Saltus, Edgar (Evertson)

Saltus, Edgar [Evertson] (1855–1921),born in New York City, after studying at Yale and abroad and receiving an LL.B. from Columbia began his literary career with a biography of Balzac (1884); volumes of translations from French fiction; The Philosophy of Disenchantment (1885), popularizing the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann; and The Anatomy of Negation (1886), a history of antitheistic philosophies. This philosophic attitude and the resulting lack of faith in anything but an esoteric hedonism, devoid of social or moral considerations, was elaborated in his fiction dealing with New York society. Mr. Incoul's Misadventure (1887) was the first of a long series of novels whose melodramatic plots were clothed in an epigrammatic style, a lush use of bizarre language, and an extravagant adaptation of fin de siècle romanticism, as expressed in his dictum: “In fiction as in history it is the shudder that tells.” Among the later novels are The Truth About Tristrem Varick (1888); The Pace That Kills (1889); Madame Sapphira (1893); Enthralled (1894); The Pomps of Satan (1904); The Perfume of Eros (1905); Vanity Square (1906); The Monster (1912), which he made into an unproduced play, The Gates of Life; and The Paliser Case (1919). He also published two volumes of short stories, A Transient Guest and Other Episodes (1889) and Purple and Fine Women (1903), and his attitude of mind and manner of presentation were further illustrated in treatments of such exotic subjects as apocryphal Bible history, in Mary Magdalen (1891); the history of the Roman emperors, in Imperial Purple (1892); eroticism, in Historia Amoris (1906); the history of religions, in The Lords of the Ghostland (1907); the history of the Romanoffs, in The Orgy (1920); and similar subjects in a collection of essays, Love and Lore (1890). His cynicism, exotic eroticism, and rebellion against conventional standards caused Saltus to be attacked by many critics, and championed by such writers as Van Vechten and Huneker, in whose novel Painted Veils he is a minor character. His last works show a change from the dependence upon an aesthetic doctrine of art for art's sake to a belief in theosophy, in which he was largely influenced by the views of his third wife, Marie Saltus, who wrote a biography (1925) and edited his posthumous works.