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“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.