He is always the snob (somewhere he defends the snob in an essay):
rich food ("half-mourning" [artichoke hearts and truffles], "filet of
reindeer," a cygnet in its plumage bearing an orchid in its beak,
"heron's eggs whipped with wine into an amber foam," "mashed
grasshoppers baked in saffron"), rich clothes, rich people interest
him. There is no poverty in his books. His creatures do not toil. They
cut coupons off bonds. Sometimes they write or paint, but for the most
part they are free to devote themselves exclusively to the pursuit of
emotional experience, eating, reading, and travelling the while. And
when they have finished dining they wipe their hands, wetted in a
golden bowl, in the curly hair of a tiny serving boy. A character in
"Madam Sapphira" explains this tendency: "A writer, if he happens to
be worth his syndicate, never chooses a subject. The subject chooses
him. He writes what he must, not what he might. That's the thing the
public can't understand."

There is always a preoccupation with ancient life, sometimes freely
expressed as in "Imperial Purple," but more often suggested by plot,
phrase, or scene. He kills more people than Caligula killed during the
whole course of his bloody reign. Murders, suicides, and other forms
of sudden death flash their sensations across his pages. Webster and
the other Elizabethans never steeped themselves so completely in gore.
In almost every book there is an orgy of death and he has been
ingenious in varying its forms. The poisons of rafflesia, muscarine,
and orsere are introduced in his fictions; somewhere he devotes an
essay to toxicology. Daggers with blades like needles, pistols,
drownings, asphyxiations, play their roles ... and in one book there
is a crucifixion!

Again I find that Mr. Saltus has said his word on the subject: "In
fiction as in history it is the shudder that tells. Hugo could find no
higher compliment for Baudelaire than to announce that the latter had
discovered a new one. For new shudders are as rare as new vices;
antiquity has made them all seem trite. The apt commingling of the
horrible and the trivial, pathos and ferocity, is yet the one secret
of enduring work--a secret, parenthetically, which Hugo knew as no one
else."

His fables depend in most instances upon sexual abberrations, curious
coincidences, fantastic happenings. Rapes and incests decorate his
pages. He does not ask us to believe his monstrous stories; he compels
us to. He ca