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Updated: May 31, 2025
One of the best-known of the Saltus books, "The Philosophy of Disenchantment" is written in a clear, translucent style without the iridescence which decorates his later opera. The introduction is written in Saltus's most beguiling manner and may be referred to as one of the most delightful short essays on Balzac extant. The dedication is to V. A. B.
As he cordially shook hands with me there flashed into the field of my mental vision a picture of him as I had seen him last in full evening dress, making a speech at the Fellowcraft Club in New York, and expressing, in a metaphor almost pictorially graphic, his extremely unfavorable opinion of the novels of Edgar Saltus.
If you have visited the Musée 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.
Saltus tells us that Balzac took all his characters' names from life, frequently from signs which he observed on the street. In this respect Saltus certainly has not followed him; in another he has been more imitative: I refer to the Balzacian trick of carrying people from one book to another.
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. Pervaded with his rare charm they are clairvoyant and illuminating, more than that arresting.
There is here, apparently, not only a step in development but a saltus mortalis, a dividing and impassable gulf. Our bodily senses we share with the brutes. Some brutes excel us in quickness of sense. They have the rudiments, but the rudiments only, of our emotions and affections. The mother bird loves her offspring, but only until they are fledged.
Was Saltus ballyhooing for this institution? The hero is a modern Don Juan. Alphabet Jones appears occasionally, as he does in many of the other novels. This Balzacian trick obsessed the author for a time. The book is dedicated to John S. Rutherford and bears as a motto on its title page this quotation from Rabusson: "Pourquoi la mort? Dites, plutôt, pourquoi la vie?"
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.
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 cæsars than is usual with Saltus. Vanity Square, we are told, is bounded by Central Park, Madison Avenue, Seventy-second Street and the Plaza.
Saltus writes me, "he gave a paragraph of mine as his own. Later on he added, 'as we have already said' and repeated the paragraph. The plural struck me as singular." "Madam Sapphira" is a vivid study in unchastened womanhood.
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