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From the beginning, his style has attracted the attention of the few and no one, I am sure, has ever written a three line review of a book by Saltus without referring to it. Mme. Amelie Rives has quoted Oscar Wilde as saying to her one night at dinner, “In Edgar Saltus’s work passion struggles with grammar on every page!” Percival Pollard has dubbed him a “prose paranoiac,” and Elbert Hubbard says, “He writes so well that he grows enamoured of his own style and is subdued like the dyer’s hand; he becomes intoxicated on the lure of lines and the roll of phrases. He is woozy on words–locoed by syntax and prosody. The libation he pours is flavoured with euphues. It is all like a cherry in a morning Martini.” A phrase which Remy de Gourmont uses to describe Villiers de l’Isle Adam might be applied with equal success to the author of “The Lords of the Ghostland”: ” L’idealisme de Villiers etait un veritable idealisme verbal, c’est-a-dire qu’il croyait vraiment a la puissance evocatrice des mots, a leur vertu magique. ” And we may listen to Saltus’s own testimony in the matter: “It may be noted that in literature only three things count, style, style polished, style repolished; these imagination and the art of transition aid, but do not enhance. As for style, it may be defined as the sorcery of syllables, the fall of sentences, the use of the exact term, the pursuit of a repetition even unto the thirtieth and fortieth line. Grammar is an adjunct but not an obligation. No grammarian ever wrote a thing that was fit to read.”

At his worst–and his worst can be monstrous!–garbed fantastically in purple patches and gaudy rags, he wallows in muddy puddles of Burgundy and gold dust; even then he is unflagging and holds the attention in a vise. His women have eyes which are purple pools, their hair is bitten by combs, their lips are scarlet threads. Even the names of his characters, Roanoke Raritan, Ruis Ixar, Tancred Ennever, Erastus Varick, Gulian Verplank, Melancthon Orr, Justine Dunnellen, Roland Mistrial, Giselle Oppensheim, Yoda Jones, Stella Sixmuth, Violet Silverstairs, Sallie Malakoff, Shane Wyvell, Dugald Maule, Eden Menemon (it will be observed that he has a persistent, balefully procacious, perhaps, indeed, Freudian predilection for the letters U, V, and X),[3] are fantastic and fabulous … sometimes almost frivolous. And here we may find our paradox. His sense of humour is abnormal, sometimes expressed directly by way of epigram or sly wording but may it not also occasionally express itself indirectly in these purple towers of painted velvet words, extravagant fables, and unbelievable characters he is so fond of erecting? Some of his work almost approaches the burlesque in form. He carries his manner to a point where he seems to laugh at it himself, and then, with a touch of poignant realism or a poetic phrase, he confounds the reader’s judgment. The virtuosity of the performance is breath-taking!

[Footnote 3: You will find an account of Balzac’s interesting theory regarding names and letters, which may well have had a direct influence on Edgar Saltus, in Saltus’s “Balzac,” p. 29 et seq. For a precisely contrary theory turn to “The Naming of Streets” in Max Beerbohm’s “Yet Again.”]

He is always the snob (somewhere he defends the snob in an essay): rich food (“half-mourning” [artichoke hearts and truffles], “filet of reindeer,” a cygnet in its plumage bearing an orchid in its beak, “heron’s eggs whipped with wine into an amber foam,” “mashed grasshoppers baked in saffron”), rich clothes, rich people interest him. There is no poverty in his books. His creatures do not toil. They cut coupons off bonds. Sometimes they write or paint, but for the most part they are free to devote themselves exclusively to the pursuit of emotional experience, eating, reading, and travelling the while. And when they have finished dining they wipe their hands, wetted in a golden bowl, in the curly hair of a tiny serving boy. A character in “Madam Sapphira” explains this tendency: “A writer, if he happens to be worth his syndicate, never chooses a subject. The subject chooses him. He writes what he must, not what he might. That’s the thing the public can’t understand.”