re one. In
painting, in poetry the idea, the words, the form, may be separated;
each may play its part, but in music there is no idea without form, no
form without idea. That is what makes musical criticism difficult.

_January 24, 1918._

Edgar Saltus

_"O no, we never mention him,
His name is never heard!"_

Old Ballad.

Edgar Saltus

To write about Edgar Saltus should be _vieux jeu_. The man is an
American; he was born in 1858; he accomplished some of his best work
in the Eighties and the Nineties, in the days when mutton-legged
sleeves, whatnots, Rogers groups, cat-tails, peacock feathers,
Japanese fans, musk-mellon seed collars, and big-wheeled bicycles were
in vogue. He has written history, fiction, poetry, literary criticism,
and philosophy, and to all these forms he has brought sympathy,
erudition, a fresh point of view, and a radiant style. He has
imagination and he understands the gentle art of arranging facts in
kaleidoscopic patterns so that they may attract and not repel the
reader. America, indeed, has not produced a round dozen authors who
equal him as a brilliant stylist with a great deal to say. And yet
this man, who wrote some of his best books in the Eighties and who is
still alive, has been allowed to drift into comparative oblivion. Even
his early reviewers shoved him impatiently aside or ignored him
altogether; a writer in "Belford's Magazine" for July, 1888, says:
"Edgar Saltus should have his name changed to Edgar Assaulted." Soon
he became a literary leper. The doctors and professors would have none
of him. To most of them, nowadays, I suppose, he is only a name. Many
of them have never read any of his books. I do not even remember to
have seen him mentioned in the works of James Huneker and you will not
find his name in Barrett Wendell's "A History of American Literature"
(1901), "A Reader's History of American Literature" by Thomas
Wentworth Higginson and Henry Walcott Boynton (1903), Katherine Lee
Bates's "American Literature" (1898), "A Manual of American
Literature," edited by Theodore Stanton (1909), William B. Cairns's "A
History of American Literature" (1912), William Edward Simonds's "A
Student's History of American Literature" (1909), Fred Lewis Pattee's
"A History of American Literature Since 1870" (1915), John Macy's "The
Spirit of American Literature" (1913), or William Lyon Phelps's "The
Advance of the English Novel" (1916)