A grotesque and somewhat pathetic story. The man began life with everything in his favor. His family was well-to-do and of good social position in New York; he was sent to Eton and then to Heidelberg, and apparently made useful friends at both places; he plunged into writing at the precise moment when revolt against the New England Brahmins was rising; he attracted attention quickly, and was given a lavish welcome. No American author of 1885 was more talked about. When his first novel, “The Truth About Tristrem Varick,” came out in 1888 it made a genuine sensation. But the stick came down almost as fast as the rocket had gone up. His books set the nation agog for a short while, and were then quietly forgotten. He began as the hope of American letters, and ended as a writer of yellow-backs and a special correspondent for the Hearst papers. What ailed him was simply lack of solid substance. He could be clever, as cleverness was understood during the first Cleveland administration, but he lacked dignity, information, sense. His books of “philosophy” were feeble and superficial, his novels were only facile improvisations, full of satanic melodrama and wooden marionettes. Of late I have been re-reading them--a sad job, surely, for when I was a schoolboy they were nine-day wonders, barred from all the libraries but devoured eagerly by every aspiring youth. Now their epigrams are dulled, and there is nothing else left. “The Anatomy of Negation” and “The Philosophy of Disenchantment” have been superseded by far better books; “The Truth About Tristrem Varick” reads like one of the shockers of Gertrude Atherton; “Mary Magdalen” is a dead shell; the essays and articles republished as “Uplands of Dream” are simply ninth-rate journalism. Of them all only “Imperial Purple” holds up. A certain fine glow is still in it; it has gusto if not profundity; Saltus’s worst faults do not damage it appreciably. I find myself, indeed, agreeing thoroughly with the literary judgment of Dr. Harding. “Imperial Purple” remains Saltus’s best book. It remains also, alas, his only good one! XVII. MISCELLANEOUS NOTES 1 _Martyrs_ To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true! Searching history, I can find no such case. All the great martyrs of the books died for sheer nonsense--often for trivial matters of doctrine and ceremonial, too absurd to be stated in plain terms. But what of the countless thousands who have perished in the wars, fighting magnificently for their country? Well, show me one who knew precisely what the war he died in was about, and could put it into a simple and plausible proposition. 2 _The Ancients_