s 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
the Frontier, but it is another frontier: the Canadian North and
Northwest, Alaska, the islands of the South Seas, latterly the battle
fields of France, and always the trails of American exploration wherever
they may chance to lead. The performers upon such themes--the Rex
Beaches, the Emerson Houghs, the Randall Parrishes, the Zane Greys, the
James Oliver Curwoods--march ordinarily under the noisy banner of "red
blood" and derive from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, those
generous boys of naturalism whose temperaments carried them again and
again into the territories of vivid danger. Criticism notes in the later
annalists of "red blood" their sp