Edgar Saltus: The Man Part 3

Another meteor crossing his...o...b..t was Verlaine. It was at the Cafe Francois Premier that they met. Shabby, dirty, and a little drunk, he talked delightfully as only poets and madmen can. He talked of his "prisons" and of his "charity hospitals," quite unaffectedly and as a landed proprietor speaks of his estates. One of these Edgar Saltus visited. It was an enclosure at the back of a shop in a blind alley, where he had a cot that stood not on the floor, for there was no floor, but on the earth.

Of Oscar Wilde and Owen Meredith, he had at that time only a peep in pa.s.sing. His particular chums were the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Francis Hope. Among the interesting personalities with whom he became friends was the Baron Harden Hickey. In what way he became a Baron was never elucidated to Mr. Saltus' satisfaction. Poet, scholar, and crack duelist, his sword was as mighty as his pen. At my hand is a book of his called "Euthanasia,"

and inscribed in his writing are the words:

To Edgar Saltus............................the unique, From his extravagant admirer H. H.

Harden Hickey had ambitions. One of them was to found a monarchy at Trinidad and rule there. He was nothing if not original. The post of Poet Laureate he offered to Edgar Saltus. Owing to the intervention of the Powers, the project failed. Harden Hickey killed himself. Such friends in any event were not commonplace.

Deciding at last that he must have some kind of an occupation, his mother having on his account drawn liberally from her princ.i.p.al, Mr. Saltus decided to return to the United States. Once there he entered Columbia Law School. Terse, clear, and versatile with his pen, the law seemed more or less to beckon. Plead he could not; owing to his acute nervousness and his slight hesitancy of speech that was out of the question. The uninteresting but necessary technical side of the law could alone be his. In some climates and alt.i.tudes Mr. Saltus' speech became almost a stammer. In others it vanished. Never was it unpleasant, and many thought it rather fascinating. People affected him in this way. Most of them got on his nerves, and the peculiar hesitancy followed, while with those to whom he was accustomed, he could talk for hours without a trace of it. Even as a youth his disinclination to meet people, his horror of crowds, and his desire to be alone a great deal were becoming marked characteristics. So also was the quality he had developed as a child, the increasing inability to face a disagreeable issue.

During his life in Germany, Schopenhauer had been his daily food. From his angle religions were superst.i.tions for the ignorant and credulous. They offered nothing. With Schopenhauer came Spinoza. Between them the Columbia student became saturated like a sponge.

At intervals Mr. Saltus had tried his hand at verse as well as prose. A sonnet written in Venice and published afterward under the t.i.tle of "History" was among his first. Timidly, almost apologetically, he took it to his brother Frank.

"Splendid! Better than anything I ever did," was the unexpected praise. "I write more easily, but it is too much f.a.g for me to polish my work. You are slower, but you scintillate. Go in for letters. It is your place in the scheme of things."

Thus encouraged, and by the brother who was the flame of the family, Edgar Saltus took up his pencil in earnest. Fundamentally, both Edgar and Frank Saltus were alike. They seemed to be oriental souls functioning for a life in occidental bodies, and the clothes pinched. Neither could endure routine, nor could they tolerate the prescribed and circ.u.mscribed existence of the western world. It was difficult to internalize in an environment both objective and external. They were subtle, indolent, exotic, living in worlds of their own, as far removed from those with whom they brushed elbows as is the fourth dimension.

Frank let himself go the way of least resistance, without effort or desire to fit in with his environment. Having traveled everywhere, and exhausted to its limit every emotion and experience, bored to tears with the world outside of his imagination and finally even with that within, he stimulated what remained with alcohol and drugs. As the mood took him he composed, tossing off sonnets and serenades like champagne, carelessly and without effort, a t.i.tan with the indifference of a pigmy. What he might have been, had he forced his furtive and fertile fancy to grapple with the tedium of sandpaper and polish, only an extension of consciousness could reveal.

Writing of him in those days James Huneker said:

"He had the look of a Greek G.o.d gone to ruin. He was fond of absinthe and I never saw him without a cigarette in his mouth. He carved sonnets out of solid wood and compiled epigrams for Town Topics as a pastime. He composed feuilletons that would have made the fortune of a boulevardier. He was a ruin, but he was a gentleman. Edgar Saltus was handsome in a different way, dark, pet.i.t maitre."

Of Frank Saltus' multiple love affairs one alone cut deep enough to leave an imprint. Under the t.i.tle "To Marie B--," he wrote one of his best poems.

Curiously enough, the name Marie had been that of Edgar's first and unfortunate love. So convinced was he that no one with that name could survive close a.s.sociation with a Saltus, that from the first hour of our acquaintance he refused to call me by it, using a contraction I had lisped as an infant in trying to p.r.o.nounce Marie, Mowgy. It was the last word he spoke on earth.

The son of a brilliant father and brother of a genius, Edgar Saltus was made conscious of his supposed inferiority by the world at large. To his mother, in spite of her indulgent idolatry of him, must be given the credit that he, too, did not sink into an apathy and dream his life away. The worst side of his brother's character was held always before him, as well as his inability to earn anything with all his talents, and the fact that he, Edgar, was an Evertson as well as a Saltus was used effectively. As far as she could she fought the soft, sensual streak in his nature, the oriental under its mask. Too late to grapple with his fixed habit of avoiding the ugly, unpleasant, and the irksome, she hammered in the lesson of dissipated talents and a wasted life. So well was this done that Edgar Saltus, to use his own words, "By the grace of G.o.d and absent-minded professors," managed to take his degree as a Doctor of Law.

With that in one pocket and a sonnet in the other, he cut loose to have a little fling before starting in for a career at the bar. That career never materialized.

With a mother always a part of the upper ten, he was soon submerged by b.a.l.l.s, receptions, and festivities. His ability to fraternize being limited and superficial and the necessity for a great deal of solitude fundamental, it was not long before the desire to express himself with his pen rea.s.serted itself, and a number of sonnets was the result. Few knew anything of the hours he put in pruning, polishing, and sandpapering them.

Albert Edwin Shroeder, a friend reaching back to the Heidelberg days, knew the most, but even with him Edgar Saltus was reticent about his work. It may be mentioned in pa.s.sing that Shroeder was an intimate friend of Frank Saltus, as well. His admiration for the brothers expressed itself in many ways. Among Mr. Saltus' effects are letters from him and some books. On the fly-leaf of one is written, "To the Master from his servant A. Shroeder."

On another, "To the unique, from one who admires him uniquely." This friendship lasted until Mr. Shroeder's death.

Other intimate friends were Clarence and Walter Andrews. Of his escapades with them Mr. Saltus was never weary of telling, the tendrils of their friendship being long and strong. Of those who knew him in these halcyon days Walter Andrews alone survives. Sitting at my side, as he very graciously offered to do, he drove with Mr. Saltus' only child, his daughter, Mrs. J. Theus Munds, and myself, to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and saw the ashes of his oldest friend returned to the earth.

Not fitted by nature for the cut and dried, the literal and the precise, longing more and more to express himself in writing, he let the law linger.

Having already several stories to his credit, the possibility of making letters his profession appealed strongly to Mr. Saltus. Money in itself meant nothing to him. It went through his hands as through a sieve. To be free from rules and routine, free to express himself, that alone mattered, and that, despite the inroads made into their capital, he could do.

Law books were consigned to the trash baskets. Paper and pencils took their place, and it was not long before the results took on a golden hue.

At that epoch, his star rising to the ascendent and Fame flitting before him as a will-o'-the-wisp urging him on, he met one of New York's most beautiful young matrons--Mme. C----. An American herself of old Knickerbocker stock, married to a n.o.bleman, she represented youth, beauty, charm, and position, added to which she had a brilliant mind.

A serious love affair resulted. Vainly did Mrs. Saltus urge her son to marry and settle down. Vainly did the family of Mme. C----warn her of possible perils ahead. So handsome in those days that the papers referred to him as the "Pocket Apollo," so popular that girls fought for his favor, Mr. Saltus had a triumphal sail through a social sea as heady as champagne.

From his own account and a diary of Mme. C----'s found after his death, the affair must have cut deep. Quoting from it one reads:

"Edgar called to-day. There is no one like him in the world. He is the unique. I adore him to madness."

Again one reads:

"Edgar is the center of my being. Never can I cease to love him. That is certain. But should he ever cease to love me--? It is unthinkable. I cannot contemplate it--and live."

Once again:

"They tell me that this cannot go on. I have children. Oh, my G.o.d! Can I tear him out of my heart--and live?"

There is no doubt whatever but that the devotion was very sincere on both sides. It ended, nevertheless, owing no doubt to the fine qualities of Mme.

C----, who, putting the happiness of others before her own, went abroad and lost herself there for a time.

Proud, arrogant, accustomed to having his own way at any cost, selfish and self-centered as the result of his indulgent childhood, during which he had never exercised the least self-control, it was a new experience to Edgar Saltus. Taking what he wanted when he wanted it and because he wanted it, without the least thought of others, save perhaps his mother, he had built up on his weaknesses, in ignorance of, and not recognizing, his strength.

The affair of Mme. C---- hurt.

Little wonder it was that when a pretty and pet.i.te blonde girl swam into the maelstrom of his environment, he made a grab for her. Pert and piquant, her face upturned in the waltz, he whispered the lines beginning: "Helen, thy beauty is to me" ... following it up as only he could. In addition to her own attractiveness, Helen Read had a father who was a partner of J. Pierpont Morgan. She was no small catch, and there were many out with fishing tackle and bait.

On the surface it looked like an ideal match. All the gifts of the G.o.ds were divided between them. Besides, every one approved of it. That in itself should have warned them of disaster.

The year 1883 turned a new page, Edgar Saltus breaking into matrimony and into print almost simultaneously. Houghton, Mifflin and Company having agreed to bring out his translation of Balzac, the horizon opened like a fan. The microbe of ink having entered into his blood, he conceived the idea of putting Schopenhauer and Spinoza before the public in condensed and epigrammatic form. To their philosophy he determined to add his own. "The Philosophy of Disenchantment" and "The Anatomy of Negation" began brewing in the caldron of his mind.

A note-book in which is condensed material for writing these books is perhaps the most interesting bit of intimate work Mr. Saltus left behind him, revealing as it does an Edgar Saltus unknown and unsuspected by the world. In it is no man giving out savories and souffles with both hands, taking the world as a jest, a game, and an amus.e.m.e.nt. It reveals the serious and sober student, hiding behind a mask of smiles, subtleties, and cynicism; the soul of a seeker, a soul very like that of his brother Frank.

So out of tune was it with its environment, so little understood, and so little expecting to be, that wrapping itself in a mantle of impenetrability and adjusting its mask, no one knew what existed behind it.

The note-book itself is most characteristic of Mr. Saltus. In it are sonnets many of which have been published,--notes for his work,--drafts of letters he expected to write,--quotations from various sources and epigrams of his own and others jumbled together. Some of these are written with his almost copper-plate precision, and the rest jotted down late at night, perhaps after he had dined and wined well. These are mere scratches, which only one familiar with his hand could decipher.

Youth flames from a leaf on which he has written:

Edgar Saltus.

A.M., Ph. D., K.S.K., etc., etc., etc.

The pomposity of this amused him very much during his later years. The following quotations reveal what has been referred to as his oriental soul floundering in the dark, seeking expression in a language new to his tongue. Taken at random a few of the quotations are as follows:

"There are verses in the Vedas which when repeated are said to charm the birds and beasts."

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought."

"Having pervaded the Universe with a fragment of Myself,--I remain."

"Near to renunciation,--_very near_,--dwelleth eternal peace."

As material for a book on agnosticism it is amusing,--his agnosticism being in reality only his inability to accept creed-bound faiths. The quotations are proof, however, that germinal somewhere was an aspiration for the verities of things. Unable to find them, the ego drew in upon itself, closing the door. Behind that door however it was watching and waiting with a wistful yearning. Years later, after reading one stanza from the Book of Dzyan, it flung open the door and emerged, to bathe in the sunlight it had been seeking so long.

At the bottom of the page of quotations from the Gita is a footnote: "True perhaps but utterly unintelligible to the rabble."

It was not long after his marriage that turning a corner he saw Fame flitting ahead of him, smiling over her shoulder. The newspapers began to quote his witticisms, as for example:

Hostess--"Mr. Saltus, what character in fiction do you admire most?"