He wrote novels, too, of contemporary life, but they are his least
notable achievements. His personages in none of these novels manage to
convince; his plots are melodrama; his worldly wisdom has smirks and
postures in it; his style, now sharp now sagging, is unequal. Saltus
could not, it seems, dispense with antiquity and remoteness in his
books. Only when buried in the deep world of ancient story or when
ranging through the widest field of time did he become most himself.
Then he invited no comparisons with familiar actualities and could
assemble the most magnificent glories according to his whims and could
drape them in the most gorgeous stuffs. What especially touched his
imagination was the spectacle of imperial Rome as interpreted to him by
French decadence: that lust for power and sensation, those incredible
temples, palaces, feasts, revelries, blasphemies, butcheries. Commencing
with a beauty which knew no bounds, he moved on to lust or satiety or
impotence for his theme; in the end he brought little but a glittering
ferocity to that cold chronicle of the czars from Ivan to Catherine,
_The Imperial Orgy_. His phrases never failed him, flashing like gems or
snakes and clasping his exuberant materials in almost the only
discipline they ever had. Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness.
Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually
checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism. To
venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and
kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks
behind corruption, malevolent though delirious.

Romance of the traditionary sort, it is plain, has lately lost its vogue
in the United States and is being neglected as at almost no other period
since Fenimore Cooper established its principal native modes. The
ancient romantic matters of the Settlement and the Revolution flourish
almost solely in tales for boys. There is of course still a matter of