Chapter 2
Or is harmonization the important factor? Folk-songs are not harmonized at all, and yet certain musicians, Cecil Sharp for example, devote their lives to collecting them, while others, like Percy Grainger, base their compositions on them. On the other hand such music as Debussy's _Iberia_ depends for its very existence on its beautiful harmonies. The harmonies of Gluck are extremely simple, those of Richard Strauss extremely complex.
H. T. Finck says somewhere that one of the greatest charms of music is modulation but the old church composers who wrote in the "modes" never modulated at all. Erik Satie seldom avails himself of this modern device. It is a question whether Leo Ornstein modulates. If we may take him at his word Arnold Schoenberg has a system of modulation. At least it is his very own.
Are long compositions better than short ones? This may seem a silly question but I have read criticisms based on a theory that they were. Listen, for example, to de Quincy: "A song, an air, a tune,--that is, a short succession of notes revolving rapidly upon itself,--how could that by possibility offer a field of compass sufficient for the development of great musical effects? The preparation pregnant with the future, the remote correspondence, the questions, as it were, which to a deep musical sense are asked in one passage, and answered in another; the iteration and ingemination of a given effect, moving through subtile variations that sometimes disguise the theme, sometimes fitfully reveal it, sometimes throw it out tumultuously to the daylight,--these and ten thousand forms of self-conflicting musical passion--what room could they find, what opening, for utterance, in so limited a field as an air or song?" After this broadside permit me to quote a verse of Gerard de Nerval:
_"Il est un air pour qui je donnerais Tout Rossini, tout Mozart, et tout Weber, Un air tres-vieux, languissant et funebre, Qui pour moi seul a des charmes secrets."_
And now let us dispassionately, if possible, regard the evidence. Richard Strauss's _Alpine Symphony_, admittedly one of his weakest works and considered very tiresome even by ardent Straussians, plays for nearly an hour while any one can sing _Der Erlkonig_ in three minutes. Are short compositions better than long ones? Answer: _Love me and the World is Mine_ is a short song (although it seldom sounds so) while Schubert's _C major Symphony_ is called the "symphony of heavenly length."
Is what is new better than what is old? Is what is old better than what is new? Schoenberg is new; is he therefor to be considered better than Beethoven? Stravinsky is new; is he therefor to be considered worse than Liszt?
Is an opera better than a song? Compare _Pagliacci_ and Strauss's _Standchen_. Is a string quartet better than a piece for the piano? But I grow weary.... Under the circumstances it would seem that if you have any strong opinions about music you are perfectly entitled to them, for the critics do not agree and you will find many of them basing their criticism on some of the various hypotheses I have advanced. H. T. Finck tells us that the sonata form is illogical, forgetting perhaps that once it served its purpose; Jean Marnold dubbed _Armide_ an _oeuvre batarde_; John F. Runciman called _Parsifal_ "decrepit stuff," while Ernest Newman assures us that it is "marvellous"; Pierre Lalo and Philip Hale disagree on the subject of Debussy's _La Mer_ while W. J. Henderson and James Huneker wrangle over Richard Strauss's _Don Quixote_.
The clue to the whole matter lies in a short phrase: Imitative work is always bad. Music that tries to be something that something else has been may be thrown aside as worthless. It will not endure although it may sometimes please the zanies and jackoclocks of a generation. The critic, therefor, who comes nearest to the heart of the matter, is he who, either through instinct or familiarity with the various phenomena of music, is able to judge of a work's originality. There must be individuality in new music to make it worthy of our attention, and that, after all is all that matters. For the tiniest folk-song often persists in the hearts and minds of the people, often stirs the pulse of a musician, pursuing its tuneful way through two centuries, while a mighty thundering symphony of the same period may lie dead and rotting, food for the Niptus Hololencus and the Blatta Germanica. We still sing _The Old Folks At Home_ and _Le Cycle du Vin_ but we have laid aside _Di Tanti Palpiti_. Any piece of music possessing the certain magic power of individuality is of value, it matters not whether it be symphony or song, opera or dance. What most critics have forgotten is that in Music matter, form, and idea are one. In painting, in poetry the idea, the words, the form, may be separated; each may play its part, but in music there is no idea without form, no form without idea. That is what makes musical criticism difficult.
_January 24, 1918._
Edgar Saltus
_"O no, we never mention him, His name is never heard!"_
Old Ballad.
Edgar Saltus
To write about Edgar Saltus should be _vieux jeu_. The man is an American; he was born in 1858; he accomplished some of his best work in the Eighties and the Nineties, in the days when mutton-legged sleeves, whatnots, Rogers groups, cat-tails, peacock feathers, Japanese fans, musk-mellon seed collars, and big-wheeled bicycles were in vogue. He has written history, fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and philosophy, and to all these forms he has brought sympathy, erudition, a fresh point of view, and a radiant style. He has imagination and he understands the gentle art of arranging facts in kaleidoscopic patterns so that they may attract and not repel the reader. America, indeed, has not produced a round dozen authors who equal him as a brilliant stylist with a great deal to say. And yet this man, who wrote some of his best books in the Eighties and who is still alive, has been allowed to drift into comparative oblivion. Even his early reviewers shoved him impatiently aside or ignored him altogether; a writer in "Belford's Magazine" for July, 1888, says: "Edgar Saltus should have his name changed to Edgar Assaulted." Soon he became a literary leper. The doctors and professors would have none of him. To most of them, nowadays, I suppose, he is only a name. Many of them have never read any of his books. I do not even remember to have seen him mentioned in the works of James Huneker and you will not find his name in Barrett Wendell's "A History of American Literature" (1901), "A Reader's History of American Literature" by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Henry Walcott Boynton (1903), Katherine Lee Bates's "American Literature" (1898), "A Manual of American Literature," edited by Theodore Stanton (1909), William B. Cairns's "A History of American Literature" (1912), William Edward Simonds's "A Student's History of American Literature" (1909), Fred Lewis Pattee's "A History of American Literature Since 1870" (1915), John Macy's "The Spirit of American Literature" (1913), or William Lyon Phelps's "The Advance of the English Novel" (1916). The third volume of "The Cambridge History of American Literature," bringing the subject up to 1900, has not yet appeared but I should be amazed to discover that the editors had decided to include Saltus therein. Curiously enough he is mentioned in Oscar Fay Adams's "A Dictionary of American Authors" (1901 edition) and, of all places, I have found a reference to him in one of Agnes Repplier's books.
You will find few essays about the man or his work in current or anterior periodicals. There is, to be sure, the article by Ramsay Colles, entitled "A Publicist: Edgar Saltus," published in the "Westminster Magazine" for October, 1904, but this essay could have won our author no adherents. If any one had the courage to wade through its muddy paragraphs he doubtless emerged vowing never to read Saltus. Besides only the novels are touched on. In 1903 G. F. Monkshood and George Gamble arranged a compilation from Saltus's work which they entitled "Wit and Wisdom from Edgar Saltus" (Greening and Co., London). The work is done without sense or sensitiveness and the prefatory essay is without salt or flavour of any sort. An anonymous writer in "Current Literature" for July, 1907, asks plaintively why this author has been permitted to remain in obscurity and quotes from some of the reviews. In "The Philistine" for October, 1907, Elbert Hubbard takes a hand in the game. He says, "Edgar Saltus is the best writer in America--with a few insignificant exceptions," but he deplores the fact that Saltus knows nothing about the cows and chickens; only cities and gods seem to interest him. Still there is some atmosphere in this study, which is devoted to one book, "The Lords of the Ghostland." In the New York Public Library four of Saltus's books and one of his translations (about one-sixth of his published work) are listed. You may also find there in a series of volumes entitled "Nations of the World" his supplementary chapters bringing the books up to date. That is all.
All these years, of course, Saltus has had his admiring circle,[1] people of intelligence, of whom, unfortunately, I cannot say that I was one. These, who have been content to read and admire without spreading the news, may well be inclined to regard my performance as repetitive and impertinent. Of these I must crave indulgence and of Saltus himself too. For he, knowing how well he has done his work, must sit like Buddha, ironic and indulgent, smiling on the poor benighted who have yet to approach his altars. Once, at least, he spoke: "A book that pleases no one may be poor. The book that pleases every one is detestable."
I seem to remember to have heard his name all my life, but until recently I have not read one line concerning or by him. I find that my friends, many of whom are extensive readers, are in the same sad state of ignorance. There is an exception and that exception is responsible for my conversion. For six years, no less, Edna Kenton has been urging me to read Edgar Saltus. She has been gently insinuating but firm. None of us can struggle forever against fate or a determined woman. In the end I capitulated, purchased a book by Edgar Saltus at random, and read it ... at one sitting. I sought for more. As most of his books are out of print and as the list in the Public Library conspicuously omits all but one of his best _opera_ the matter presented difficulties. However, a little diligent search in the old book shops accomplished wonders. In less than two weeks I had dug up twenty-two titles and in less than two weeks I had read twenty-four; since then I have consumed the other four. There are few writers in American or any other literature who can survive such a test; there are few writers who have given me such keen pleasure.
The events of his life, mostly remain shrouded in mystery. His comings and goings are not reported in the newspapers; he does not make public speeches; and his name is seldom, if ever, mentioned "among those present." That he has been married and has one daughter "Who's Who" proclaims, together with the few biographical details mentioned below. That is all. May we not herein find some small explanation for his apparent neglect? Many thousands of lesser men have lifted themselves to "literary" prominence by blowing their own tubas and striking their own crotals. Even in the case of a man of such manifest genius as George Bernard Shaw we may be permitted to doubt if he would be so well known, had he not taken the trouble to erect monuments to himself on every possible occasion in every possible location. Fame is a quaint old-fashioned body, who loves to be pursued. She seldom, if ever, runs after anybody except in her well-known role of necrophile.
Edgar Evertson Saltus was born in New York City June 8, 1858. He is a lineal descendant of Admiral Kornelis Evertson, the commander of the Dutch fleet, who captured New York from the English, August 9, 1673. Francis Saltus, the poet, was his brother. He enjoyed a cosmopolitan education which may be regarded as an important factor in the development of his tastes and ideas. From St. Paul's School in Concord he migrated to the Sorbonne in Paris, and thence to Heidelberg and Munich, where he bathed in the newer Germanic philosophies. Finally he took a course of law at Columbia University. The influence of this somewhat heterogeneous seminary life is manifest in all his future writing. Beginning, no doubt, as a disciple of Emerson in New England, he fell under the spell of Balzac in Paris, of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann in Germany. Pages might be brought forward as evidence that he had a thorough classical education. His knowledge of languages made it easy for him to drink deeply at many fountain heads. If Oscar Wilde found his chief inspiration in Huysmans's "A Rebours," it is certain that Saltus also quaffed intoxicating draughts at this source. Indeed in one of his books he refers to Huysmans as his friend. It is further apparent that he is acquainted with the works of Barbey d'Aurevilly, Josephin Peladan,[2] Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Catulle Mendes, and Jules Laforgue, especially the Laforgue of the "Moralites Legendaires." His kinship with these writers is near, but through this mixed blood run strains inherited from the early pagans, the mediaeval monks, the Germanic philosophers, and London of the Eighteen Nineties (although there is not one word about Saltus in Holbrook Jackson's book of the period), and perhaps, after all, his nearest literary relative was an American, Edgar Allan Poe, who bequeathed to him a garret full of strange odds and ends. But Saltus surpasses Poe in almost every respect save as a poet.
Joseph Hergesheimer has expressed a theory to the effect that great art is always provincial, never cosmopolitan; that only provincial art is universal in its appeal. Like every other theory this one is to a large extent true, but Hergesheimer in his arbitrary summing up, has forgotten the fantastic. The fantastic in literature, in art of any kind, can never be provincial. The work of Poe is not provincial; nor is that of Gustave Moreau, an artist with whom Edgar Saltus can very readily be compared. If you have visited the Musee Moreau in Paris where, in the studio of the dead painter, is gathered together the most complete collection of his works, which lend themselves to endless inspection, you can, in a sense, reconstruct for yourself an idea of the works of Edgar Saltus. One finds therein the same unicorns, the same fabulous monsters, the same virgins on the rocks, the same exotic and undreamed of flora and fauna, the same mystic paganism, the same exquisitely jewelled workmanship. One can find further analogies in the Aubrey Beardsley of "Under the Hill," in the elaborate stylized irony of Max Beerbohm. Surely not provincials these, but just as surely artists.
Moreover Saltus's style may be said to possess American characteristics. It is dashing and rapid, and as clear as the water in Southern seas. The man has a penchant for short and nervous sentences, but they are never jerky. They explode like so many firecrackers and remind one of the great national holiday!... Nevertheless Edgar Saltus should have been born in France.
His essays, whether they deal with literary criticism, history, religion (which is almost an obsession with this writer), devil-worship, or cooking, are pervaded by that rare quality, charm. Somewhere he quotes a French aphorism:
_"Etre riche n'est pas l'affaire, Toute l'affaire est de charmer,"_
which might be applied to his own work. There is a deep and beneficent guile in the simplicity of his style, as limpid as a brook, and yet, as over a brook, in its overtones hover a myriad of sparkling dragon-flies and butterflies; in its depths lie a plethora of trout. He deals with the most obstruse and abstract subjects with such ease and grace, without for one moment laying aside the badge of authority, that they assume a mysterious fascination to catch the eye of the passerby. In his fictions he has sometimes cultivated a more hectic style, but that in itself constitutes one of the bases of its richness. Scarcely a word but evokes an image, a strange, bizarre image, often a complication of images. He is never afraid of the colloquial, never afraid of slang even, and he often weaves lovely patterns with obsolete or technical words. These lines, in which Saltus paid tribute to Gautier, he might, with equal justice, have applied to himself: "No one could torment a fancy more delicately than he; he had the gift of adjective; he scented a new one afar like a truffle; and from the Morgue of the dictionary he dragged forgotten beauties. He dowered the language of his day with every tint of dawn and every convulsion of sunset; he invented metaphors that were worth a king's ransom, and figures of speech that deserve the Prix Montyon. Then reviewing his work, he formulated an axiom which will go down with a nimbus through time: Whomsoever a thought however complex, a vision however apocalyptic, surprises without words to convey it, is not a writer. The inexpressible does not exist." It is impossible to taste at this man's table. One must eat the whole dinner to appreciate its opulent inevitability. Still I may offer a few olives, a branch or two of succulent celery to those who have not as yet been invited to sit down. One of his ladies walks the Avenue in a gown the "color of fried smelts." Such figurative phrases as "Her eyes were of that green-grey which is caught in an icicle held over grass," "The sand is as fine as face powder, _nuance_ Rachel, packed hard," "Death, it may be, is not merely a law but a place, perhaps a garage which the traveller reaches on a demolished motor, but whence none can proceed until all old scores are paid," "The ocean resembled nothing so much as an immense blue syrup," "She was a pale freckled girl, with hair the shade of Bavarian beer," "The sun rose from the ocean like an indolent girl from her bath," "Night, that queen who reigns only when she falls, shook out the shroud she wears for gown," are to be found on every page. Certain phrases sound good to him and are re-used: "Disappearances are deceptive," "ruedelapaixian" (to describe a dress), "toilet of the ring" (lifted from the bull-fight in "Mr. Incoul's Misadventure" to do service in an account of the arena games under Nero in "Imperial Purple"), but repetition of this kind is infrequent in his works and seemingly unnecessary. Ideas and phrases, endless chains of them, spurt from the point of his ardent pen. Standing on his magic carpet he shakes new sins out of his sleeve as a conjurer shakes out white rabbits and juggles words with an exquisite dexterity. He is, indeed, the _jongleur de notre ame_!
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!
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."
There is always a preoccupation with ancient life, sometimes freely expressed as in "Imperial Purple," but more often suggested by plot, phrase, or scene. He kills more people than Caligula killed during the whole course of his bloody reign. Murders, suicides, and other forms of sudden death flash their sensations across his pages. Webster and the other Elizabethans never steeped themselves so completely in gore. In almost every book there is an orgy of death and he has been ingenious in varying its forms. The poisons of rafflesia, muscarine, and orsere are introduced in his fictions; somewhere he devotes an essay to toxicology. Daggers with blades like needles, pistols, drownings, asphyxiations, play their roles ... and in one book there is a crucifixion!