I wish you a happy New Year, sir." It was the servant, green of livery, the yellow waistcoat slashed with black, bearing the coffee and fruit. "Put it there, please," Roland answered. And then, in recognition of the salutation, he added, "Thanks: the same to you." "H'm," he mused, as the man withdrew, "I ought to have tipped him, I suppose." He leaned from the bed, poured some milk into a cup, and for a second nibbled at a slice of iced orange. Through the transom came a faint odor of home-made bread, and with it the rustle of a gown and a girl's clear laugh. The room itself was small. It was...
I wish you a happy New Year, sir." It was the servant, green of livery, the yellow waistcoat slashed with black, bearing the coffee and fruit. "Put it...
THE ideal is the essence of poetry. In the virginal innocence of the world, poetry was a term that meant discourse of the gods. A world grown grey has learned to regard the gods as diseases of language. Conceived, it may be, in fevers of fancy, perhaps, originally, they were but deified words. Yet, it is as children of beauty and of dream that they remain. "Mortal has made the immortal," the Rig-Veda explicitly declares. The making was surely slow. In tracing the genealogy of the divine, it has been found that its root was fear. The root, dispersed by light, ultimately dissolved. But,...
THE ideal is the essence of poetry. In the virginal innocence of the world, poetry was a term that meant discourse of the gods. A world grown grey has...
The trite and commonplace question of contentment and dissatisfaction is a topic which is not only of every-day interest, but one which in recent years has so claimed the attention of thinkers, that they have broadly divided mankind into those who accept life off-hand, as a more or less pleasing possession, and those who resolutely look the gift in the mouth and say it is not worth the having. Viewed simply as systems of thought, the first of these two divisions is evidently contemporaneous with humanity, while the second will be found to be of purely modern origin; for from the earliest...
The trite and commonplace question of contentment and dissatisfaction is a topic which is not only of every-day interest, but one which in recent year...
It is just as well to say at the onset that the tragedy in which Tristrem Varick was the central figure has not been rightly understood. The world in which he lived, as well as the newspaper public, have had but one theory between them to account for it, and that theory is that Tristrem Varick was insane. Tristrem Varick was not insane. He had, perhaps, a fibre more or a fibre less than the ordinary run of men; that something, in fact, which is the prime factor of individuality and differentiates the possessor from the herd; but to call him insane is nonsense. If he were, it is a pity that...
It is just as well to say at the onset that the tragedy in which Tristrem Varick was the central figure has not been rightly understood. The world in ...
Saltus's first two novels bear the imprint of the kind of diffident, decadent pessimism "The Philosophy of Disenchantment" elaborates. Indeed, the sensitivity requisite for the recognition that life has no value informs "Mr. Incoul's Misadventure," the first novel, while the delusion that life has value motivates the action of the obtuse hero of the second novel, "The Truth about Tristram Varick." -David Weir, "Decadent Culture in the United States," 2008 Though any adjective would suit it better than "delightful," the strongest novel of the past twelve months is Edgar Saltus's "The...
Saltus's first two novels bear the imprint of the kind of diffident, decadent pessimism "The Philosophy of Disenchantment" elaborates. Indeed, the sen...
TIMUR and Attila the Hun dwarf Ivan the Terrible but not very much. In the fury with which Attila pounced on civilisation there is the impersonality of a cyclone. Timur was a homicidal maniac with unlimited power and a limitless area in which to be homicidal. Where he passed he left pyramids of human heads and towers made of prisoners mixed with mortar. Where Attila passed he left nothing. Ivan turned cities into shambles and provinces into cemeteries. A cholera, corpses mounted about him. But death was the least of his gifts. He discovered Siberia. That was for later comers. For his...
TIMUR and Attila the Hun dwarf Ivan the Terrible but not very much. In the fury with which Attila pounced on civilisation there is the impersonality o...
