[In the following essay, de Casseres provides a short sketch of Hartmann's exploits.]

A grotesque etched in flesh by the drunken Goya of Heaven. A grinning, obscene gargoyle on the Temple of American Letters. Superman-bum. Half God, half Hooligan; all artist. Anarch, sadist, satyr. A fusion of Jap and German, the ghastly experiment of an Occidental on the person of an Oriental. Sublime, ridiculous, impossible. A genius of the ateliers, picture studios, ginmills and East Side lobscouse restaurants. A dancing dervish, with graceful, Gargantuan feet and a mouth like the Cloaca Maxima. A painter out of Hakusai, Manet, Monet, Whistler. Result: fantastic realism. A colossal ironist, a suave pessimist, a Dionysiac wobbly.

Hartmann has the gift of elusiveness in all he writes. Ironic elusiveness is the hardest thing to achieve, even if one is born to it, or, rather, if it is born unto one. With Sadakichi it is a gift. His The Last Thirty Days of Christ is a superb piece of work, glowingly vivid, elusively ironic, and conveying such a sense of reality, of plausibility, that it carries with it, to me at least, the aura of inspiration, of a piecing together of some remembered adventure. He has put the veritable Jesus on paper as the rationalized, civilized, messianic-free mind conceives Him: an itinerant mystic with the thunders of evangelical propaganda locked in His subconscious nature; a hobo yogi who occasionally went into trances; a pantheist who passionately loved with a mystical furor whatever was alive; a man of vast humor and vast pity; a little of the mountebank, sincere by autosuggestion.

Hartmann in his book pictures to us the disciples of Christ with quick strokes of his brush—raw, human, ignorant wastrels, bums, pick-plates and rustic go-getters. So long as Jesus can show them where a free meal is to be had or a few pennies picked up they will believe in His mission.

They stand out in all their naked, everyday vulgarity and terre-á-terre humanity on Sadakichi's canvas like the persons in the pictures of Frans Hals. The humor of "miracles"—the humor of the rationalization of the most incredible credulity of which we have any knowledge—provokes an enormous satisfaction in the brain of the reader because of their plausibility.

Out of this book a Goya or a Daumier could make a series of pictures that would forever blow the Christmyth on to the rubbish heap of human stupidities as effectively as Cervantes blew chivalry to atoms in "Don Quixote"—if it is ever advisable to destroy a beautiful myth, which is an open question in my mind so far as the masses are concerned. In the minds of artists there is no conflict between an ironic fact and a gorgeous fiction.

Three A.M. in a private room over a saloon-restaurant (Mrs. Hoburg's) at Third avenue and Fourteenth street. Sadakichi dancing for an hour his grotesque, obscene, maniacal dances. Unforgettable hour.

Or Sadakichi in Jack's at 4 A.M., ordering lobster and beer for six of us and walking out as the check is presented. Unforgettable bilk.

Or Sadakichi doing his dervish dances in Joel's at 5 A.M., passing around the hat among the boozers, one of whom kicks the hat full of cash in the air, Sadakichi throwing a tableful of glasses in our faces. Unforgettable rough-house.

Sadakichi Hartmann was born out of his age. He was a man who belonged in Cellini's gang or with the rowdy geniuses of the Mermaid Tavern.