of brilliant mind will go on to
aver (forgetting the Scot) that men who wear skirts are not men,
(forgetting the Spaniards) that women who smoke cigars are not women,
and to settle numberless other matters in so silly a manner that a ten
year old, half-witted school boy, after three minutes light thinking,
could be depended upon to do better.
The rules for the art of singing, laid down in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, have become obsolete. How could it be otherwise?
They were contrived to fit a certain style of composition. We have but
the briefest knowledge, indeed, of how people sang before 1700,
although records exist praising the performances of Archilei and
others. If a different standard for the criticism of vocalization
existed before 1600 there is no reason why there should not after
1917. As a matter of fact, maugre much authoritative opinion to the
contrary, a different standard does exist. In certain respects the new
standard is taken for granted. We do not, for example, expect to hear
male sopranos at the opera. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe admired this
artificial form of voice almost to the exclusion of all others. His
favourite singer, indeed, Pacchierotti, was a male soprano. But other
breaks have been made with tradition, breaks which are not yet taken
for granted. When you find that all but one or two of the singers in
every opera house in the world are ignoring the rules in some respect
or other you may be certain, in spite of the protests of the
professors, that the rules are dead. Their excuse has disappeared and
they remain only as silly commandments made to fit an old religion. A
singer in Handel's day was accustomed to stand in one spot on the
stage and sing; nothing else was required of him. He was not asked to
walk about or to act; even expression in his singing was limited to
pathos. The singers of this period, Nicolini, Senesino, Cuzzoni,
Faustina, Caffarelli, Farinelli, Carestini, Gizziello, and
Pacchierotti, devoted their study years to preparing their voices for
the display of a certain definite kind of florid music. They had
nothing else to learn. As a consequence they were expected to be
particularly efficient. Porpora, Caffarelli's teacher, is said to have
spent six years on his pupil before he sent him forth to be "the
greatest singer in the world." Contemporary critics appear to have
been highly pleased with the result but there is some excuse for H. T.
Finck's impatience, expressed in "Songs and Song Writers": "The
favourites of the eighteenth-century Italian audiences were artificial
male sopranos, like Farinelli, who was frantically applauded for such
circus tricks as beating a trumpeter in holding on to a note, or
racing with an orchestra and getting ahead of it; or Caffarelli, who
entertained his audiences by singing, _in one breath_, a chromatic
chain of trills up and down two octaves. Caffarelli was a pupil of the
famous vocal teacher Porpora, who wrote operas consisting chiefly of
monotonous successions of florid arias resembling the music that is
now written for flutes and violins." All very well for the day, no
doubt, but could Cuzzoni sing Isolde? Could Faustina sing Melisande?
And what modern parts would be allotted to the Julian Eltinges of the
Eighteenth Century?