[In the following essay, the writer examines the public image Hartmann's life and personality fostered.]

The recent suggestion of Miss Amy Lowell, that no poet or writer ought to be paid for his or her literary work, but should earn a living in other kinds of work, would, if acted upon, deprive our poets especially of a picturesque and legendary quality that has added an undoubted glamor to much of their work. The modern young poet seems deficient in the power to create a legend about himself or is indifferent to its value. If he is going to look like a business man how can he hope to astonish and mystify the public? Such are the reflections suggested by a sketch of the weirdest figure of American letters—Sadakichi Hartmann—recently published in Bruno's Weekly. Sadakichi is Baudelaire, Gerard de Nerval, Verlaine. At the same time he is a product of America, though his parentage is German and Japanese! "He is poet, artist, author, critic, lecturer and professional esthete," we are told. "To speak of a single achievement, he has written probably the most remarkable cyclus of poetic dramas that ever inspired a pen. In the highest sense they transcend stage art. He alone can produce them, by voice and gesture." He possesses a personality as vividly esoteric as the products of his pen, and, like Verlaine and Rimbaud and the rest of the continentals, he has created a legend about himself. Perhaps Miss Lowell has not considered the artistic value of that, or perhaps she does not regard the value of it an artistic value. At any rate, here is how Sadakichi Hartmann impresses Joseph Lewis French, who writes in Bruno's Weekly:

The sight—or rather the apparition, for such he is as he rises to begin—of Sadakichi Hartmann on the platform of the assembly rooms of the Ferrer Center in New York reading his Buddha the other evening, operated on myself in several ways. First it stirred up wonder at the weird look of the man, rising pale, like an Afrite, in his black dress-clothes—a feeling that thrilled every one of his auditors to the core. I have seen a young woman, as he rose to give his Poe years ago, throw up her hands, shriek and faint at the sight of him. Here is a man who looks like the ghost of the dreams he is about to interpret. His message, his mission, are all in his manner. You cannot look upon this tall, gaunt ashy-pale specter of a man without feeling that you are going to get something sincere, exotic. You are never disappointed. My second thought, for I had not seen Sadakichi in some time, carried me back at once to a little room in a poverty-stricken flat in New York, and an evening seventeen years before, when I had heard the words of Buddha as they came fresh from the brain of the young poet. … I never knew a man in those days who lived so completely in his dreams as Sadakichi Hartmann. He was the typical dreamer of our great metropolis—known as such everywhere, from the sanctum of Stedman and Howells to the poorest purlieus of the East Side.

His soul at that time was wrapped up in his great cyclus. He had already written Christ in Boston (and suffered for it); and here was Buddha, to which I listened with 'a rapt surmise,' feeling that a 'new planet' had indeed 'swum into my ken.' Mohammed was to come, and Confucius. Where the bread was to come from for himself and the family meanwhile Sadakichi knew not and cared not. It came, although there were times when the poetic fire was dimmed by starvation. I have known poets and dreamers by the score, but I never knew one who was so possessed by the spirit of selfabnegation as this man. He cared not for the world when he was writing these four wonderful dreams—he asked nothing of it. He did not even presume that a publisher would look at his work. He was satisfied, as only the true artist is, with the inner vision and he listened only to her voice. Two of the dramas—they can hardly be called plays, as their effects transcend all stage art—were published at his own expense. The others, Mohammed and Confucius, the public knew only through his own recitals.

Hartmann's work was praised by Walt Whitman, John Burroughs, the great French poet Mallarmé, Theophile Bentzon and James Huneker. Yet it has been, Mr. French continues, primarily Mr. Hartmann's manner in interpreting his own work that has created such a mysterious and exotic impression of his personality. "It seemed to be almost literally another sphere into which he led his auditors evening after evening. As scene after scene unfolded itself, gorgeous as the panoply of the heavens, one asked oneself who, after all, but Sadakichi could have interpreted this. Here is the case where the poet and his work are indissoluble. The art of reading these dramas will be lost with Sadakichi."

Discussing the content of these colorful dramas, as exemplified in the Buddha, Mr. French writes:

The doctrine of Buddhism is for Sadakichi Hartmann out of which rises the powerful figure of Gautama with his great world-ethic "Renounce! Renounce!" Through him the centuries first heard the cry which has echoed steadily ever since through his own and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Against this powerful spiritual motif as a background Sadakichi projects the marvelous panorama of the East, of India at the height of her power and splendor—that "gorgeous East which with richest hand showers on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold."

Scene after scene he builds up with stark realism and opulent color, two master-keys in the hand of the artist who dares to employ them together, till we can feel the shine and splendor of it all, and hear the naked voices speaking to us. Here is great material for an epic drama—absolute elemental contrasts—the Orient in the fullness of its glory and the strange, stark figure of the prophet protesting against it all. One asks oneself what form but the drama the poet could have used. A story? No, the canvas is too immense to be circumscribed within narrative bounds. One can readily conceive 'Salammbo' heightened by having been cast in this form after hearing Buddha … Only in this chosen form can he load his brush with color and sweep it at will.

The exotic note in the personality of Sadakichi Hartmann is undoubtedly the result of his curious ancestry. Renouf helpley, one of the contributors to Bruno's Weekly—a publication which has done much to sustain the Sadakichi "legend"—writes:

The son of a German father and a Japanese mother, of a burgomaster's son from Mecklenburg, the only European state without a constitution, and the daughter of a ronin, a roving soldier of old Japan— surely a weird combination that had to produce something out of the ordinary. Sadakichi is much more Japanese than German. His style is extravagant but suave. Some of his short stories are as excessive and intense as Poe's on strictly realistic lines. The utmost bounds of expression are reached—even his originality is aggressive. His drama—will they ever be presented? Their splendor is all fire and flame, little short of barbarous. His poems, on the other hand, are all filigree work, the most difficult forms, dripping with technic to express a vague vista, color and motion, in words. …

He attempts to be Rabelaisian with the constitution of a Charles IX. An invalid half his life, often spending three days of every week in bed—"my ailments are exceeded only by my debts"—and then indulging in some tour de force of writing seventeen hours at a stretch, or dissipating three nights without sleep, or dancing a solo of the Blue Danube Valse with an encore of Offenbach's La Belle Helene at some public ball. Incredible!

Look at his face. Handsome? not a bit. Downright ugly—not unlike Zangwill. At times tired and sordid looking. A veritable gargoyle. And then suddenly it will brighten up as if lit up by some inner flame, with a play of features as subtle and unfathomable as eastern philosophy. "Why did you not become an actor?" he is frequently asked. "Because I chose to be an author," is his answer.

Five or six substantial volumes have been published from his pen, including a history of American art, and a valuable estimate of the art of Whistler. The poet places naturally a high value on his creative work, which is for the most part unpublished. "But so far as an audience is concerned," he is reported to have exclaimed, "I am indifferent whether I find it among my contemporaries or among their grandchildren. Mr. Whelpley advises us to read some of his short stories and poems. "Some of his art essays on sculpture, perfume, fireworks, and, finally, his Buddha, a thing all color, sound and incense, as Vance Thompson has said, a strange mixture of lyrical pantheism, of Shelley, and the Ibsen of the Peer Gynt period."

A tradition has grown up around Sadakichi Hartmann, we read further. It is made up partly of his own sparkling mots. "You are permitted to greet me, but I will not talk to you—that shall be your punishment," he is said to have remarked in breaking off a friendship. One critic who fell under his spell called him "the child of dreams who all his life has wandered amid a garden of black roses and plucked the bud of despair." How few of our younger poets evoke such a tribute! Two of his books, Conversations with Walt Whitman and My Theory of Soul Atoms, were never put on the market because there was no money to pay the printer. "He is still the same fanatic in quest of glory and daily bread." Sadakichi Hartmann once rented a New York theater and produced therein a symphony of perfumes. It has, of course, added to the Sadakichi legend.

Sadakichi Hartmann first appeared on the horizon of American letters at the age of twenty with his drama Christ, Mr. Whelpley writes. He suffered ostracism, and his fiery drama "languished on the locked shelves of American libraries." He found few champions. The Christ was the first of a cyclus of four dramas dealing with the four great primal religions. It was written in Boston in 1887. "It was the most daring thing that ever appeared above the literary horizon. Boston was not only shocked, but horrified. Sadakichi was arrested and confined four days in the city prison. The central situation of the play, a scene between Christ and Mary Magdalen, was regarded as utterly blasphemous and subversive of all Christian doctrine. Finally a coterie of writers, painters and musicians rallied to his aid, and on behalf of his wife and children his release was effected.

His Greenwich Village biographer gives us a further glimpse of this weird personality: "He is evasive. He is frank but allows nobody to come very close to him. He has no pose and dresses in the simplest, least noticeable manner, like a man who likes to mingle with the crowd without attracting attention. … 'I have certain gifts,' he sighs, 'so I have to live up to them. The public apparently gives me plenty of time to finish my work. Perhaps it is all for the better.'"

There is another Sadakichi Hartmann, a Hartmann unknown to the admirers of the picturesque and the exotic. There is the Sadakichi Hartmann who in the pages of the magazine devoted to the camera trade writes technical articles on the problems of commercial photography and portraiture. Perhaps in this respect the weird, shadowy poet is following the advice of Miss Lowell; but he does not allow it to interfere with the Sadakichi "legend."