Chapter X

The new Ibsen play enjoyed a stormy première. After he had sounded its praise and expressed his personal opinion that critics who thought to the contrary were imbeciles not worth the powder to blow them hell ward, Ulick went to the Utopian Club there to relax. He ran into Edgar Saltus as he entered. That writer was then at his brilliant apogee. He had published The Anatomy of Negation, The Philosophy of Disenchantment, The Truth About Tristram Varick and Mr. Incoul's Misadventure, and was enjoying with his ironic humor the row raised by the moral bell-boys of criticism over his incomparable style and incomparable unmorality. Ulick had been his admirer in Paris and told the aristocratic author so in no measured manner. Saltus liked the young man and encouraged him. "Naturally, you should have remained in Paris. Here you commit spiritual suicide. I don't care what De Gourmont advised. You have the soul of a cosmopolitan. There is no nationality in art any more than there is democratic art. Demos dislikes art as much as he does a bathtub. Soap and social equality are akin. His self-constituted champion, Walt Whitman, who wrote some stunning head-lines, not to mention his catalogue of the human genitals, is not welcome to Mr. & Mrs. Demos. Longfellow about fills their lyric cup to overflowing. However, I was about to write you. I've an invitation for you." Then he went into details. Ulick was delighted. "Of course, I'll accept the invitation. It's very kind of you to think of me. What a jolly party it will be. I'm getting staler and staler in this town of my mother's. That party may bring back a whiff of dear old Paris." They shook hands and parted. Ulick went to the Maison Felicé, across Madison Square park, and after he had gone to bed he couldn't sleep; yet the noise of poker-chips in the next room didn't keep him awake. It's those damnable dream-brats, he irritably exclaimed and though it was long past two he donned a dressing gown and sat down to his desk in the music-room.