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[Footnote 30: Mitchell Kennerley; 1907.]

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.

[Footnote 31: Mitchell Kennerley; 1909.]

“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.

[Footnote 32: Pulitzer Publishing Co.; 1912.]

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.