9, 1673.
Francis Saltus, the poet, was his brother. He enjoyed a cosmopolitan
education which may be regarded as an important factor in the
development of his tastes and ideas. From St. Paul's School in Concord
he migrated to the Sorbonne in Paris, and thence to Heidelberg and
Munich, where he bathed in the newer Germanic philosophies. Finally he
took a course of law at Columbia University. The influence of this
somewhat heterogeneous seminary life is manifest in all his future
writing. Beginning, no doubt, as a disciple of Emerson in New England,
he fell under the spell of Balzac in Paris, of Schopenhauer and von
Hartmann in Germany. Pages might be brought forward as evidence that
he had a thorough classical education. His knowledge of languages made
it easy for him to drink deeply at many fountain heads. If Oscar Wilde
found his chief inspiration in Huysmans's "A Rebours," it is certain
that Saltus also quaffed intoxicating draughts at this source. Indeed
in one of his books he refers to Huysmans as his friend. It is further
apparent that he is acquainted with the works of Barbey d'Aurevilly,
Josephin Peladan,[2] Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud,
Catulle Mendes, and Jules Laforgue, especially the Laforgue of the
"Moralites Legendaires." His kinship with these writers is near, but
through this mixed blood run strains inherited from the early pagans,
the mediaeval monks, the Germanic philosophers, and London of the
Eighteen Nineties (although there is not one word about Saltus in
Holbrook Jackson's book of the period), and perhaps, after all, his
nearest literary relative was an American, Edgar Allan Poe, who
bequeathed to him a garret full of strange odds and ends. But Saltus
surpasses Poe in almost every respect save as a poet.

Joseph Hergesheimer has expressed a theory to the effect that great
art is always provincial, never cosmopolitan; that only provincial art
is universal in its appeal. Like every other theory this one is to a
large extent true, but Hergesheimer in his arbitrary summing up, has
forgotten the fantastic. The fantastic in literature, in art of any
kind, can never be provincial. The work of Poe is not provincial; nor
is that of Gustave Moreau, an artist with whom Edgar Saltus can very
readily be compared. If you have visited the Musee Moreau in Paris
where, in the studio of the dead painter, is gathered together the
most complete collection of his works, which lend themselves to
endle