Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews (American Critical Archives)

STEPHEN CRANE

AMERICAN CRITICAL ARCHIVES 17 Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews general editor: M. Thomas Inge, Randolph-Macon College 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Joel Myerson Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by James W. Tuttleton, Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray Ellen Glasgow: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Dorothy M. Scura Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by John L. Idol, Jr. and Buford Jones William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by M. Thomas Inge Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Kevin J. Hayes John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Jesse S. Crisler, and Susan Shillinglaw Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Kenneth M. Price Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Letitia Dace Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Louis Budd Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Margaret Anne O’Connor Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Beverly Lyon Clark T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker Eudora Welty: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Pearl S. McHaney Flannery O’Connor: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by R. Neil Scott and Irwin H. Streight

Stephen Crane The Contemporary Reviews Edited by George Monteiro Brown University

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao ˜ Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521382656  c Cambridge University Press 2009

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2009 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Stephen Crane : the contemporary reviews / edited by George Monteiro. p. cm. – (American critical archives ; 17) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-521-38265-6 1. Crane, Stephen, 1871–1900 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Monteiro, George. II. Title. III. Series. PS1449.C85Z935 2009 2009014263 813 .4 – dc22 ISBN 978-0-521-38265-6 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Daniel G. Hoffman R. W. Stallman John Berryman

Contents Series editor’s preface Introduction Acknowledgments

page viii ix xxvi

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) The Red Badge of Courage (1895) George’s Mother (1896) Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1896) The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War (1896) The Third Violet (1897) The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898) Pictures of War (1898) War is Kind (1899) Active Service: A Novel (1899) The Monster and Other Stories (1899) Bowery Tales (1900) Whilomville Stories (1900) Wounds in the Rain: War Stories (1900) The Monster and Other Stories (1901) Great Battles of the World (1901) Last Words (1902) The O’Ruddy (1903)

133 143 161 187 193 205 213 219 223 237 245 251 257 263

Index

271

vii

1 9 21 69 99

Series editor’s preface The American Critical Archives series documents a part of a writer’s career that is usually difficult to examine, that is, the immediate response to each work as it was made public on the part of reviewers in contemporary newspapers and journals. Although it would not be feasible to reprint every review, each volume in the series reprints a selection of reviews designed to provide the reader with a proportionate sense of the critical response, whether it was positive, negative, or mixed. Checklists of other known reviews are also included to complete the documentary record and allow access for those who wish to do further reading and research. The editor of each volume has provided an introduction that surveys the career of the author in the context of the contemporary critical response. Ideally, the introduction will inform the reader in brief of what is to be learned by a reading of the full volume. The reader then can go as deeply as necessary in terms of the kind of information desired—be it about a single work, a period in the author’s life, or the author’s entire career. The intent is to provide quick and easy access to the material for students, scholars, librarians, and general readers. When completed, the American Critical Archives should constitute a comprehensive history of critical practice in America, and in some cases England, as the writers’ careers were in progress. The volumes open a window on the patterns and forces that have shaped the history of American writing and the reputations of the writers. These are primary documents in the literary and cultural life of the nation. M. Thomas Inge

viii

Introduction In the 1890s, no one took Stephen Crane lightly or casually. From the start his work sparked controversy, renewed with every publication he crowded into the single decade of his career. There was great and noisy disagreement over the merits of his journalism, his first novel, his poetry, his early stories and sketches—in short, everything he wrote. Those who championed him no less than those who attacked him worked hard at describing that writing, characterizing it or fixing it into categories. It was praised and it was ridiculed. He was personally reviled and occasionally honored. The evidence is in the reviews. Even his early death did not modify the situation, at least not immediately, though the poet Wallace Stevens thought he detected change. On June 5, 1900, the twenty-eight-year-old Stephen Crane died in Badenweiler, Baden, where his wife, Cora, had taken him in the final days of his illness. During the long journey to his interment in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the young writer was memorialized at the Central Metropolitan Temple in New York. The New York Tribune man who reported on the funeral service filed a modest, non-committal and rather perfunctory account of the service. Only seventy-two years later, when a selection of the unidentified reporter’s letters was published, did the world learn that Wallace Stevens had covered the funeral service for Crane, a fellow-poet only three years his senior. Here is what Stevens set down in his journal: This morning I went to the funeral of Stephen Crane at the Central Metropolitan Temple on Seventh Avenue near Fourteenth Street. The church is a small one and was about [a] third full. Most of the people were of the lower classes and had dropped in apparently to pass away the time. There was a sprinkling of men and women who looked literary, but they were a wretched, rag, tag, and bob-tail. I recognized John Kendrick Bangs. The whole thing was frightful. The prayers were perfunctory, the choir worse than perfunctory with the exception of its hymn “Nearer My God To Thee” which is the only appropriate hymn for funerals I ever heard. The address ix

was absurd. The man kept me tittering from the time he began till the time he ended. He spoke of Gladstone + Goethe. Then—on the line of premature death—he dragged in Shelley; and speaking of the dead man’s later work he referred to Hawthorne. Finally came the Judgement day—all this with most delicate, sweet, and bursal gestures—when the earth and the sea shall give up their dead. A few of the figures to appear that day flashed through my head—and poor Crane looked ridiculous among them. But he lived a brave, aspiring, hard-working life. Certainly he deserved something better than this absolutely common-place, bare, silly service I have just come from. As the hearse rattled up the street over the cobbles, in the stifling heat of the sun, with not a single person paying the least attention to it and with only four or five carriages behind it at a distance I realized much that I had doubtingly suspected before—There are few hero-worshippers. Therefore, few heroes.1

∗∗∗

It is tempting to see in Stevens’s reaction to the poor showing in every aspect of Crane’s New York funeral service an emblematic foreshadowing of what would in a few short years become of the living Crane’s literary reputation—one of such neglect such that, just a few years later, in 1914, prompted the brilliant English critic Edward Garnett to deplore the American critic’s “grudging, inadequate recognition of the most original genius it has produced in story-telling.”2 Garnett was ready therefore when Thomas Beer appeared before him in 1923 with an appeal for support in his request for an interview with Joseph Conrad, and when Conrad agreed to write an introduction for Beer’s book, Garnett wrote to Conrad, on March 19, 1923: I am glad that you are going to do that chapter on Crane. And part of it I think you should devote to Crane’s style—it’s perfection at its finest. I have tried to rub into those blasted Americans that Crane was a master & do you know that my essay on Crane in “Friday Nights” was rejected in turn by the half a dozen American quarterlies I tried. You are in position to say things emphatically. If you look up my paper you will see I have touched concisely on his best work & his quality.3

1 2

3

Letters of Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens, ed. (New York: Knopf, 1972), p. 41. “Some Remarks on American and English Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly, 114 (December 1914), 747–756; reprinted in Edward Garnett, Friday Nights (New York: Knopf, 1922). I quote from the latter, pp. 248–249. Letter to Joseph Conrad, March 19, 1923, in A Portrait in Letters: Correspondence to and about Conrad, J. H. Stape and Owen Knowles, eds. (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 1996), pp. 206–207.

x

Yet even four years after the appearance in 1923 of Beer’s study, with Conrad’s “commonplace” introduction (as it was called by the critic Ernest Boyd4 ), Garnett was still convinced that Crane had never been given his just due. “Crane was a genius,” he wrote to his young prot´eg´e H. E. Bates, “& do you know since the day he died he has been shockingly ‘put on the back shelf.’ Nobody cares a damn.”5 Apparently in Garnett’s view neither the Beer volume nor even the publication over the years 1925–1927 of the twelve volume collection brought out by Knopf in an edition of 750 copies had made much difference in Crane’s fortunes with the American reader, reviewer or critic. Yet, to return to Wallace Stevens’s reaction to the service for Crane, it seems notable to me that the young reporter and fledgling poet ends his journal entry not by focusing on Crane’s achievement as a writer but as some sort of heroic figure. Crane, a professional writer—reporter as well as author of fiction and (what must have had great appeal to Stevens, whose own work occasionally echoes Crane’s) as poet—had achieved fame and notoriety. His name was not only prominent in the journals of large circulation but even more frequently present in the newspapers where his comings and goings were chronicled no less than his scrapes with the New York police. His heroism in Cuba during the Spanish–American War had set him apart from his fellow reporters, his fellowwriter and war correspondent Richard Harding Davis decided in Harper’s Magazine in 1899: The best correspondent is probably the man who by his energy and resource sees more of the war, both afloat and ashore, than do his rivals, and who is able to make the public see what he saw. If that is a good definition, Stephen Crane would seem to have distinctly won the first place among correspondents in the late disturbance . . . Of his power to make the public see what he sees it would be impertinent to speak. His story of Nolan, the regular, bleeding to death on the San Juan hills, is, so far as I have read, the most valuable contribution to literature that the war has produced. It is only necessary to imagine how other writers would have handled it, to appreciate that it could not have been better done. His story of the marine at Guantanamo, who stood on the crest of the hill to “wigwag” to the warships, and so exposed himself to the fire of the entire Spanish force, is also particularly interesting, as it illustrates that in his devotion to duty, and also in his readiness at the exciting moments of life, Crane is quite as much of a soldier as the man whose courage he described. He tells how the marine stood erect, staring through the dusk with half-closed eyes, and with his lips 4

5

“Readers and Writers,” Independent, 114 (June 6, 1925), p. 645. Eric Solomon, however, describes Conrad’s introduction as “powerful”—Stephen Crane in England: A Portrait of the Artist ([Columbus]: Ohio State University Press, 1964), p. 39. Letter to H. E. Bates, February 2, 1927, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. Quoted with consent.

xi

moving as he counted the answers from the war-ships, while innumerable bullets splashed the sand about him. But it never occurs to Crane that to sit at the man’s feet, as he did, close enough to watch his lips move and to be able to make mental notes for a later tribute to the marine’s scorn of fear, was equally deserving of praise.6 That by the time of his death Crane’s celebrity, fame, and literary fortune on either side of the Atlantic was already in decline (as suggested by the note Stevens strikes at the close of his journal entry) was not immediately noticeable in the public arena of books, reviewers, and publishers. If the London Times obituary concludes that Crane’s “early death removes from the ranks of letters a man of real ability, from whom not only the public, but his fellow-craftsmen, expected a good deal,”7 there were still more books to come. After all, in the summer of 1900 there were new Crane books about to appear. Bowery Tales (a combined edition of George’s Mother and Maggie), Whilomville Stories, and Wounds in the Rain were published in the days and weeks following Crane’s death, while Great Battles of the World (a collection of historical essays researched by Kate Lyons, the novelist Harold Frederic’s wife) and Last Words (a collection of fugitive pieces, stories, and sketches) were to appear in 1902. To cap all this was the talk about the unfinished novel The O’Ruddy and who would bring it to conclusion. Eventually the task would be taken up and completed by Crane’s friend the historical novelist Robert Barr. Indeed, most reviewers of The O’Ruddy, which did not appear until 1903, bent over backwards to praise the book, even though, as most of them agreed, it was not in Crane’s customary line. Crane’s “Irish” pieces”—“At Clancy’s Wake,” published in Truth in 1893, for example—which might have given critics a head’s-up on how to take The O’Ruddy, were buried away in newspapers and other periodicals, and Maggie and George’s Mother were much too seriously taken (ignoring their spots of unmistakable comedy) to offer a clue to Crane’s humor as evidenced in a satirical account of the genial escapades of a “King of the Irelands,” as Crane’s hero was dubbed by one reviewer, following a hint in the novel itself.8 Early on Crane showed signs of interest in writing. His first known “literary” piece, “Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle,” dates from 1885 when he was fourteen. The boy’s talent was soon recognized and put to profitable use by his brother, Jonathan Townley Crane, Jr., a reporter from the Jersey shore 6 7 8

Richard Harding Davis, “Our War Correspondents in Cuba and Puerto Rico,” Harper’s Magazine, 98 (May 1899), p. 941. “Mr. Stephen Crane,” London Times (June 6, 1900), p. 8. “King of the Irelands,” New York Times (November 21, 1903), p. BR8. See also Stephen Crane and Robert Barr, The O’Ruddy, in The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, Fredson Bowers et al., eds., vol. IV (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971), p. 20.

xii

during the summer months. Young Stephen assisted him with copy furnished to New York newspapers. After a short stint at Lafayette College, followed by a year at Syracuse University, Crane seems to have decided upon a career as a reporter–writer who kept imagining his way out and away from facts as an end in themselves. It is not known just exactly when he decided, while still writing pieces on various themes and subjects, most of them datelined Hartwood, New York, to write a novel about the Bowery and its inhabitants. In 1893, at the age of twenty-two, he published at his own expense and (mysteriously) under a pseudonym—Johnston Smith—his first piece of extended fiction, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York). He could hardly give it away, let alone sell it. But it did come to the attention of Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, who became champions of the precocious work of this newcomer to what was called (by Crane himself) this “beautiful war” for realism.9 In an interview published in the Philadelphia Press on April 15, 1894, Howells is quoted on Crane: “He has written one novel so far—Maggie, I think that as a study of East Side life in New York Maggie is a wonderful book. There is so much realism of a certain kind in it that we might not like to have it lying on our parlor tables, but I hope that the time will come when any book can safely tell the truth as completely as Maggie does.”10 In the next year Howells once again tried to call attention to Crane’s achievement in Maggie. In his “Life and Letters” column in Harper’s Weekly, he wrote: I referred last week to the work done in “tough” New York dialect by the author of the Chimmie Fadden stories, but this had been anticipated by Mr. Stephen Crane in a story called Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, which was printed some years ago, but could not be said to have been published, so wholly did it fail of recognition. There was reason for this in its grim, not to say grimy truth, and in the impossibility to cultured ears of a parlance whose texture is so largely profanity. All its conscience and all its art could not save it, and it will probably remain unknown, but it embodied perhaps the best tough dialect which has yet found its way into print.11 But “in June 1895, no one could know that by Christmas The Red Badge of Courage, published in the fall, would have made the author famous,” writes Edwin Cady.12 Preceding that outbreak of fame, however, was another important Crane publication. A version of The Red Badge of Courage was syndicated to newspapers around the country. When the novel was published by 9

10 11 12

Letter to Lily Brandon Munroe, [March–April 1894], in The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, eds. vol. I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 63. Edward Marshall, “A Great American Writer,” Philadelphia Press (April 15, 1894), p. 27. William Dean Howells, “Life and Letters,” Harper’s Weekly, 39 (June 8, 1895), p. 533. W. D. Howells as Critic, Edwin H. Cady, ed. (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 232.

xiii

D. Appleton in the autumn of 1895, possibly due to the book’s success in the newspapers, the cuts that had been made to meet journalistic requirement were restored along with some revisions in matters of detail and style. Between the syndication of the shortened version of The Red Badge of Courage and its book publication in full form, Crane took a flier at publishing his verse, “lines,” as he called his poems. Published by the Boston firm Copeland and Day, “among the first of American publishers to issue works of literary merit in an attractive format,” write Ames W. Williams and Vincent Starrett.13 The presentation of the poems, all words in capitals, along with the design of the cover and title-page, was, to many reviewers, an open invitation for ridicule, not only of the book as an artifact, but of Crane’s often puzzling poems, which sounded like no other poetry they were familiar with but which “looked” like the verse then being published by the English-language decadents abroad. The book found no more than a small handful of sympathetic reviewers, some of them writing, significantly, due to the initial success of The Red Badge of Courage in late 1895. It was his Civil War novel, of course, that put Stephen Crane on the literary map both in the United States and Great Britain. Although there would be a lasting controversy in the journals and newspapers over whether it was the English reviewer who first recognized the greatness of Crane’s novel and thus spurred the American press to take notice or it was the American reviewer who had noted its importance and worth right off, it is clear from the evidence now gathered that the favorable reviews of the novel followed close upon the book’s publication, first in the United States at the end of September 1895 and then in Great Britain two months later. There were other controversial matters. One of them revolved around the discovery that the book was not based on Crane’s personal experience of the Civil War, which had ended six years before he was born. That Crane had imagined his boy’s tale brought him both praise and scorn. The scorn took what has become its storied form in an attack by Alexander C. McClurg, a Civil War volunteer who had risen from Private to Brigadier General, who impugned Crane’s presentation of the private soldier’s temperament and psychology as being in any way representative of those soldiers engaged in battles that he had experienced. “Nowhere are seen the quiet, manly, self-respecting, and patriotic men, influenced by the highest sense of duty, who in reality fought our battles,” complains McClurg. In short, the book is “a mere work of diseased imagination.”14 Moreover, Crane’s ignorance in matters relating to warfare, he argued, extended to the falsity of his style; and he listed examples of solecisms and the absurdity of his language and imagery. Others, of course, came to Crane’s defense, including 13 14

Ames W. Williams and Vincent Starrett, Stephen Crane: A Bibliography (Glendale, California: J. Valentine, 1948), p. 16. A[lexander] C. McClurg, “The Red Badge of Hysteria,” Dial, 20 (April 16, 1896), pp. 227–228.

xiv

military officers. The controversy seems not to have hurt the book’s popularity or its sales. The Red Badge of Courage proved to be Crane’s one great popular, financial, and critical success during his lifetime; and it remains so to this day, with some of its strongest adherents among writers. William Faulkner said, “It is the only good war story I know.”15 Ernest Hemingway would later call it “that great boy’s dream of war that was to be truer to how war is than any war the boy who wrote it would ever live to see. It is one of the finest books of our literature. It is all as much of one piece as a great poem is.”16 William Saroyan did not stop with The Red Badge of Courage. The culmination of a character sketch is the advice: “Say kid, read Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage. You’ll like it. Read anything of Crane’s!”17 Hoping to cash in on the attention he was getting for his war novel, Crane reached agreements with his publisher Appleton to reissue Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, but with changes, at least one key excision, and significant re-writing, mainly for stylistic reasons, and with a different publisher Edward Arnold to publish George’s Mother, a second Bowery novel about two figures—a young man and his mother—living in the same tenement house as Maggie Johnson and her family. Publication of George’s Mother preceded that of Maggie by a matter of days, such that reviewers sometimes considered the two books together. Both the applauders and detractors of these novels agreed that Crane was definitely a realist (for having chosen to offer a somber portrait of how “the other half lives”—to borrow the phrase made famous by Jacob Riis in his sociological study of that title). But they disagreed over whether or not such books should be written. Those who opposed Crane’s ventures in this area of social realism, opting to dismiss them as works of realism, did not acknowledge that Crane’s literary realism went beyond the reproduction of details and stock situations, that his characters had thoughts and feelings beneath their superficial impressions. Behind Maggie and George’s Mother was the same impulse that led him to write The Red Badge of Courage. “I wonder that some of those fellows,” he said, writing in the “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” series in the Century Magazine, “don’t tell how they felt in those scraps. They spout enough of what they did, but they’re as emotionless as rocks.”18 His own narrative would supply what was left out in those accounts. George’s Mother and Maggie, along with The Red Badge of Courage, were also Crane’s de facto answer to the widespread general complaints about literary realism in his time. “If ‘Realism’ is only half of life as the body is only part of the Man,” wrote 15 16 17 18

Letter to Bennett Cerf, Christmas 1932, in Selected Letters of William Faulkner, Joseph Blotner, ed. (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 69. Ernest Hemingway, Introduction to Men at War (New York: Berkeley, 1958), p. 10. William Saroyan, “Portrait of a Bum,” Overland Monthly, 86 (December 1928), p. 424. Corwin Knapp Linson, “Little Stories of ‘Steve’ Crane,” Saturday Evening Post, 175 (April 11, 1903), p. 19.

xv

the New York Tribune at the beginning the decade, “how can a book or a play presenting only the outside of things be true to nature and life?” It is easy to picture a lean and slippered pantaloon hobbling along the crowded street; then on the paper one may see his bent back, the wrinkles in his leathery cheeks, the faded rustiness of his once black coat, the cracks in his dirty linen, the knotted veins, the enlarged knuckles of his old hands. But it takes a Balzac to show the tragedy in the man’s soul—not by pasting a label on the man’s breast, but by making his soul live before you.19 Crane was not always credited with bringing out the soul of his Bowery denizens. But to do so was his intention, if we are to credit the now familiar dedicatory message he wrote in several copies of the 1893 Maggie: “this book . . . tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless. If one proves that theory, one makes room in Heaven for all sorts of souls, notably an occasional street girl, who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people.”20 Still eager to strike while the iron was hot, Appletons brought out a small collection of Crane’s war stories, as the subtitle has it (echoing the subtitle of The Red Badge of Courage) of “Episodes of the American Civil War.” Brought out in London as well, as had all of Crane’s books following The Red Badge of Courage, The Little Regiment attracted considerable attention, especially for a grouping of merely half a dozen tales, with most of the reviewers applauding Crane as an accomplished writer of war stories. The publication of this book helped to solidify (petrify, in some cases) the notion that Crane was at his best as a writer of war stories. This prejudice was helped along when it was noted that the composition of both George’s Mother and Maggie had preceded the writing of The Red Badge of Courage, though the recognition of that fact might just as well have indicated to them that Crane, a professional writer, would not allow himself to accept such a limitation. It was in this professional spirit, one imagines, that he next undertook a different subject: the bohemian art world of New York, something he knew much about at first hand. He was certainly aware of George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), a novel on the “artist and model” theme that had recently been a sensation of enormous proportion on both sides of the Atlantic, and realized that he could bring his own quite different talent to bear on the New York world of painting. His novel would not follow du Maurier’s Svengali theme but would pursue the twists and turns of a wry love story. Published simultaneously in both the United States and England in mid-spring 1897, The Third Violet evoked a wide range of responses, ranging from the negative criticism of the 19 20

“Literary Notes,” New York Tribune (July 19, 1891), p. 14. Quoted in Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane 1871–1900 (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), p. 89.

xvi

Critic—“it is inconceivable that even for an experiment in inanity a writer should be willing to follow up a book like ‘The Red Badge’ with such a vacuous trifle”21 —to the extravagantly positive reaction—“a remarkable piece of purely literary craft; as a study in handling and technical originality it is something unprecedented.”22 Needless to say, The Third Violet did not come close to bringing Crane anything resembling du Maurier’s popular success with Trilby. In 1898, eleven months after the publication of The Third Violet, Doubleday & McClure brought out the American edition of The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure, which, along with the title story, included the stories “A Man and Some Others,” “One Dash—Horses,” “Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” “The Wise Men,” “Death and the Child,” and “The Five White Mice.” The British edition, published at just about the same time, was a more substantial volume, containing all the stories printed in the American edition now presented under the rubric “Minor Conflicts” as well as a second section titled “Midnight Sketches,” containing “An Experiment in Misery,” “The Men in the Storm,” “The Duel that was not Fought,” “An Ominous Baby,” “A Great Mistake,” “An Eloquence of Grief,” “The Auction,” “The Pace of Youth,” and “A Detail.” Many of the reviews focused on “The Open Boat,” tacking on a mere mention of the titles of the remaining stories to the end of their reviews. (“The others have the virtues of plot and character to an unusual degree,” summarized the Criterion. “They concern Greeks, Mexicans, children and cowboys.”23 ) Attracted by the fact that Crane’s story was based on its author’s own aftershipwreck experience, shared with three other survivors in rough seas trying and failing to make it to shore, reviewers in the main had nothing but praise for Crane’s story. There was a strong tendency, too, to grant Crane preeminence as the writer whose forte was to depict powerful, unpleasant emotions (whether in war, slums, or shipwrecks). This was Crane’s “own lurid province.”24 This was important not only because it implied a more accepting, broader, view of Crane’s work, but also because it tied in with the controversy over whether to classify him as a “realist” or “impressionist”; that is, many critics were able to tolerate (and even commend) his unconventional lack of plot, incident, character development by emphasizing that he writes of emotions—he specializes in the psychology of minds under stress, and as such has every right to eschew plot, etc. While Conrad was still describing Crane as “the only impressionist and only an impressionist,” the reviewers were looking on Crane as a sort 21 22 23 24

Critic, 27 (June 26, 1897), p. 438. “Chelifer” [Rupert Hughes], “The Bookery,” Godey’s Magazine, 135 (September 1897), p. 331. “A New Book by Stephen Crane,” Criterion, 17 (April 23, 1898), p. 25. “Stephen Crane’s Stories,” New York Press (May 1, 1898), p. 29.

xvii

of realistic impressionist, or impressionistic realist.25 Only twenty years later did Conrad acknowledge publicly that Crane’s “impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface.”26 Elbert Hubbard of the Philistine spoke for not a few when he described “The Open Boat” as the “sternest, creepiest bit of realism ever penned.”27 In 1899 Crane published three books. In mid-spring appeared War is Kind, followed by Active Service in the fall and The Monster and Other Stories in December. War is Kind, a second collection of poems, was brought out by Frederick A. Stokes in New York. It was not published in London. Rather modishly designed, illustrated by Will Bradley, and selling for the gaudy price of $2.50—some reviewers considered this a rip-off, given the blank space on the pages, the Beardsleyesque illustrations, and the misleading title—the book found, at best, a mixed reception. The title poem’s earlier publication, in the February 1896 Bookman, had evoked interested responses on both sides of the Atlantic. Jeannette L. Gilder, writing in the New York World, found the lines “quite remarkable for the thought in them, but they are not poetry,” at least “not poetry as Tennyson understood it, for instance.”28 In London they were noted as “‘lines’ by Mr. Crane, which, while they are not poetry, are strong and original.”29 Although there were a few serious reviews of War is Kind—some favorable, some hostile—for the most part, the reviews seemed to lie in some vast gray area full of ridicule, parody, flippancy. Like War is Kind, Active Service added nothing to Crane’s literary reputation overall. The longest of Crane’s novels, it draws in part on Crane’s experience covering the Greco–Turkish conflict in the spring of 1897. But Crane had arrived at the war scene late and because he was also ill part of the time, he had witnessed no real action. Anticipating the possibility that potential buyers of the book would mistake it for a reporter’s account of the war, the American edition of Active Service carried the explanatory subtitle “A Novel” on the title page. This tag would also defuse any possible disappointment that Crane, despite now having witnessed warfare at first hand, had not produced a “real” account of warfare. No such label, presumably because it was deemed unnecessary, appears in copies of the British edition. What the premier American war novelist had produced was not a war novel as such but, curiously, a conventional love story played out against the meager 25

26 27 28 29

Letter to Edward Garnett, December 5, 1897, Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. I: 1861– 1897, Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 416. Joseph Conrad, “Stephen Crane: A Note Without Dates,” Bookman, 50 (February 1920), p. 530. Elbert Hubbard, Philistine, 11 (September 1900), p. 123. Jeannette L. Gilder, New York World (February 23, 1896), p. 18. “Mr. Stephen Crane,” Sketch, 13 (March 18, 1896), p. 338.

xviii

color the foreign locale had to yield. The best that reviewers could say of Active Service, in the words of the Independent, was that it was “a pleasing little story for an idle hour.”30 Detractors pointed out that despite its title and the single red saber illustrating its front and back covers the book was not about war, that the love story line was not original, and that the novel was devoid of the penetrating psychology that characterized the best of Crane’s previous works. As the Outlook put it, “we demand that his own peculiar gift, his clairvoyance, in laying bare the psychology of men’s blind emotions should flash on us dramas of real significance.”31 Writing shortly after Crane’s death, H. G. Wells offered a plausible explanation for Crane’s failure with this novel: “Much more surely is ‘On Active Service’ [sic] an effort [than The Third Violet], and in places a painful effort, to fit his peculiar gift to the uncongenial conditions of popular acceptance. It is the least capable and least satisfactory of all Crane’s work.”32 In December 1899 Harper & Brothers published The Monster and Other Stories, containing, besides the title story, “The Blue Hotel” and “His New Mittens.” Notably, when the book was republished in 1901, eight months after Crane’s death, it was so enlarged by the inclusion of an additional four stories—“Twelve O’clock,” “Moonlight on the Snow,” “Manacled,” and “An Illusion in Red and White”—that it must be considered a separate publication (as I do in this collection), not merely a reprint. As they did with the Open Boat collection, reviewers of this volume (especially in the shorter, first edition) were wont to focus on the title story. Generally favorable, the two most common views of “The Monster” were that it was a psychological study of hysteria and fear or that it was a detailed study of American rural life. A few critics (notably of church-affiliated periodicals) saw it as an investigation of ethics, specifically, the question as to what limits might reasonably exist in the brother’s-keeper approach to life. These readings tended to see Dr. Trescott, who saves Henry Johnson’s life, as, thematically, the tale’s central character, not, as is customary, the heroic black man. “The Monster” alone would have been sufficient to establish Crane’s literary reputation, concluded the Spectator. “If Mr. Crane had never written anything else,” it said, “he would have earned the right of remembrance by this story alone.”33 But the story also had its detractors. They complained that there was no satisfactory resolution to the doctor’s plight, that the elaborate description (of the fire, for example) was pointless, that the subject was violent or horrible. Even as it praises Crane’s artistry, the Chicago Evening Post calls the story “a small and odious work of art.”34 30 31 32 33 34

The Independent, 51 (December 7, 1899), p. 3300. “Mr. Stephen Crane in Action,” Outlook, 4 (December 16, 1899), p. 657. H. G. Wells, “Stephen Crane: From an English Standpoint,” North American Review, 171 (August 15, 1900), p. 240. “Novels of the Week,” Spectator, 86 (February 16, 1901), p. 244. Chicago Evening Post (December 18, 1899), p. 5.

xix

“The Blue Hotel” and “His New Mittens” drew much less attention than “The Monster.” They were dismissed entirely by some. “Of the three stories that it [the 1899 Monster and Other Stories] contains, the last is childishly ineffective and the second incoherently so” said the Churchman.35 But the Boston Evening Transcript thought otherwise. The other two stories were as effective as the title story. “This wonderful artist again gives us three sketches which palpitate with life,” it begins: in the first Negro traits, childhood, a village fire and the gossip and incident of a narrow community. In the second a Nebraska scrap. In the third, the tragedy of a boy’s mittens. Stephen Crane’s words fall like the adjustments of a magnificent and complicated mechanism.36 Occasionally there were suggestions that Crane’s work in this volume was derivative. “The Monster” had its source in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was suggested, and “The Blue Hotel” in Bret Harte’s SnowBound at Eagle’s. Cora Crane offered the information that, in the latter instance, the story was “one of Mr. Crane’s own experiences when he went West for the Batchelor Syndicate of New York.”37 This explanation stands as a sort of confirmation before the fact for Thomas Beer’s “invented” account of Crane’s behavior as witness to a fight similar to the one depicted in “The Blue Hotel.” In the period of scarcely three months after Crane’s death on June 5, 1900 there appeared three books with his name on the title-page. William Heinemann reissued Maggie: A Child of the Streets (its British title) and George’s Mother as a single volume bearing the title Bowery Tales, Harper & Brothers published Whilomville Stories (in New York as well as London), and Frederick A. Stokes in New York and Methuen & Co. in London brought out Wounds in the Rain. Heinemann’s edition of Bowery Tales, the only edition ever published, was barely noticed, if the paucity of reviews so far uncovered is any indication. It is interesting that the existence of Bowery Tales enabled two well-known British writers to discover at a later date Crane’s so-called slum novels. In a journal entry dated March 6, 1910, Arnold Bennett writes: “Lately I have been reading Stephen Crane’s Bowery Tales, which was quite readable, and excellent even, in parts,”38 while H. E. Bates, in a letter to Edward Garnett in 1927, writes: “My week-end was blessed with a second volume of Crane which I picked up cheap in London—Maggie & George’s Mother. Its [sic] impossible to say how they impressed me . . . Blast the people that won’t touch him.”39 35 36 37 38 39

Churchman, 80 (December 23, 1899), p. 791. “Stephen Crane’s Stories,” Boston Evening Transcript (January 10, 1900), p. 10. “The Literary Week,” Academy, 60 (March 2, 1901), p. 177. The Journal of Arnold Bennett (New York: Literary Guild, 1933), p. 370. Letter to Edward Garnett, January 26, 1927, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. Quoted with consent.

xx

Whilomville Stories, a collection of stories from Harper’s Magazine, is clearly a cycle of inter-related stories. If The Red Badge of Courage took a Huck Finnlike boy to war, this late book delves into the mysteries, joys, and cruelties of children in a Tom Sawyer world, especially as it appears in the Phelps farm episodes of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Reviewers expressed some disagreement over whether it was an adult book about children or a children’s book. If the latter it was pointed out that Crane’s language was too difficult for them. John D. Barry, who had followed Crane’s career from the days of the 1893 Maggie, explained Crane’s failure in this book as one of language. At the time of his death he was acquiring from the world the education he had missed in his brief experience at college. Among other things, he was learning new words, fine words, the words that most writers know and never use. He snatched at them as a child snatches at bits of flashing jewelry, and he stuck them into his stories with a splendid disregard of their fitness. Whilomville Stories, one of his latest books, instead of being written in the simple language suitable to the child-life described, is full of such words; they fairly stick out of the page. If Mr. Crane had lived a few years longer, he would undoubtedly have stored those words in his memory, kept them shut up there, and returned to plain speech.40 In the Nation Annie Logan, who seldom if ever had a good word to say about Crane’s writing, contended that Crane’s entire literary reputation “might justly be annihilated by Whilomville Stories.”41 While the American Ecclesiastical Review blasted Crane’s stories, including the Peter Newell drawings that illustrated them: Twelve sketches, painfully collecting and setting forth the ugly, petty, and disagreeable things in the lives of dull and wayward middle-class children. An intolerable number of words is devoted to each idea, and both words and phrases are carefully uncouth, whensoever it is possible. The pictures precisely reflect the stories and show children much more hideous than young monkeys, inasmuch as they are clothed in atrocious garments, ill-sewed and ill-fitting. Both stories and pictures are examples of misused labor.42 The Churchman, on the other hand, acknowledging the loss that Crane’s death brought to all “lovers of strenuous fiction and photographic realism,” found Whilomville Stories to be “as true to life as any that Mr. Crane ever wrote,” but with a difference. “It has a winning sympathy, a touch of nature that we recall but rarely in his former work.”43 40 41 42 43

John D. Barry, “A Note on Stephen Crane,” Bookman, 13 (April 1901), p. 148. Annie R. M. Logan, “Recent Novels,” Nation, 72 (February 28, 1901), p. 182. “Recent Popular Books,” American Ecclesiastical Review, 23 (September 1900), pp. 335–336. “Recent Fiction,” Churchman, 82 (September 29, 1900), p. 385.

xxi

On the whole the reviews of Whilomville Stories were favorable, many commenting on the humor in the stories, something that was not always considered to be a part of Crane’s temperament in other writings. According to the Outlook, “Mr. Crane, from his first great popular success until his recent sad death, did no literary work more thoroughly and truly artistic than is found in these slight and simple sketches of child life. If they are not hilariously humorous, they are whimsically droll.”44 The London Times, perhaps, offers a median in its typically measured praise: In these [stories] he appears in an attractive light, which does infinite credit to his versatility. We hardly recognize the author of “The Red Badge of Courage” in the playful humourist who identifies himself so happily with the moods, the chatter, and the childish fancies of small boys and girls . . . He has done for Whilomville what Mr. Barrie did for Thrums, and the one township is as quaint and old-world as the other.45 The publication of Whilomville Stories was followed almost immediately by the appearance of Wounds in the Rain in September. It seems apparent that Crane himself put both manuscripts together. Attesting to this is the date Crane assigns to his dedication of the war book—April 1900. Wounds in the Rain collects stories and sketches Crane wrote during and shortly after the end of the Spanish–American War. Based on his own observations and experiences, these hard-earned pieces were evidence that Crane’s earlier dependence on largely imagined impressions was giving way to a closer bonding of his imagination to the facts of war overall as well as to the mundane, if sometimes heroic, actuality of warfare. Inevitably there were comparisons with The Red Badge of Courage, which had become the benchmark for Crane’s own war writings. Most reviewers decided that the two works were of comparable excellence. “‘Wounds in the Rain’ is a book that should stand on the shelf beside the ‘Red Badge of Courage,’” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle;46 while in London the Sketch considered the two works to be “almost identical in style, in scope, in point of view, in hard surface brilliancy.”47 Crane’s accomplishment in Wounds in the Rain was a corroboration of what he had earlier imagined. In Crane’s “published work,” asserted the New York Herald, “the thing that strikes you is the fact that he discovered himself from the first. His ‘Red Badge of Courage’ was a prediction of this latest book. What Crane the dreamer had imagined, Crane the war correspondent realized. The stories in this book, written after he had known war, strikingly corroborated what he had fancied that war must 44 45 46 47

Outlook, 66 (September 8, 1900), p. 133. “Recent Novels,” London Times (April 2, 1901), p. 13. Brooklyn Daily Eagle (October 20, 1900), p. 4. O. O., “The Literary Lounger,” Sketch, 32 (October 24, 1900), p. 32.

xxii

be.” After singling out “‘War Memories,’ revealing in flashes of lightning all of the battle episodes which he had witnessed in Cuba,” he comes to what he considers Crane’s major achievement in Wounds in the Rain to be. Despite its abandonment of the epic mood, there is a true epic as epics must be written to-day. He never exaggerates, rather he underrates, yet he produces an effect which no exaggeration could reach. These American soldiers, with their reticence, their calmness, their careless jests in the face of deadly peril, are far more splendid and imposing than if they had sought to assume the heroic attitude, or if their historian had flung around them an atmosphere of conscious heroism.48 The New York Times picked up on Crane’s handling of “heroism” in war. After quoting from the last story in the volume, “The Second Generation,” the review concludes: “There is no pomp of war in what Mr. Stephen Crane writes. You see the horrors of it, lightened here and there by heroism, and it is the matter-of-fact heroism which is most to the author’s liking.”49 Great Battles of the World, first published in Philadelphia by J. B. Lippincott in early 1901, was a collection of articles on notable historical battles that ran initially in Lippincott’s Magazine. As a note prefacing the volume indicates, “It was agreed that the battles should be the choice of the author, and he chose them for their picturesque and theatric qualities, not alone for their decisiveness. What he could best assimilate from history was its grandeur and passion and the first of action. These he loved, and hence the group of glorious battles which forms this volume.”50 Not all reviewers were satisfied with Crane’s choices. Critics expressed confusion at the author’s choice of “great” battles. In fact, the choice may have been affected by the fact that the research for the essay, and perhaps some of the writing itself, was done by Kate Lyons. There was the rare example of the extravagant review. This was Crane’s “last and most remarkable book”51 or his “most important work,”52 but at best, when it did occur, praise for the volume was subdued. Early on, moreover, critics began admitting that the book would do nothing for Crane’s literary reputation and that, all told, it was disappointing. J. B. Kerfoot’s disappointment was such that he thought it “a pity that the dignity of publication should have

48 49 50 51 52

“The Soft Side and . . . the Hard Side,” New York Herald (October 20, 1900), p. 12. “War Stories by Stephen Crane,” New York Times (November 10, 1900), p. 767. Harrison S. Morris, “Note,” Great Battles of the World (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1901), pp. 3–4. “Great Battles of the World, by Stephen Crane,” Daily Inter Ocean (November 19, 1900), p. 9. “J. B. Lippincott’s Descriptive Books,” Literary News, 21 (December 1900), Christmas Number, p. 363.

xxiii

been conferred upon papers so little worthy of standing as the last word of their author.”53 But it was only Crane’s “latest” word. Cora Crane saw to that. While waiting for Robert Barr to bring The O’Ruddy to conclusion, she saw a new collection of Crane’s work through the press. Last Words appeared on the spring list 1902 of the London publisher Digby, Long, & Company. A gathering of previously published pieces—scattered fugitives, varying in subject matter and genre, cobbled together for publication—it offered few examples of what might be called Crane’s final work. Most of the reviewers managed to find something favorable to say, but there was not much enthusiasm shown for this posthumous publication. The one glaring exception was the Publishers’ Circular, which ventured that in this volume one found Crane “almost at his very best.”54 Crane’s long-awaited Irish novel The O’Ruddy was finally published by Frederick A. Stokes in New York at the end of 1903, and in London by Methuen during the summer of 1904. To attract readers among America’s Irish population, perhaps, copies in the New York edition—but not in the British edition—featured a small shamrock just below the title on the book’s spine. Given the facts that The O’Ruddy was like no other book written by Crane and that another writer—Robert Barr—had completed Crane’s unfinished manuscript, it is not surprising that many reviewers focused on the question of just how much Barr had contributed to the book. If almost everyone praised Barr’s skill in “joining” his and Crane’s work, there were a few who thought that the beginning and ending of the book were quite different, with the beginning superior to the ending.55 The Academy reflected the general attitude when it suggested, perhaps jokingly, that “it would form a nice subject for a competition for critics to separate Mr. Barr’s share of the work from the late Mr. Stephen Crane’s.”56 Reviewers also had difficulty in deciding where to place The O’Ruddy in the Crane canon. Virtually no one made comparisons with Crane’s other work. The comparisons were to the works of Charles Lever and Thackeray, seeing, in the latter instance, similarities between Crane’s hero and Barry Lyndon. Earlier markers of Crane criticism are absent from reviews of The O’Ruddy, such as “versatility,” “power,” “vivid,” “original,” and, notably, “truth,” “impressionism,” and “realism.” As it was decided in the Times Literary Supplement, the book is “a capital bit of fictitious autobiography, though perhaps 53 54 55 56

J. B. Kerfoot, “Latest Books,” Life, 37 (January 10, 1901), p. 26. Publishers’ Circular, 76 (May 17, 1902), p. 578. See “Briefer Notices,” Public Opinion, 35 (December 24, 1903), p. 824, and “Books of the Week,” Indianapolis Journal (January 4, 1904), p. 3. “Fiction,” Academy, 67 (August 6, 1904), p. 99.

xxiv

‘verisimilitude’ and ‘realism’ are words too high and serious for it.”57 The words that were used were usually intended to classify the work: “farce,” “burlesque,” “satire,” “rhodomontade,” “extravaganza,” or “fairy story for grown-ups.”58 In the same spirit, the Athenaeum called it an example of the many “Irish novels of intrigue and adventure,” lacking only “a better name to be quite a masterpiece of its kind.”59 In short, the consensus was that The O’Ruddy was light fare, amusing and full of good fun. The Manchester Guardian, always an enthusiastic supporter of Crane’s work, wondered “why so fine and powerful a writer should play such a trick with his reputation.”60 The pieces gathered here are presented chronologically within the title categories, which are also arranged chronologically by date of first publication. Items that deal substantially with more than one Crane title—after all he crammed a great deal into the years following 1895—are placed among the reviews of the last Crane title treated in such pieces. Most of the pieces have been selected because (1) they provide perceptive commentary on Crane’s work, or (2) they express clearly and often strongly an important point of view regarding Crane’s achievement. I have also kept in mind that with the publication of The Red Badge of Courage in 1895 Crane became a trans-Atlantic celebrity. Because very few of the reviewers of the Maggie: A Girl of the Streets issued in 1896 were familiar with the first edition of the book, published in 1893 under the pseudonym “Johnston Smith” and with no publisher indicated, and since the Appleton edition in 1896 is heavily revised, especially to eliminate potentially objectionable language, as well as one particularly grotesque figure, I have chosen, for the purpose of this collection, to list the 1893 and 1896 editions separately, as if they were different books. 57 58

59 60

“Fiction,” Times Literary Supplement (July 29, 1904), p. 237. “Literature,” Independent, 56 (February 4, 1904), 273; Standard, 51 (February 6, 1904), p. 690; William Morton Payne, “Recent Fiction,” Dial, 36 (February 16, 1904), p. 121; “King of the Irelands,” New York Times (November 21, 1903), p. BR8; “Novels,” Saturday Review, 98 (August 6, 1904), p. 177; and “Fiction,” Academy, 67 (August 6, 1904), p. 99. “New Novels,” Athenaeum (August 13, 1904), p. 200. “New Novels,” Manchester Guardian (July 27, 1904), p. 6.

xxv

Acknowledgments To Philip R. Eppard, Neil K. Fitzgerald, Stanton B. Garner, Susan Geary, Brenda Murphy, Hershel Parker, Alice Hall Petry and Linda J. Taylor, I am grateful for valuable assistance at various times in my quest for reviews of Crane’s work and in their preparation for publication. I have benefited much from the services provided by many libraries, especially the John Hay Library and Rockefeller Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; New York Public Library; Butler Library, Columbia University, New York; Homer Babbidge Library and Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut; Widener Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.; and City of Chicago Central Library and Center for Research, Chicago, Illinois. My thanks, too, to Thomas M. Inge, who long ago recruited me for this project and who from time to time nudged me quietly and patiently to complete my manuscript. Anyone with more than a casual interest in the life and works of Stephen Crane has profited from Ames W. Williams and Vincent Starrett’s Stephen Crane: A Bibliography (1948), R. W. Stallman’s Stephen Crane: A Critical Bibliography (1972), Richard M. Weatherford’s Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage (1973), and Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino’s The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane 1871–1900 (1993). I am no exception.

xxvi

MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS (A STORY OF NEW YORK) by Johnston Smith (1893)

with precision, force and fluency. He has humor, originality and a wonderful power of depicting life as he sees it. He has a positive genius for description and great skill in the analysis of human character and motive. The dialect of the New York slums, which is reproduced in this volume with absolute accuracy, is, we take it, something new in literature. It is certainly as legitimate a subject of literary and artistic treatment as the dialect of the Georgia negro or Tennessee mountaineer and even more interesting to the average New Yorker. The volume before us is a very clever and most creditable achievement for so young a man and we congratulate the author most heartily on the success of his first attempt at book making.

“A Remarkable Book.” Port Jervis Union, March 3, 1893, p. 3 The Union has been favored with a copy of a recently published novel entitled, “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,” by Stephen Crane of New York city. The writer is a son of the late Rev. J. T. Crane and a brother of Judge Wm. H. Crane, which facts, apart from the merits of the publication, will invest it with a certain degree of local interest. The plot is laid in the slums and dives of the great metropolis and the characters depicted are all, without exception, creatures of the slums. The evident object of the writer is to show the tremendous influence of environment on the human character and destiny. Maggie, the heroine, or central figure of the tale, grows up under surroundings which repress all good impulses, stunt the moral growth and render it inevitable that she should become what she eventually did, a creature of the streets. The pathos of her sad story will be deeply felt by all susceptible persons who read the book. The slum life of New York city is treated with the frank fidelity of the realist, and while the unco guid [sic] and ultra pious may be shocked by the freedom of his descriptions and the language in which the dialogues are carried on, sensible people will read the book in the spirit in which it was written and will derive therefrom the moral lesson which it is the author’s aim to inculcate. The literary merits of the work are considerable. The author, although scarcely yet out of his teens, is the master of a vigorous style and uses the English language

John D. Barry. Letter to Stephen Crane. March 22, 1893 Thank you very much for sending me your book. It reached me on my return after an absence of several days from the city. Otherwise, I should have acknowledged it sooner. I have read it with the deepest interest. It is pitilessly real and it produced its effect upon me—the effect, I presume, that you wished to produce, a kind of horror. To be frank with you, I doubt if such literature is good: it closely approaches the morbid and the morbid is always dangerous. Such a theme as yours, in my judgment, ought not to be treated so brutally— pardon the word—as you have treated it: you have painted too black a picture, with no light whatever to your shade. I know one might say that the truth was black and that you tried to describe it just as it was; 3

but, one ought always to bear in mind that literature is an art, that effect, the effect upon the reader, must always be kept in view by the artist and as soon as that effect approaches the morbid, the unhealthful, the art becomes diseased. It is the taint in the peach. I really believe that the lesson of your story is good, but I believe, too, that you have driven that lesson too hard. There must be moderation even in welldoing; excess of enthusiasm in reform is apt to be dangerous. The mere brooding upon evil conditions, especially those concerned with the relation of the sexes, is the most dangerous and the most sentimental of all brooding, and I don’t think that it often moves to action, to actual reform work. This, it seems to me, is just the kind of brooding your book inspires. I presume you want to make people think about the horrible things you describe. But of what avail is their thought unless it leads them to work? It would be better for them not to think about these things at all—if thinking ends as it began, for in itself it is unpleasant and in its tendency unhealthful.

the desire to utter in truthful phrase a certain rebellious cry. It is the voice of the slums. It is not written by a dilettante; it is written by one who has lived the life. The young author, Stephen Crane, is a native of the city, and has grown up in the very scenes he describes. His book is the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read, fragment though it is. It is pictorial, graphic, terrible in its directness. It has no conventional phrases. It gives the dialect of the slums as I have never before seen it written—crisp, direct, terse. It is another locality finding voice. It is important because it voices the blind rebellion of Rum Alley and Devil’s Row. It creates the atmosphere of the jungles, where vice festers and crime passes gloomily by, where outlawed human nature rebels against God and man. The story fails of rounded completeness. It is only a fragment. It is typical only of the worst elements of the alley. The author should delineate the families living on the next street, who live lives of heroic purity and hopeless hardship. The dictum is amazingly simple and fine for so young a writer. Some of the words illuminate like flashes of light. Mr. Crane is only twenty-one years of age, and yet he has met and grappled with the actualities of the street in almost unequalled grace and strength. With such a technique already at command, with life mainly before him, Stephen Crane is to be henceforth reckoned with. “Maggie” should be put beside “Van Bibber”; to see the extremes of New York as stated by two young men. Mr. Crane need not fear comparisons so far as technique goes, and Mr. Davis will need to step forward right briskly or he may be overtaken by a man who impresses the reader with a sense of almost unlimited resource.

Hamlin Garland. “An Ambitious French Novel and a Modest American Story.” Arena 8 (June 1893), pp. xi–xii This is of more interest to me, both because it is the work of a young man, and also because it is a work of astonishingly good style. It deals with poverty and vice and crime also, but it does so, not out of curiosity, not out of salaciousness, but because of a distinct art impulse, 4

ells pays such an astonishing tribute in the interview published in another part of this paper, is a study of tenement house life in this city. It tells two stories—those of a brother and sister. It begins in this way

Edward Marshall. “A Great American Writer.” Philadelphia Press, April 15, 1894, p. 27

[Quotes from “A very little boy stood on a heap of gravel” to “the fight had changed to a blasphemous chatter.”] After this the boy’s father comes and takes him home. They meet Maggie, then 10 years old, on the way. The home life of this tenement house family is painted in this way:

[Quotes William Dean Howells:] There is another whom I have great hopes of. His name is Stephen Crane, and he is very young, but he promises splendid things. He has written one novel so far—Maggie. I think that as a study of East Side life in New York Maggie is a wonderful book. There is so much realism of a certain kind in it that we might not like to have it lying on our parlor tables, but I hope that the time will come when any book can safely tell the truth as completely as Maggie does.

[Quotes “Finally the procession plunged into one of the grewsome doorways” to “Eh, Gawd, child, what is it dis time? Is yer fader beatin’ yer mudder, or yer mudder beatin’ yer fader?”] Such is the environment which Mr. Crane gives the brother and Maggie. It is from it that she goes out to become “a girl of the streets.” He tells his story—or, rather, makes his study—with merciless accuracy. There is unquestionably truth in it, the kind of truth that no American has ever had the courage (or is it bravado?) to put between book covers before. It is a question if such brutalities are wholly acceptable in literature. Perhaps, as Mr. Howells says they will be before long. Perhaps there will always be certain phases of our life which we will not want to have woven with entire realism into our reading matter. This writer, however, deserves praise for one thing, surely. He has not failed to touch vice in his book where he has found it in real life; but he has not gilded it. He has painted it as it is; he has not made it clandestinely attractive. In this he rises far above such other Americans—Edgar Fawcett and Edgar Saltus, notably—as have endeavoured to gain recognition in somewhat similar fields.

Stephen Crane, the young writer whom Mr. Howells praises in such an unusual manner, is still in the very early twenties and wrote Maggie several years ago. The little book, which is sold by the Arena Company of Boston, is the story of the life and death of a girl of the tenements. It aims at exact truth in painting an unpleasant side of life, and approaches nearer to realizing it than any other book written by an American ever has.

“Stephen Crane’s ‘Maggie.’” New York Press, April 15, 1894, part 3, p. 2 “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,” Stephen Crane’s book, to which Mr. W. D. How5

Throughout the book the quaint and graphic descriptive powers of the young author are shown as strongly as in the portions quoted. Whether or not we can be entertained by the book, it certainly must command our respect. “Maggie” is published by the Arena Company of Boston. It is interesting to note that in next Sunday’s Press Mr. Crane will describe the experience of a student of human nature among the tramps in Bowery lodging houses, under the heading of “An Experiment in Misery.” This will be followed the next week by the same student’s observations among people of the other social extreme—“An Experiment in Luxury.”

phase of miserable life in New York city, a book certainly that no one except its publisher and perhaps a score of others had ever seen. The realism of Mr. Crane as it is done in that book is certainly cold, awful, brutal realism, and it reveals a power which when the author has learned of experience and has disciplined his artistic sense may give us something that may be compared to Tolstoi with respect to art as well as realism. But it is possible to tell a story of realism quite as suggestive and not so shocking as that one told in Mr. Crane’s book, and it is a realism in which he had an unconscious part. Stephen Crane was not long ago in a certain office in New York where the tools are those of literature and journalism. The cases upon the walls contain dusty and dog-eared manuscripts. The desks were littered in charming confusion with proof slips, sheets of copy daubed here and there with the carelessly thrown, unwiped pen. Cigarette stubs were on the floor and a dismal bell over an editor’s desk jingled with the peremptory resonance of a call from the composing room beyond. Stephen Crane stood in the middle of that room as odd and plaintive appearing a specimen of eager humanity as has ever been there. He seemed to have withered so that all the vitality of his body was concentrated in his head. He was a slender, sad-eyed slip of a youth, looking around the room with yearning glances of his eyes as though he would like to find a place where he could deposit the manuscript. He looked like one who had been fed for months on crackers and milk, as very likely was the fact since he had starved himself in order to get together money enough to publish at his own expense, every publisher having rejected it, the very book which Mr. Howells has praised.

“Holland” [Elisha J. Edwards]. “Realism and a Realist.” Philadelphia Press, April 22, 1894, p. 5 In the interesting interview with Mr. William D. Howells, published in “The Press” last Sunday, there appeared a word of unusual commendation from Mr. Howells for the work of an author whom he called Stephen Crane. It is unusual because Mr. Howells, since his commendation of Mr. Howe and his story, “A Story of a Country Town,” has been careful of his favoring criticism. Of course, the praise of Mr. Howells for Mr. Crane caused quick interest to be awakened in the personality of that author. Howells praised him for his realism, approaching, as he told a friend, even that of Tolstoi. He had found it in a little book descriptive of a certain 6

At last turning to a man of authority who sat before a desk and who did not even look up when Crane spoke to him, the youth said in a voice in which there was the note of despair: “Well, I am going to chuck the whole thing,” and he pulled a listless hand out of his pocket and let it deliver an impulsive gesture, as though he was casting something away from him. “What do you mean by that?” said the busy man. “Oh, I have worked two years, living with tramps in the tenements on the East Side so that I could get to know those people as they are, and what is the use? In all that time I have received only $25 for my work. I can’t starve even to carry on this work, and I’m going home to my brother in New Jersey and perhaps learn the boot and shoe trade.” “I am sorry,” said the busy man, and then Crane wheeled about and walked away with the set of a man in whose blood there was not a particle of the vitality which comes from good beef or mutton. He went out and strolled down Broadway, far more miserable than any of the sorry creatures whom he has been studying because he was conscious of his misery. He had failed in an ambition, whereas they had no ambition. A friendly hand was laid upon his shoulder and he started as though it was the clutch of a policeman. Then he saw that there was greeting in the touch and the smile. “Crane,” said his friend, “what do you think? William D. Howells has read your book, and he says it’s great.” “Eh?” said the youth, and it seemed to the friend as though a sort of blur came over his eyes. “I say that Howells has read your book, and he compares you with Tolstoi, and he is going to say so in print.” It came upon that half-starved youth with such sudden force that he received it like a blow. If

he had been told that Howells had condemned the book he might have heaved a sigh. He seemed dazed. He looked around like a man who did not know where he was. He gulped something down his throat, grinned like a woman in hysterics, and then went off to take up his vocation again. The story must have impressed Howells only because of the brutal force of the blunt description which the author revealed. It is faithful; no newspaper man in New York, no one who is familiar with the life of the tenements, can deny the accuracy of the picture, but it is awful, just as life there is awful. And the wonder is that having gone so far in his realism Crane did not dare to go—as Tolstoi did and as Victor Hugo once did in his “Les Mis´erables”—clear over the line. Quite as realistic pictures, however, have been occasionally painted by some of the reporters for the newspapers, but they have done it without any sense of art or vocation—but simply as an incident in the reporting of some great tragedy or other important happening in those parts of the city. Crane, however, had another triumph recently. There was a gathering at a resort of high culture at which were several authors who had promised to read from their unpublished manuscripts. Mrs. Burnett was one; Gilbert Parker was another, and perhaps there were six or seven more. One of those readers, turning from his own “uncut leaves,” took up another manuscript. It contained several poems which were not poems by the laws of prosedy, having no metrical arrangement, but being of exquisite rhythmic quality, something perhaps of the character and construction which distinguished the poems of Walt Whitman. The reading of these poems by Mr. John T. Barry created something of excitement and interest. 7

fearless art, and there is a fine use of contrast in the conclusion of the work, where the brutal mother in drunken sentimentality is persuaded with difficulty to “forgive” the dead girl whom she compelled to a harsh fate by the barren cruelty of home-life.

“Chelifer” [Rupert Hughes]. “The Justification of Slum Stories.” Godey’s Magazine 132 (October 1895), pp. 431–432

Checklist of Additional Reviews

But probably the strongest piece of slum writing we have is “Maggie,” by Mr. Stephen Crane, which was published some years ago with a pen-name for the writer and no name at all for the publishers. But merit will out, and the unclaimed foundling attracted no little attention, though by no means as much as it deserves. The keenness of the wit, the minuteness of the observation, and the bitterness of the cynicism resemble Morrison’s work. The foredoomed fall of a well-meaning girl reared in an environment of drunkenness and grime is told with great humanity and

New York Recorder. 1894? Scrapbooks, Stephen Crane Collection, Columbia University. E. J. Edwards. “Uncut Leaves,” American Press Association Release. May 1, 1894. William Dean Howells. “Life and Letters.” Harper’s Weekly 39 (June 8, 1895), p. 533. “Stephen Crane’s ‘Maggie.’” New York Commercial Advertiser, April 11, 1896, p. 17.

8

THE BLACK RIDERS AND OTHER LINES Boston: Copeland & Day 1895

and forbids us to lay the volume down until the last line has been read. Even in the most fantastic of his conceits there are readily to be found a thought and a meaning. In fact, if Walt Whitman had been caught young and subjected to æsthetic influences, it is likely that he would have mellowed his barbaric yawp to some such note as that which sounds in the poems that are now before us. A few examples of Mr. Crane’s manner may serve at once as an illustration and as a diversion to those who have not yet made his acquaintance. Mr. Crane will perhaps pardon us if we neglect to display his lines in the capital letters that he appears to love. The following is a fair specimen of Mr. Crane’s treatment of things religious—or as one might more truly say, of things dogmatic:

“Writers and Books.” New York Recorder, March 25, 1894, p. 6 Mr. Stephen Crane, whose first novel, “Maggie,” won high praise from prominent authors last year, and whose second story was mentioned in The Recorder a few weeks ago, has written a volume of poems which will probably create considerable discussion when it is published. The poems are uncompromisingly realistic, and in their composition the author has ignored the laws of form. He is only 22 years of age and intensely devoted to realism.

Two or three angels Came near to the earth. They saw a fat church. Little black streams of people Came and went in continually. And the angels were puzzled To know why the people went thus, And why they stayed so long within.

Harry Thurston Peck. “Some Recent Volumes of Verse.” Bookman 1 (May 1895), p. 254

Here is a good instance of his allegorical way of giving new expression to philosophic truths or truisms:

Mr. Stephen Crane is the Aubrey Beardsley of poetry. When one first takes up his little book of verse and notes the quite too Beardsleyesque splash of black upon its staring white boards, and then on opening it discovers that the “lines” are printed wholly in capitals, and that they are unrhymed and destitute of what most poets regard as rhythm, the general impression is of a writer who is bidding for renown wholly on the basis of his eccentricity. But just as Mr. Beardsley with all his absurdities is none the less a master of black and white, so Mr. Crane is a true poet whose verse, long after the eccentricity of its form has worn off, fascinates us

I saw a man pursuing the horizon; Round and round they sped. I was disturbed at this; I accosted the man. “It is futile,” I said, “You can never—” “You lie,” he cried, And ran on. Very few of his poems sound the note of love; and when they do, there is always something gloomy or unhappy either in the main thought or in the accompanying suggestions. This short poem is sufficiently typical of the rest: 11

Should the wide world roll away, Leaving black terror, Limitless night, Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand Would be to me essential, If thou and thy white arms were there, And the fall to doom a long way.

condensed within limits of commendable brevity. The following extract will give some idea both of Mr. Crane’s literary method and of the appearance upon the printed page of the selections printed in “The Black Riders, and Other Lines”: MANY RED DEVILS RAN FROM MY HEART AND OUT UPON THE PAGE, THEY WERE SO TINY THE PEN COULD MASH THEM. AND MANY STRUGGLED IN THE INK. IT WAS STRANGE TO WRITE IN THIS RED MUCK OF THINGS FROM MY HEART.

Here is an example of his weirdness: Many red devils ran from my heart, And out upon the page. They were so tiny The pen could mash them, And many struggled in the ink. It was strange to write in this red muck Of things from my heart. On the whole, Mr. Crane’s work has traces of Entartung, but he is by no means a decadent, but rather a bold— sometimes too bold—original, and powerful writer of eccentric verse, skeptical, pessimistic, often cynical; and one who stimulates thought because he himself thinks. It is no exaggeration to say that the small volume that bears his name is the most notable contribution to literature to which the present year has given birth.

Symbolism, and mainly the symbolic utterance of gloomy, cynical, pessimistic imaginings, is Mr. Crane’s literary incubus. He says: “If I should cast off this tattered coat and go free into the mighty sky; if I should find nothing there but a vast blue echoless, ignorant—what then?” Printed thus as a paragraph of ordinary prose, this is a rather unprepossessing statement of agnostic doubts. The author can be far more ridiculous when he tries. As thus:

“An American Symbolist.” New York Recorder, May 5, 1895, p. 39

“IT WAS WRONG TO DO THIS,” SAID THE ANGEL. “YOU SHOULD LIVE LIKE A FLOWER, HOLDING MALICE LIKE A PUPPY WAGING WAR LIKE A LAMBKIN.” “NOT SO,” QUOTH THE MAN WHO HAD NO FEAR OF SPIRITS: “IT IS ONLY WRONG FOR ANGELS WHO CAN LIVE LIKE THE FLOWERS, HOLDING MALICE LIKE THE PUPPIES, WAGING WAR LIKE THE LAMBKINS.”

Mr. Stephen Crane is an extremely young man who writes beautiful prose, when he is content to do so, and who has written and published, through Copeland & Day of Boston, a strange book, which is neither prose nor verse, but a series of Maeterlinckian convulsions of symbolism, printed all in capital letters and mercifully 12

The Maeterlinckian formula is most notable in Mr. Crane’s “I Stood Musing in a Black World.” His agnosticism finds several utterances like: “Blustering god, stamping across the sky with loud swagger, I fear you not,” whereof the antistrophe is: “Withal, there is one of whom I fear; I fear to see grief upon that face. Perchance, friend, he is not your god. If so, spit upon him. By it you will do no profanity. But I—ah, sooner would I die than see tears in those eyes of my soul.” Of conformity, Crane has a slighting opinion. “‘Think as I think,’ said a man, ‘or you are abominably wicked; you are a toad,’ and after I had thought of it, I said, ‘I will be a toad.’” Of course, this is affectation, but all writing of words upon paper is apt to contain some grain of this. The real question is, after all, whether Mr. Crane’s method is artistic and worth while. And I don’t think it is. To the general reader—and each one of us is an element in that great composite—the book is simply nonsense. Yet that is not the fault of the symbolistic fable form, which is as old as Aesop and the most enduringly popular of all forms. Probably Mr. Crane doesn’t really wish to be popular. He is an American Decadent.

Tradition, thou art for suckling children, Thou art the enlivening milk for babes: But no meat for men is in thee. Then— But, alas, we are all babes. No. 41 runs in this wise:— Love walked alone, The rocks cut her tender feet. And the brambles tore her fair limbs. There came a companion to her. But, alas, he was no help, For his name was heart’s pain. These lines of Mr. Crane’s are pessimistic, we had almost said atheistic. There is in them a tone of sneering cynicism, but there is seen in them, too, the genius of the poet.

Daily Inter Ocean, May 11, 1895, p. 10 The most remarkable thing about this neatly printed little volume is the amount of blank paper—six, eight and ten lines crowd the bulk of the pages. But after reading, many will be glad that it is so. There is not a line of poetry from the opening to the closing page. Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” were luminous in comparison. Poetic Lunacy would be a better name for the book.

“Note, Comment and Forecast.” Boston Daily Advertiser, May 9, 1895, p. 5 Copeland & Day, Boston, have just brought out a notable little volume of verse by Stephen Crane, entitled “The Black Riders and Other Lines.” There are 67 of these poems. No. 45 is:— 13

Albert White Vorse. “Literature.” Boston Commonwealth 35 (June 8, 1895), p. 5

“Literary Notes.” New York Tribune, June 9, 1895, p. 24 The present period has to reckon with many amazing phenomena, but with not one more amazing, more ludicrous, than the New Poet. He is too often a veritable Autolycus as to the substance of his verse and a crude amateur as to his forms. The newest type of him is Mr. Stephen Crane, whose book called The Black Riders and Other Lines, is said to have been written “in a sudden fit of inspiration.” Sudden or not, the visitation to which we owe Mr. Crane’s “lines” does not seem to have come from Parnassus. On the contrary, this young gentleman, over whom some noise is getting itself made, stays on a level of dull prose, disdaining to use— if he could—the means whereby even the minor poet can sometimes give his work a lift. Mr. Crane has no taste for Academic form, no feeling, apparently, for rhythm. Neither have any of his compeers. It seems to be believed nowadays that irregularity of form is a virtue, that the measures, the cadences which were good enough for the great poets of the past are useless for the tumultuous deliverances of true inspiration. The sooner Mr. Crane and his friends abandon this hypothesis the better for them all. The only poets of consequence in this century who rebelled against form, Browning and Whitman, failed to win perfection and are still insecure as to their niches in the temple of pure poetic fame. The poets have written in blank verse or in rhymed measures, in both they have preserved the quality of rhythm, in both they have proved that rhythm is as essential to poetry as grammar is to prose. But the

Mr. Stephen Crane has put certain moods of his into words and Messrs. Copeland and Day have published the words, bound in a white cover decorated with a black orchid. Mr. Crane has called his poems The Black Riders, which is, perhaps, Mr. Crane’s favorite euphemism for The Blue Devils. Mr. Crane seems to be rather down on his luck; he comments chiefly on the futility of human desires and the ridiculousness of human foibles. Others have done this, but others have not arranged their little pessimisms in very short sentences, one below another. Mr. Crane has thus arranged his pessimisms; each pessimism in the form of a little allegory. Here is a specimen: I saw a man pursuing the horizon; Round and round they sped. I was disturbed at this; I accosted the man. “It is futile,” I said, “You can never—” “You lie,” he cried, And ran on. There is dramatic contrast here, if you seek it, and so there is in most of the allegories. Whether the points gain force— except among the Decadents—from the odd manner of their presentation is questionable. Perhaps they do, if you read them, one at a sitting.

14

current dabbler in mysteries which he is unworthy to approach proposes to change all this. He goes on in this fashion:

of the Street,” but that is out of print and not many got to read it. Hence the talk. A new book, however, by this embryonic lion will soon be published by the Appletons. It bears the title of “The Red Badge of Courage.” Mr. Crane probably wore the badge before he wrote it. The sayings of this youthful lion whose roar is so sweet are now cherished and repeated in salons, certain evidence of an achievement. Here are some of them:

Many red devils ran from my heart, And out upon the page. They were so tiny The pen could mash them, And many struggled in the ink. It was strange to write in this red muck Of things from my heart. To which it is only possible to reply: Does Mr. Crane really believe that he is writing of things from his heart? If so, why have not his “lines” some poetic vitality, some obvious reason for being? In their futility and affectation they strike the impartial reader as so much trash.

“The things we don’t know are always interesting,” he once remarked, “because we write books about them.” “Good people give me ideas,” he said at another time, “because the things they would like to do are so wicked.” “What is impertinence if said to yourself is wit if overheard by others,” he pithily observes. And again: “I like to look at blank books. They remind me of Ibsen.”

“Something About the Beardsley of Letters.” St. Louis Republic, June 30, 1895, p. 18

It is possible that after this one is prepared for some of the Crane poetry. Here goes: If I should cast off this tattered coat, And go free into the mighty sky: If I should find nothing there But a vast blue, Echoless, ignorant— What then?

Mr. Stephen Crane is talked of by some as the Aubrey Beardsley of poetry, and by William Dean Howells as the leading literary light of the next two decades—if he lives. Much stress is to be laid upon this clause. Mr. Crane is but 23 years of age, smooth face and slight physique. His volume of enigmatic poetry, “The Black Riders,” and other poems, was written in three days, a statement that may be believed with readiness. One wonders, indeed, that he was more than three minutes at it. Even the decadents laugh at it. But what matters it which road is taken to reach the goal?—he has succeeded so far in gaining the concentrated attention of the public. The book by Mr. Crane that is most talked about is called “Maggie: a Girl

To make this a classic, Mr. Crane should say, “What t’ell?” But he goes on: There was a man who lived a life of fire, Even upon the fabric of time, Where purple becomes orange And orange purple, This life glowed, A dire red stain, indelible; Yet when he was dead, He saw that he had not lived. 15

Remark upon the above would be a mere waste of words. The following, however, has some spirit in it:

with pain and anger and loathing, and to the heart which has known its own bitterness they mean much.

I saw a man pursuing the horizon; Round and round they sped. I was disturbed at this; I accosted the man. “It is futile,” I said, “You can never—” “You lie,” he cried, And ran on.

T[homas] W[entworth] Higginson. “Recent Poetry.” Nation 61 (October 24, 1895), p. 296

It would be interesting to know whether the insulted gentleman ever got satisfaction. But this Crane stuff is too good for commonplace annotation. Let’s get into some more of it. Here, for example:

It is worth considering wherein lies the charm that attaches, it appears, to “The Black Riders, and Other Lines,” by Stephen Crane (Boston: Copeland & Day). It is an attraction which makes young people learn it by heart, carry it into the woods with them, sleep with it under their pillows, and perhaps suggest that it should be buried with them in their early graves. Undoubtedly it offers new sensations: the brevity of its stanzas; its rhymelessness and covert rhythm, as of a condensed Whitman or an amplified Emily Dickinson; a certain modest aggressiveness, stopping short of actual conceit. The power lies largely in the fact that this apparent affectation is not really such, and that there is behind it a vigorous earnestness and a fresh pair of eyes. Even the capitalization of every word seems to imply that the author sought thus to emphasize his “lines”—just as Wordsworth printed “The White Doe of Rylstone,” in quarto— to express his sense of their value. A mere experiment will show how much each page loses by being reduced to what printers call “lower-case” type; and yet this result itself seems unsatisfactory because anything which is really good, one might say, could bear to be printed in letters as small as in those microscopic newspapers sent out of Paris under pigeons’

Should the wide world roll away, Leaving black terror, Limitless night. Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand Would be to me essential, If thou and thy white arms were there, And the fall to doom a long way. It will be observed, from this quotation, that Mr. Crane is but a common mortal, after all.

“Book Notes and News.” New York Commercial Advertiser, August 8, 1895, p. 8 There is much naked thought in “The Black Riders and Other Lines,” by Stephen Crane, and much of this nakedness is a sad, unsightly and condemning thing. There is no verse in these verses. There are no rhymes. There is no meter. There is rhythm and there is also strength. Out of the bitterness of the heart have they come 16

wings during the siege. The total effect of the book is that of poetry torn up by the roots—a process always interesting to the botanist, yet bad for the blossoms. As formless, in the ordinary sense, as the productions of Walt Whitman, these “lines” are in other respects the antipodes of his; while Whitman dilutes mercilessly, Crane condenses almost as formidably. He fulfils Joubert’s wish, to condense a page into a sentence and a sentence into a word. He grasps his thought as nakedly and simply as Emily Dickinson; gives you a glance at it, or, perhaps, two glances from different points of view, and leaves it there. If it be a paradox, as it commonly is, so much the better for him. Thus (p. 12):

If the spirit was just, Why did the maid weep? Again, he gives his protest against superstition (p. 56): A man went before a strange God— The God of many men, sadly wise. And the Deity thundered loudly, “Kneel, mortal, and cringe And grovel and do homage To my particularly sublime Majesty.” The man fled. Then the man went to another God— The God of his inner thoughts, And this one looked at him With soft eyes Lit with infinite condescension, And said, “My poor child!”

In a lonely place, I encountered a sage Who sat, all still, Regarding a newspaper. He accosted me: “Sir, what is this?” Then I saw that I was greater, Aye, greater than this sage. I answered him at once, “Old, old man, it is the wisdom of the age.” The sage looked upon me with admiration.

Better, perhaps, than any of these polemics are those “lines” which paint, with a terseness like Emily Dickinson’s, some aspect of nature. Since Browning’s fine description, in “England in Italy,” of the “infinite movement” of a chain of mountains before the traveller, the same thing has not been more vividly put than here (p. 38): On the horizon the peaks assembled, And, as I looked. The march of the mountains began. As they marched, they sang, “Aye, we come! we come!”

That is all, but it tells its own story, and is the equivalent of many columns. At other times he not merely intimates his own problem, but states it, still tersely (p. 26):

That is all; but it is fine, it tells its own story. If it be asked whether it is also poetry, one can only remember Thoreau’s dictum, that no matter how we define poetry, the true poet will presently set the whole definition aside. If it be further asked whether such a book gives promise, the reply must be that experience points the other way. So marked a new departure rarely leads to further growth. Neither Whitman nor Miss Dickinson ever stepped beyond the circle they first drew.

Behold the grave of a wicked man. And near it a stern spirit. There came a drooping maid with violets, But the spirit grasped her arm. “No flowers for him,” he said. The maid wept: “Ah, I loved him,” But the spirit, grim and frowning, “No flowers for him.” Now this is it. 17

he were to do that sort of thing again, it would be less novel in effect than the sort of thing that other men have always been doing. I cannot see how the thought in the following lines, which seems to me fresh, and fine and true, would have been any less so if it had been cast in the mould which need not have been broken to secure them the stamp of novelty:

W[illiam] D[ean] Howells. “Life and Letters.” Harper’s Weekly 40 (January 25, 1896), p. 79

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.”

In the case of two or three little books which out of the twenty or thirty have seemed to me the most promising, it would have been so much better for the authors if the winnowing could have been done in private, and not left for every blast of criticism that blows in public. Mr. Stephen Crane, for instance, has done the most striking thing of the year in his little book of “lines” called The Black Riders, but I believe it will be the opinion of most who read it all that the effect would have been three times as great from a third of the quantity; and I say this with a sense of its peculiar quality which has not been seriously affected from having had to get at it through unbroken phalanxes of small capitals. To print the lines so was a caprice or an affectation which need not be attributed to the poet, for he will have enough to answer for with conventional criticism in his proper part of the enterprise. But I hope it is not the conventional criticism that summons him before it in this place; indeed, I hope it is a sympathy keen and eager with all who are trying to utter life in any form. I myself would not have chosen Mr. Crane’s form because it is so near formlessness, and because I would rather live in a house of the accepted structure than in a hut of logs and boughs. But I do not pronounce my preference in this as a law, or expect any one to abide by it, not even Mr. Crane, whom I do not expect to go on dwelling in huts, either. For once he has done a certain sort of thing, but if

But, after all, how a man gives you his thought is not so important as what thought he gives you, and we can well be patient with Mr. Crane’s form as long as he can endure it himself. There is passion in the little poem below which I suppose could not be more intense if it were duly rhymed and measured: Should the wide world roll away, Leaving black terror, Limitless night, Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand Would be to me essential, If thou and thy white arms were there, And the fall to doom a long way. There is thinking, I am sure, in all these strange poems, but often it is the thoughtstuff rather than the thought which is presented, and sometimes the thought does not free itself enough from mere sensation or emotion to be tangible even when it is quite intelligible. Here is a curious and interesting example of the sort: There was, before me. Mile upon mile 18

Riders, by Stephen Crane. As completely as the one book is overlaid with ornament, the other is stripped bare of it. The strange little lines of which The Black Riders is made up are not even rhymed, and have but a faint rhythmic quality. Surpassing the college exercise in verse, to which the shrewd instructor made objection that every line began with a capital letter, these small skeletons of poetry are printed entirely in capitals, and in the modern fashion which hangs a few lines by the shoulders to the top of the page, as if more had meant to come below, but had changed its mind. The virtue of these lines, however, is that they often have enough freshness of conception to set the reader thinking, and so perhaps the blank spaces are filled. The spirit of the lines is generally rebellious and modern in the extreme, occasionally blasphemous to a degree which even cleverness will not reconcile to a liberal taste. One feels that a long journey has been taken since the Last Poems of Mr. Lowell were read. But it is too much to think that the writer always takes himself seriously. Many of the lines are intentionally amusing, and the satiric note sometimes serves to mollify the profanity. The parable form into which many of the fragments are cast gives them half their effectiveness. The audacity of their conception, suggesting a mind not without kinship to Emily Dickinson’s, supplies the rest. Instead of talking more about them or discussing the possibility of their production before Tourg´enieff’s Prose Poems, let us quote, without all its capital letters, this characteristic bit, which might serve either as a credo for the modern pessimist or as a felicitous epigram at his expense:—

Of snow, ice, burning sand. And yet I could look beyond all this To a place of infinite beauty; And I could see the loveliness of her Who walked in the shade of the trees. When I gazed All was lost But this place of beauty and her. When I gazed And in my gazing desired, Then came again Mile upon mile Of snow, ice, burning sand. Scarcely any one of the strange little pieces fails to be suggestive, but many of them are so slightly suggestive that they do not justify themselves to my mind any more than their form justifies itself. Often there is a teasing dream quality in them: a promise of significance that fades from them when you examine them in the waking light. But I can forgive much of this uncertainty, this ineffectuality, for the sake of some such plunge into “The abysmal depths of personality” as I find in one piece, which I will print as prose, to prove that it owes nothing of its poetry to the typographic mask of metre: “I was in the darkness. I could not see my words nor the wishes of my heart. Then suddenly there was a great light— “Let me into the darkness again!”

M[ark] A[nthony] DeWolfe Howe. “Six Books of Verse.” Atlantic Monthly 77 (February 1896), pp. 271–272

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it.

If the Sister-Songs are intricate, an Antipodal word must be found for The Black 19

novels have shown that he can observe and record with merciless, if onesided, realism; his little “Lines” show that he has ideas.

I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.”

Athenaeum 3626 (April 24, 1897), p. 540

Throughout the little book, nevertheless, there is some eating of other viands, for the sweet is mixed with the bitter. Just another parable we must transcribe, since it is thoroughly typical of Mr. Crane’s performances, and will serve as an excellent “sixthly and lastly” for any critic who has spoken his mind:—

The Black Riders, and other Lines, by Mr. Stephen Crane, hardly deserved the pretty printing and get-up which Mr. Heinemann has given it. These lines have no rhyme or rhythm, but are occasionally forcible by sheer abruptness. Mr. Crane is too young in experience to write apologues and fables of destiny and man. The futility of human wisdom and the doctrine that every man is a law unto himself are themes so well worn as to need a master hand to illuminate them afresh, to which Mr. Crane, with all his promise, cannot pretend.

Once there was a man,— Oh, so wise! In all drink He detected the bitter, And in all touch He found the sting. At last he cried thus: “There is nothing,— No life, No joy, No pain,— There is nothing save opinion, And opinion be damned.”

Checklist of Additional Reviews

“Short Notices.” London Times, February 4, 1897, p. 7

“Stephen Crane.” Bookman 1 (May 1895), pp. 229–230. “New Volumes of Verse.” Book Buyer 12 (June 1895), p. 298. Daily Inter Ocean. June 1, 1895, p. 10. Arena 10 (July 1895), pp. vi, viii. “Literary Chat.” Munsey’s Magazine 13 (July 1895), p. 430. “Stephen Crane, Author of The Black Riders.” Current Literature 18 (July 1895), p. 9. “Lettres Anglaises.” Mercure de France 25 (January 1898), p. 330. “An Omitted Introduction to ‘The Black Riders.’ By S—ph-n Cr-ne.” Munsey’s Magazine 22 (March 1900), p. 905.

. . . nobody is more modern than Mr. Stephen Crane, the young American writer who has lately made a considerable reputation by his military and other novels. He now comes forward with a tiny volume of unrhymed poems, the Black Riders and Other Lines; an experiment suggesting Walt Whitman on the one hand and Friedrich Nietzsche on the other. Mr. Crane probably has a literary future. His 20

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE AN EPISODE OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR New York: D. Appleton and Company 1895

pays no heed to those who write this or that about American fiction, he is quite likely to gain recognition before very long as the most powerful of American tellers of tales.

“Holland” [Elisha J. Edwards]. “The Work of Stephen Crane.” Philadelphia Press, December 8, 1894, p. 7

“Men, Women and Books.” New York Recorder (October 6, 1895), p. 26

The editorial comment published in The Press this morning upon the fiction of Stephen Crane, which is now appearing as a serial in The Press, justified what was said of that young author some months ago in this correspondence. Then it was predicted that Crane, if he was careful of his powers, subjected them to thorough discipline, would surely make a name for himself in American literature. He was a shy, almost nervous young man when I saw him and talked with him about the first of his works of fiction, which had been published only a few days. It contained the evidences of great power, of real imagination, and a sort of poetic quality as well, which would be sure to take him out of the list of the perfunctory realists. At that time I saw the manuscript of the story that is now running in The Press as a serial. Then Mr. Crane had some purpose of publishing it in the first instance complete in book form. A hasty reading of the story very greatly impressed me. Here was a young man not born until long after the war days had closed, who nevertheless, by power of imagination, by a capacity intuitively to understand the impulses which prevailed in war days, had been able to write a story perhaps the most graphic and truthful in its suggestion of some of the phases of that epoch which has ever appeared in print. If Mr. Crane is careful, is true to his best impulses, follows his intuitions and

Mr. Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage” is of a less popular type. Its author obtained a great deal of advertising last summer by the publication of certain “Lines” in the extreme mode of symbolism, which made ridicule easy and tempted parody. But he has a gift, and that gift is an accurate imagination. Born several years after the great war he can tell only what would be the feelings of a young country lad before his first battle, and his word pictures of army movements are vivid and unconventional. The story is that of Henry Fleming, how he ran away from his first battle, and gained a wound, “the red badge of courage,” through being knocked down with a clubbed musket by a man even more anxious to run away than himself and how he redeemed himself on an after occasion. The conversation is crisp and good, the method is realistic to the last degree, and there is no blinking of the ghastly in battle scenes though there are fewer shudders to the page in his work than that of Ambrose Bierce. In this respect Crane’s work is better balanced. There is too much shudder in Bierce. Crane has a dry humor. There is the case of Bill. “Bill ain’t a-gittin’ scared easy. He was jest mad, that’s what he was. When that feller trod on his hand, he up ’n’ said that he was willin’ t’ give 23

his hand t’ his country, but he be dumbed if he was goin’ t’ have every dumb bushwhacker in th’ kentry walkin’ ’roun’ on it. So he went t’ th’ hospital, disregardless of th’ fight. Three fingers was scrunched. Th’ dern doctor wanted t’ amputate ’m, ’n’ Bill he raised a heluva row I hear. He’s a funny feller.” There are vigorous similes. “The guns squatted in a row like savage chiefs. They argued with abrupt violence.” In such terse work as this it is a surprise to come upon not a few badly constructed sentences. But Mr. Crane is young and he has gifts. There is no reason apparent in his work why he may not become a writer of the highest rank.

“Of and About the Makers of Books.” Scranton Tribune, October 12, 1895, p. 11 Several critics have recently told us that in Stephen Crane, the newly-discovered writer of whom Mr. E. J. Edwards predicts such great things, American letters have found a valuable possibility. These prophecies naturally incline one to expect much; and it may be that thereby the reviewer is unprepared to deal impartially and without preconceptions with Mr. Crane’s latest book. But candor forces the assertion that the reading of it has been attended with disappointment. Here is a handsome book of 233 pages devoted to nothing more than the analysis, from a dozen different view-points, of the sensations experienced by the volunteer soldier prior to his first real battle. To be sure, the dissection is minute and skillful, and it shows a wonderful command both of psychological processes and of the English language. But as a matter of personal taste we do not care for 233 pages full of mindanalysis when we are led to expect, from the prospectus, that we are to be treated, instead to a vivid, rousing story. That Mr. Crane has a fine facility in the use of words may be admitted without endorsing the manner in which he has most recently exhibited it. Lastly, we may observe that his style is much too suggestive of a constant straining after effect. It does not flow easily and in such naturalness that its beauties steal on one unawares. It rather keeps the reader always conscious that the author must have stayed up nights and spent many worried days fashioning and furbishing his alliterations and putting the finishing touches to his epigrams.

“Book Store Chat.” Providence News, October 9, 1895, p. 7 This is a book to be read at a single sitting—or two sittings at most, interrupting the reading where the youth sleeps between the two days of battle. It is the story of a single battle in the American civil war, the story of a bit of the life of a young soldier, a realism and an impression that carries the reader from first chapter to last, as the central figure himself was carrried, almost irresistibly, in the telling. We should say, however, that Crane has exhausted his style in this remarkable piece of story telling. We don’t believe he can do it again. But he is entitled to the red badge of both fame and courage for doing it once. We need not compare it to the work of the Russian author that did it before him a decade ago or so. No writer of English that we recall has done it, although M. Quad’s war sketches were of a similar flavor, rather more poetical without being, it seems to us, the less realistic. 24

in all the wild frenzy of a bayonet charge, at the supreme moment of it, we are asked to pause and to observe of the hero that “pulsating saliva stood at the corners of his mouth.” And again, at the close of a desperate and bloody battle, “the red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.” Had not the typesetter, or the proofreader’s copyholder, authority to expunge such belittling brutalities? Could not the printer’s devil have corrected such expressions as “to further risk himself,” or “he tried to mathematically prove”? If we turn from words which are turgid, inflated, and affected to a degree, to the action, we find it weak where it should be strong and hesitant where it should be precipitate. The writer takes half an hour to describe what happened in half a minute. The story is largely one of haste, of tumult, of excitement, but by dwelling upon insignificant details, and magnifying them unduly, he makes it tedious as a funeral march. It is as if, in telling of a horserace, one were to mention each individual lifting up and setting down of each individual foot of the contestants. This is, after all, the most serious if not the most obvious fault of the book. There is an old saying about not being able to see the woods because of its leaves. Mr. Crane gives us so many details, and dwells upon them so elaborately, that he obscures the broad motive and the general action of the story. If more simply and directly treated, it would not be without effect. The story is one of a young man who had dreamed of heroic deeds; who went to the war, a raw recruit in a raw regiment; who in the midst of a great battle got scared and ran away; and who returned to the ranks next day and played the hero. There is opportunity in it for a fine delineation of contending passions, for humor, pathos and dramatic force. Of pathos Mr. Crane seems to have little conception, or, indeed, of humor, such as he gives us in this book

“Current Fiction: The Romantic and the Lurid.” New York Daily Tribune, October 13, 1895, p. 24 The title of Mr. Crane’s book is incomplete. Red Badge is well enough, though why not crimson or lurid does not appear. But simple Courage is disappointing and inadequate to proper description of the story. It should have been colossal, or purple, or incredible, or perhaps crushed strawberry. For this is a volume of adjectives and adverbs, largely chromatic and always intense. There is scarcely a thing of which the quality is not described, and there are few to which some color is not attributed. There are crimson oaths, and black curses, and red cheers, and lurid rage. There are colossal noises, and a crimson roar, and black rage, and a blue haze of curses. These are numerous. The hero of the episode has an eternal debate in his own mind, and feels a vast pity for himself. He sees a haze of treachery, too, and conceives red letters of curious revenge. Men march along an eternal way, and swear with incredible power. They make desperate rushes perpetually backward and forward, and their firings are incredibly fierce. Gray, bewhiskered hordes advance with relentless curses and chew tobacco with unspeakable valor. And so on, to the end of the twenty-fourth chapter. The whole episode is a chromatic nightmare. This characteristic of the book demands attention, because it is of all the most conspicuous. But there are others. Notably there are anti-climaxes, produced by strivings for grotesque effect, the result of which is to make ridiculous some scenes which otherwise would not have been devoid of tragic power. Thus 25

being sardonic and grotesque; while, as we have suggested, his dramatic powers often fail at the supreme moment through some ill-advised phrasing or petty detail sketching. He is, however, as yet a very young man, a mere novice in the craft of letters; and his models and masters have apparently not been the best. The exaggerated common places of Tolstoi, the brutal coarseness of Zola, and the reduplicated profanities of Maeterlink, are not commendable ideals for the student of literary art. Nor is decadent morbidity destined to win a commanding place in literature. If Mr. Crane will eschew such influences and tendencies, try to forget the jejune foolery of the “Black Riders,” and fix his mind upon the wholesome themes and methods which distinguish true classics from the hothouse fruit of a single season, he may perhaps produce some profitable works. Meanwhile we cannot hail him as a Master.

will make the real soldier tired to follow him. He has small conception of the humor and comradeship and spirit of a regiment, or a great army, and leads the reader to believe a regiment of American soldiers is made up of a thousand dull automatons with a great amount of coarseness, if not brutality. Some of his pictures of the horror of battle fields, and especially deserted fields, with dead unburied, are graphic and impressive. It is not an even balanced book, with its pictures overdrawn, often to the surfeit of the reader.

John O’Hara Cosgrave. “New Books: War and Socialism: ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’” The Wave, October 19, 1895, p. 9

“Current Literature.” Daily Inter Ocean. October 19, 1895, p. 10

Stephen Crane is comparatively a new name in American letters. The author of certain verses of strange, irregular rhythm, his note is that of eccentricity; he is an issue of the aesthetic craze. In The Red Badge of Courage, he is presented to us in a different phase; he emerges a figure, one of the young men who may lift our literature out of its rut, and provide reading for England, as London is now doing for us. Curiously unsymmetric is the form of this narrative—the story of a battle— of two days’ fighting. Pure description, it is full of the incidents of advance and retreat, of firing, charging, of skirmish, ambush, of thunderous volleys, of the clanging of ramrods, of the boom of cannon, of blood and bullets, of the killed and wounded. Dialogue—a little between soldiers either under the hail of fiery missiles, or discussing the chances of battle, the

The volume recites an episode of the American Civil War. Its author is evidently a theoretical soldier, and never carried a knapsack or a gun, or heard the roar of battle. The hero of the story is a young man, who had dreamed he was a hero, and made for heroic deeds, who went to war as a raw recruit, and in the midst of a great battle got scared and ran away, but the next day returned, and proved a real hero in many a conquest. Mr. Crane tells some things well, but he is too profuse, profane, and prolix. He doesn’t tell things as a soldier would, and he doesn’t see things as a soldier did, and 26

progress of the war-contest—an uncouth, clipped dialect of rough men, touched with pathos, enthusiasm, and the infatuated ignorance and vainglory of the masses in war-time. Powerful writing, without doubt the most promising first book an American has offered since Hamlin Garland’s Main Traveled Roads, but promising rather in the power developed than for the skill demonstrated. Literature is full of battle pieces, but few among them suggest the atmosphere of modern warfare. The stories of Ambrose Bierce touch one with the terror of battle, but there is no comparing the chisled accuracy of their phrasing with the wild picturesque effect of this lurid panorama of war words. It is the difference between statuary and an impressionist oil painting. The style is Hugoesque, the manner rather after Tolstoi’s Peace and War—bold, stirring, dashing. There is no complication; the situations are the series of rencontres of the regiment with the enemy. The main figure is Henry Fleming; the narrative is the history of his doings, of his enlistment, his farewell, of the inactivity before fighting begins, of his tremors, hesitation, of the terrific shock as the “bullets began to whistle among the branches and nip at the trees. Twigs and leaves came sailing down. It was as if a thousand axes, wee and invisible were being wielded. Many of the men were constantly dodging and ducking their heads.” There is the attack when Fleming sees, “across the smoke-infested fields came a brown swarm of running men, who were giving shrill yells. They came on, stooping and swinging their rifles at all angles.” The cruel moment is that in which, after repulsing the enemy amid the clouds of acrid smoke the 304th is summoned to repulse a second attack, and in the face of the fighting, Fleming flees into the woods. The horror of that flight, the terror of the trees are powerfully depicted.

One lives in his anguished flight, and the despair of his cowardice penetrates one’s soul. It is a noble contrast that offered by the stream of wounded, bleeding, maimed soldiers the terror-stricken youth encounters limping to the rear. They glory in their wounds, their talk is dashed with stories of the battle; they throw conflicting interpretations across its phases. The men Fleming meets imagine him bullet-pierced like themselves. A terrible remorse seizes him; he slinks out of the way, but he does not advance upon the bullets. Then he is struck on the head by a rifle in the hands of a Confederate corporal. He finds his own regiment; they suspect not his cowardice. Next day the battle begins afresh; the horrors of war are rehearsed again, the bullets whistle through the woods. But Fleming has recovered himself; he fights and realizes he must be brave, and ere the day is through is a bold, cool, courageous man, who has faced the great death and returned its stony stare unmoved. What will Stephen Crane do with so notable a talent as he evinces here. Not bury it surely. Like Balzac, he should have written thirty novels before publishing this. It is too prolix, this, however awe inspiring; too long drawn out, however eloquent. Really the book is not a story, but rather a prose war epic.

“A Green Private Under Fire.” New York Times, October 19, 1895, p. 3 Stephen Crane is very young—not yet twenty-five, it is said—and this picture he presents of war is therefore a purely imaginative work. The very best thing that can be said about it, though, is that it strikes the reader as a statement of facts by a 27

veteran. The purpose of the book is to set forth the experiences of a volunteer soldier in his first battle. The poetical idea of the hero and the coward in war was long since abandoned by well-informed writers. A recent autobiographical account of actual experiences in our civil war bears testimony that every soldier is frightened at the moment of entering battle, and his fright increases rather than diminishes as he grows old in service and more familiar with the dangers he has to encounter. It is true, also, that once in battle all men are much alike. They fight like beasts. Cowards and skulkers are the exception, and cowardice is often the result of some sudden physical disability. The young private soldier who is the central personage in this remarkable work was a farm boy in one of the Middle States, probably Ohio, though certain peculiarities of the dialect in which Mr. Crane chooses to clothe the speech of all his persons, belong also to Western Pennsylvania and the Hoosier country. Except for those few expressions, such as “Watch out” for “Look out,” the talk is a very fair phonetic equivalent for the common speech in parts of this State and Connecticut. The boy does not enlist at the beginning of the war, but his duty to go to the front weighs upon him day and night. He is the only son of his mother, and she a widow and a typical American woman of the old New-England stock, who ever conceals her emotions, and seems to possess no imaginative faculty whatever. She is peeling potatoes when her boy, in his new blue clothes, says “Goodbye,” and the exhortation she then delivers is perfectly practical and devoid of all sentiment. There is a black-eyed girl, nameless in the story, who looks after the youth as he trudges down the road, but when he looks back pretends to be gazing at the sky. In other words, the early environment of Mr. Crane’s hero is absolutely typi-

cal, differing in no particular from that of tens of thousands of young men who went to the front in the interval between the Sumter episode and the fall of Richmond. But as to his temperament and the quality of his mind, we cannot speak so positively. He is certainly of a more emotional type than any one of his comrades. His aspirations, perhaps, are no higher than theirs, his mental capacity no larger, his will, certainly, no stronger. But there is a touch of poetry in his nature which most men lack. Probably Mr. Crane has put some of his own mental traits into the composition of his otherwise commonplace hero. Therefore, it is not possible to accept this graphic study of his mind under the stress of new and frightful experiences as an exact picture of the mental states of every green soldier under his first fire. All its complexities are surely not typical. Yet it is as a picture which seems to be extraordinarily true, free from any suspicion of ideality, defying every accepted tradition of martial glory, that the book commends itself to the reader. The majesty, the pomp and circumstance of glorious war, Mr. Crane rejects altogether. War, as he depicts it, is a mean, nasty, horrible thing; its seeming glories are the results of accident or that blind courage when driven to bay and fighting for life that the meanest animal would show as strongly as man. For it must be remembered that the point of view is consistently that of the humblest soldier in the ranks, who never knows where he is going or what is expected of him until the order comes, who never comprehends the whole scheme, but only his small share of it, who is frequently put forward as an intentional sacrifice, but yet is a sentient human being, who is bound to have his own opinions founded on the scanty knowledge he possesses, his own hopes and fears and doubts and prejudices. 28

Private Henry Fleming goes to the war a hot-headed young patriot with his mind brimful of crude ideas of glory, and a settled conviction that his capacity for heroism is quite out of the common. Weary months of drill in camp reduce him seemingly to the proper machinelike condition. He learns many things, among them that the glories of war have been greatly exaggerated in books, that the enemy is not composed chiefly of bragging cowards, that victory is rare and dear, and that the lot of a private soldier is very hard. On the eve of his first battle he has about abandoned all hope of ever getting a chance to distinguish himself. Yet when the hour comes it brings depression instead of exhilaration. He communes with himself, and fears that he is a coward. The battle Mr. Crane describes is one of those long and bloody conflicts of our civil war that we now freely admit were badly mismanaged through lack of good generalship, which had no particular result except the destruction of human life, and were claimed as prodigious victories by both sides. The green regiment is part of a brigade which is in the centre at first, and for a long while it has nothing to do. Then it has to stand on the edge of a piece of woods and receive the enemy’s fire, and return it. This is a short and sharp proceeding, and while it lasts Private Henry Fleming acquits himself creditably. When the enemy’s fire stops, he feels himself a hero and feels also that he has done the greatest day’s work of his life. The nervous tension has been awful, the revulsion of feeling is correspondingly great. When the enemy’s fire is resumed, a few minutes later, he is entirely unprepared. Panic seizes him, he drops his musket and runs for his life. All that day he is a skulker in the rear of a great battle. His emotions, his mental vagaries, his experiences with the dead and dying, and the terrible nervous ordeal he

undergoes are depicted by Mr. Crane with a degree of vividness and original power almost unique in our fiction. The night of the first day finds him back in the camp of his own regiment, lauded by his surviving comrades as a wounded hero. His scalp was cut by a blow of a musket by a retreating soldier, whose flight he tried to stop, for no reason, and he has tied his handkerchief over the wound. He is physically exhausted, and his conscience troubles him sorely. In the next day’s conflict he remains with his regiment. His nervous excitement has increased, but he is no longer so greatly shocked by the spectacle of the dead and dying. He has lost all control of his tongue, and he jabbers oaths incessantly. When his regiment is called upon to repel an advance of the enemy, he excels all his comrades in the ferocious rapidity of his fire. He is again extolled as a hero, but scarcely comprehends the praise. His regiment, esteemed by the division officers, apparently with good reason, as nearly worthless is selected to make a charge which is intended merely to check a contemplated attack of the enemy on the left until reinforcements can be forwarded to that point. It is not expected that any member of the regiment will return alive, and some rude remarks of a staff officer to this effect reach the ears of the men and transform them into demons, but very impotent and purposeless demons. The order is only half carried out. A file of soldiers in gray, behind a rail fence, keeps the blue fellows at bay. They stand like lost sheep, and scarcely return the fire which is destroying them. Yet, on their retreat, they combat bravely enough with a small Confederate body which tries to cut them off. Returning to their own lines, they are received with derision, while their Colonel is roundly abused by his superior. The charge has been a failure, yet it has transformed Private Henry Fleming. He has 29

saved the colors, and he has sounded his own depths. He feels that he will never run away again.

their pages, while major and brigadier generals prance up and down their chapters, doing great execution and outmaneuvering Napoleon himself. The rank and file is generally out of sight, holding the enemy at bay, perhaps, or busy watering out-of-the-way fields with their blood, but rarely presentable in the pages of an upto-date novel. But in this narrative the private holds the stage. He comes from the field and farmhouse, from the village store and the smithy, and he comes in columns, many hundred thousand strong. Never before have we had the seamy side of glorious war so well depicted. ErckmannChartrain did the same service for France in the “Conscript,” but with us heretofore it has been a glorification of the powers that appear, while the real force is behind and out of sight. This story deals with the hopes, fears and various sensations of a young recruit who, having enlisted, full of fiery enthusiasm, and against his mother’s will, is taken aback at the sendoff she gives him. In a vague way he had expected a grand burst of sentiment something like the Spartan mother to her son, but when she merely said, “You watch out, Henry, an’ take good keer of yerself in this here fightin’ business—you watch out. Don’t go a-thinkin’ you kin lick the hull rebel army at the start, because yeh can’t. Yer jest one little feller amongst a hull lot of others, and yeh’ve got to keep quiet and do what they tell yeh,” he felt in a way defrauded of his rights. That was not the way they went to war in the tales he had sometimes read. In the course of time this would-be soldier arrives upon the scene of action, and then his real troubles begin. The first thing he discovers is that he knows nothing about himself and everything else is strange. Awful probabilities present themselves to his mind. He grows panicky, and feels sure he will run at the first sound of battle. He dreads death of all things, yet longs to be in the thick of

At last his eyes seemed to open to some new ways. He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them. With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive, but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man. The book is written in terse and vigorous sentences, but not without some unpleasant affectations of style which the author would do well to correct. His natural talent is so strong that it is a pity its expression should be marred by petty tricks. When he begins a sentence with “too,” for instance, he makes a sensitive reader squirm. But he is certainly a young man of remarkable promise.

“A Strong Tale of War.” Chicago Evening Post, October 26, 1895, pp. 4–5 “The Red Badge of Courage,” by Stephen Crane, is an episode of our civil war, and is a departure in the treatment of this much-used theme. The majority of stories founded upon the great rebellion have had for their plane of action the upper stratum of war material. Nothing less than a gay lieutenant is tolerated in 30

the fight, and his heart surges with bitterness because of the stupidity of the generals that keeps his regiment in the rear. He goes back in swift retrospection to the old home, and the farm he was so eager to leave, and “remembers he had often cursed the brindle cow and her mates, and had sometimes flung milking stools. But, from his present point of view, there was a halo of happiness about each of their heads, and he would have sacrificed all the brass buttons on the continent to have been able to return to them.” But his reflections are interrupted. There are alarms and counter-alarms, marchings and countermarchings, and fierce mutterings among the men, and scathing criticisms of the generals all along the line. Especially does our young recruit know that if he were to the fore the war would be fought to a finish before another day, and he chafes sorely under the inaction and curses his fate. Then his regiment really “meets up” with the enemy. There is firing in front, the pickets are driven in, and stumbling over bush and brier our hero comes face to face with his first dead. “He (the dead man) lay upon his back staring at the sky. The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard, as if a hand were stroking it.” But there is no time for pause. The death he so courts and shuns is on in front, and thitherward plunges the regiment, driven by fate. There is no time to think, no chance to run. “A brigade ahead and on the right went into action with a rending roar. It was as if it had exploded.” Thereupon there is fighting enough and to spare. Our soldier bears himself well in spite of his premonitions. And then in the midst of hurrahs over victory there is a cry, “They’re comin’ agin!” and he is taken with another panic and really runs away. But he retrieves himself gloriously, and in the end wears the red badge of courage fairly won. The action

of the story throughout is splendid, and all aglow with color, movement and vim. The style is as keen and bright as a sword blade, and a Kipling has done nothing better in this line. The rank and file has its historian at last, and we have had nothing finer since the “Retreat of the Ten Thousand.”

Richard Henry Stoddard. New York Mail and Express, October 26, 1895, p. 16 There is more than talent. There is a genius of a certain kind in “The Red Badge of Courage,” by Stephen Crane, but the kind is not large enough, nor varied enough, to create such a story of our civil war as we hoped this might prove, for instead of being a story it is at most an episode, the purport of which was to satisfy its hero whether he was, or was not, the coward that he feared he might be. This was something for him to learn, no doubt, but not enough to make a story out of, nor to fairly utilize the battle materials with which it is surrounded, Mr. Crane’s object being as narrowly personal as that of Wordsworth when he undertook in “The Excursion” to write the history of an individual mind. Mr. Crane’s next story will be superior to this in many ways, we are sure, for having shown the red badge of courage here, as Keats did in “Endymion,” he will have learned what he did not know when he began, and will write more and better stories, and the more the better, when he has become the master workman that he may be. His faults are those that are speedily out-grown, and if they strike us as weeds now, they resemble those which the old 31

poet called “weeds of glorious future,” and they betoken glorious flowers.

much convince me; I have not heard people speak with those contractions, though perhaps they do it; and in commending the book I should dwell rather upon the skill shown in evolving from the youth’s crude expectations and ambitions a quiet honesty and self-possession manlier and nobler than any heroism he had imagined. There are divinations of motive and experience which cannot fail to strike the critical reader, from time to time; and decidedly on the psychological side the book is worth while as an earnest of the greater things that we may hope from a new talent working upon a high level, not quite clearly as yet, but strenuously.

William Dean Howells. “Life and Letters.” Harper’s Weekly 39 (October 26, 1895), p. 1013 Of our own smaller fiction I have been reading several books without finding a very fresh note except in The Red Badge of Courage, by Mr. Stephen Crane. He is the author of that story of New York tough life, Maggie, which I mentioned some time ago as so good but so impossible of general acceptance because of our conventional limitations in respect of swearing, and some other traits of the common parlance. He has now attempted to give a close-at-hand impression of battle as seen by a young volunteer in the civil war, and I cannot say that to my inexperience of battle he has given such a vivid sense of it as one gets from some other authors. The sense of deaf and blind turmoil he does indeed give, but we might get that from fewer pages than Mr. Crane employs to impart it. The more valuable effect of the book is subjective: the conception of character in the tawdry-minded youth whom the slight story gathers itself about, and in his comrades and superiors of all sorts. The human commonness (which we cannot shrink from without vulgarity) is potently illustrated throughout in their speech and action and motive; and the cloud of bewilderment in which they all have their being after the fighting begins, the frenzy, the insensate resentment, are graphically and probably suggested. The dialect employed does not so

“The Best Recent Novels.” Independent 47 (November 21, 1895), p. 1579 The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, is a raw lump of pseudo-realism wherein a man, who clearly has no firsthand knowledge of war, attempts to present an American picture in Tolstoi’s manner. It is, in fact, not true to life, and as a romance it is supremely disgusting. We call attention to it as the first noteworthy attempt in American fiction to imitate Tolstoi’s style of depicting brutality as the main feature of human life.

32

they have! Yes, by heavens, they’ve held ’im! They’ve held ’im!” Then he roared blithely at his staff. “We’ll wallop ’im now,” said he. “We’ve got ’em sure,” and, turning to another aide. “Here—you— Jones—quick—ride after Tompkins—see Taylor—tell him t’ go in—everlastingly— like blazes—anything.” We think everybody will coincide with the General in the opinion that he had got ’em. There used to be a story of a Confederate officer who gave the command: “Two ranks form four ranks. Right smart! Git!” And there is a legend of a Connecticut Captain who instructed his men to bow around a mud puddle. It is natural enough to suppose that the West Point impress should be forgotten at times, and that all stilted and artificial deportment should be flung to the winds. Passing over Mr. Crane’s very vivid and truthful picture of the profane young officer who held his wounded finger so that the blood would not drip on his trousers. We may quote, as an instance of the author’s power in narrative effect, a brief passage occurring on page 79. A youth who is running away from the fight comes upon a grim spectacle:

“New Books.” New York Sun, November 23, 1895, p. 7 We have read with interest “The Red Badge of Courage,” by Stephen Crane. This is a realistic story of the American Civil War, and the “red badge” of the title means a bleeding and, generally, we should think, in the eye of Mr. Crane’s imagination, exceedingly horrible wound. Mr. Crane shows us here that there is more than one sort of realism, and makes it plain that Mr. James and Mr. Howells by no means occupy the whole field. The two especially remarkable points of the story, as we think, are the homely fashion of the dialogue and the studied energy of the narrative style. Even Mr. Crane’s Generals talk in the homely American way. On page 72, for instance, we are introduced to what Mr. Crane describes as a mousecolored General sitting quietly on a splendid charger and surrounded by a galloping and jingling staff. Not withstanding the quiet demeanor of this commander, he had, Mr. Crane says, the appearance of a business man whose business is swinging up and down. Presently the General had occasion to issue an order. “Tompkins,” he called out irritably, “go over an’ see Taylor, an’ tell him not t’ be in such an all-fired hurry; tell him t’ halt his brigade in th’ edge of th’ woods; tell him t’ detach a reg’ment—say I think th’ centre ’ll break if we don’t help it out some; tell him t’ hurry up.” Off goes Tompkins, a slim youth, on a fine chestnut horse, in a cloud of dust. It must be that he saw Taylor, and that the officer was quick to carry out his orders, for presently the General bounced excitedly in his saddle, leaned forward with face aflame, and said: “Yes, by heavens,

At length he reached a place where the high, arching boughs made a chapel. He softly pushed the green doors aside and entered. Pine needles were a gentle brown carpet. There was a religious half light. Near the threshold he stopped, horror-stricken at the sight of a thing. He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over 33

the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip.

The trees about the portals of the chapel moved soughingly in a soft wind. A sad silence was upon the little guarding edifice.

We remember no realism more shocking than this since Mr. Ambrose Bierce’s story of the outlaw who enclosed his uncle in a meal sack, and, suspending him from the branch of an apple tree, permitted him to be butted to death by a sheep. Page 79 is certainly a very unpleasant part of Mr. Crane’s book, and we shall be glad presently to leave it! but it is no more than fair to let our readers know what became of the youth:

Mr. Crane frequently gives a grim effect even to his humor. He has this same youth wishing that he was dead, and “believing that he envied a corpse.” He also has him think of getting himself killed as a reproach to persons who scorned him: “It was his idea, vaguely formulated, that his corpse would be for those eyes a great and sad reproach.” In preparing his dialect Mr. Crane was at some trouble that was unnecessary. “Liquor” is as good as “licker” so far as pronunciation is concerned, and “said” is as good as “sed,” and “heluva,” any possible question of humor aside, has no advantage over the real form, except that it may be held to be more polite. Neither is Mr. Crane always careful in the matter of his own immediate English. “Would have liked to have discovered” is not the best way of putting it, and “whom he knew to be him” and “the majesty of he who dares” could be profitably changed when the story comes to a second edition.

The youth gave a shriek as he confronted the thing. He was for moments turned to stone before it. He remained staring into the liquid-looking eyes. The dead man and the living man exchanged a long look. Then the youth cautiously put one hand behind him and brought it against a tree. Leaning upon this he retreated, step by step, with his face still toward the thing. He feared that if he turned his back the body might spring up and stealthily pursue him. The branches, pushing against him, threatened to throw him over upon it. His unguided feet, too, caught aggravatingly in brambles; and with it all he received a subtle suggestion to touch the corpse. As he thought of his hand upon it he shuddered profoundly. At last he burst the bonds which had fastened him to the spot and fled, unheeding the underbrush. He was pursued by a sight of the black ants swarming greedily upon the gray face and venturing horribly near to the eyes. After a time he paused, and, breathless and panting, listened. He imagined some strange voice would come from the dead throat and squawk after him in horrible menaces.

“An Extraordinary Work: Stephen Crane’s Talent Recognized by the Reviews and Newspapers of the United States.” Port Jervis Union, November 25, 1895 Some months ago the Union announced the publication of a work from the pen of Mr. Stephen Crane, entitled “Red Badge 34

of Courage.” This work deals with the events of a single battle, the battle of Chancellorsville and describes in a style of the most powerful realism the experience of a raw New England youth, who received his baptism of fire in that sanguinary contest. The work is a departure from the ordinary method of treating military subjects in the graphic and powerful manner in which the horrors of war are described. The talent evinced in the work is of a high order and has had reviews of from all over the United States. Quotations from a few of the favorable notices are given below. In view of the fact that the 124th Regiment, recruited from Orange county, bore an honorable and important part in this battle, checking the advance of Stonewall Jackson’s impetuous troopers after the extreme right of the Union line had been driven back and disorganized by their unexpected onset, the work will have a special interest in this locality. Here are a few of the quotations:

Free Press, Detroit, Oct. 7.:—“Stephen Crane describes in a style that reminds one of Victor Hugo in its terse brief sentences, its aptness of comparison and its strength of scene painting, what men feel and see in war.” Globe, St. Paul, Minn., Oct. 20.:—“In substance the book is one which both Mr. Howells and Andrew Lang might enjoy. This is equivalent to saying that Mr. Crane has performed a feat compared to which the pasturing of the lion and lamb in company is a mere bagatelle.” Post, Chicago, Oct. 26.:—“The action of the story throughout is splendid and all aglow with color, movement and vim. The style is as keen and bright as a sword-blade and Kipling has done nothing better in this line. The rank and file has its historian at last and we have had nothing finer since the ‘Retreat of the Ten Thousand.’” Plain-Dealer, Cleveland, Oct. 27.:—“It is perfectly apparent that the experiences described were those of the author.” Times, Minneapolis, Oct. 13.:—“The battle descriptions are intensely real and the whole book is full of superb word painting.” News, Providence, R. I., Oct. 9.:— “This is a book to be read at a single sitting—or two sittings at most. It is the story of a single battle in the American Civil War, a realism and impression that carries the reader from first chapter to last, almost irresistibly in the telling.” Beacon, Boston, Oct. 12.:—“Mr. Crane narrates with a depth of comprehension and a pitiless sincerity that are nothing less than fascinating. To read the book is like looking upon a painting of Verestchagin.”

The Home Journal, Boston, Oct. 19.:— “The Red Badge of Courage is a story of wonderful power, in character not like unto anything concerning our late struggle that we have ever read and in point of intensity of interest standing unsurpassed.” The Transcript, Boston, Oct. 26.:— “The Red Badge of Courage is a book with a mighty theme. It is designated on the title page as merely ‘an episode of the civil war,’ but it is something more than this. It is a tremendous grasping of the glory and carnage of all war; it is the rendering, in phrases that reveal like lightning flashes, of the raw fighter’s emotions, the blind magnificent courage and the cowardice equally blind of a youth first possessed by the red sickness of battle.” 35

be hard to say, but the works bear signal comparison. There is another writer, much neglected, if we remember rightly, who has treated war in much the same way, and strangely enough his episodes were taken from the American Civil War; but Mr. Ambrose Bierce never prosecuted analysis so staunchly as Mr. Crane. This is an integral attempt to embody in language the detail of a soldier’s mind in his first action. Let us see how Mr. Crane makes his essay, for the study will repay rigid attention. Upon hearing the battle was imminent the youth was in a trance of astonishment, wondering if he would be brave. This mood passed, and he “saw visions of a thousand-tongued fear that would babble at his back and cause him to flee, while others were going coolly about their country’s business.” The regiment started for action, but there was the indefinite delay of warfare. He now panted for battle; he wanted to get it over, and to know whether he was to be a coward or not. Still there was no fighting, but the line encountered a dead body. “The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.” The whole of this scene is remarkable, as remarkable as that later period of panic which perhaps covers the most important episode in the volume. The regiment was shifted, shifted constantly; the soldiers raised little heaps of stones for protection before them, and were moved away. The act became mechanical. The regiment came into action; bullets whistled in the trees. After the first shot the youth “was working at his weapon like an automatic affair. He suddenly lost concern for

H. B. Marriott-Watson. Pall Mall Gazette 61 (November 26, 1895), p. 4

Mr. Crane has certainly written a remarkable book. He has deliberately synthesized the particular emotions of warfare, which, it is plain, he had been at pains to analyze fastidiously. To a curious reader it may appear that the synthesis is better than the analysis, but in reality we may well halt and doubt on reaching this conclusion definitely. Certainly at times Mr. Crane would seem to wander slightly; his psychology has now and then an aberrant air; he moves with a sureness, but it is sometimes a sureness that does not convince. It is as though he built upon the current passions and fears too insistently. The scheme is a trifle too logical, too methodic. It is not ecstatic, it is not extravagant; nay, its very coolness and deliberation seem studied and articulate. It is wholly cold-blooded. But it is a gallant endeavour, and in truth and beyond question a very singular performance. Not the least of Mr. Crane’s gifts is that this narrative, with scarce a name to hang upon a single character, and no plot whatsoever, holds one irrevocably. There is no possibility of resistance, when once you are in its grip, from the first march of the troops to the closing scenes. The hero is the “youth.” His comrades call him Henry, but to Mr. Crane and the reader he remains the “youth.” He goes into battle a coward; he is among the deserters on the first day of fighting; he comes out of the three days’ campaign with the red badge. How much of his inspiration Mr. Crane has derived from Tolstoi it would 36

himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate . . . If he had thought the regiment was about to be annihilated, perhaps he would have amputated himself from it. But its noise gave him assurance. The regiment was like a firework that, once ignited, proceeds superior to circumstances until its blazing vitality fades.” But after this first frenzy it is that he runs. Panic seizes him and he scuttles past the furious lieutenant. We have no space for quotation, otherwise we should like to have quoted from the horrible passages which describe his encounter with the train of wounded. Verestschagin painted such scenes, but Verestschagin’s canvas testified merely to fact, and not to emotion. A more gruesome reality was never adventured on paper than the description in Chapters IX. and X. of Jim Conklin and the “tattered man.” Mr. Crane’s imagination adumbrates the horrible confusion and vagueness of the battlefield. You will pick from his pages nothing of the campaign, nothing of any certainty, save the terrors and passions of the characters he employs. The reader is befogged with the bewildered “youth,” and wanders from camp to camp in the mellay. Finally, out of this panic comes the redemption. It is excellently managed. The heroic has no place in the mental evolution. It is by the baptism of fire alone that the soldier regains his nerve. If the concluding portions of the analysis are less sensational, they are none the less interesting. In the new peace that comes of accomplishment the youth is pursued by images of the “tattered” soldier, whom he had deserted in the extremity of death. But slowly he put the shame of his cowardice from him. “He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them. With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive, but of

sturdy and strong blood . . . He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.” Mr. Crane, we repeat, has written a remarkable book. His insight and his power of realization amount to genius.

“The Red Badge of Courage.” Critic 24 (November 30, 1895), p. 363 Having recently startled part of the world and amused another part by the unconventional thought and expression of “The Black Riders,” Mr. Crane has now given us, in his latest prose work, something which can more easily be appreciated by “the general,” but which, we think, will none the less be valued by the more discriminating. The first and simplest impression made by its perusal is one of power—power perhaps a thought undisciplined, perhaps a little youthful in the exuberance of its expression, but very real. A strong book, then, is “The Red Badge of Courage,” and it is a true book; true to life, whether it be taken as a literal transcript of a soldier’s experiences in his first battle, or (as some have fancied) a great parable of the inner battle which every man must fight. Taking it in the obvious sense, we are struck, also, by the vivid power of realization which Mr. Crane shows at an age when he can hardly have seen real fighting, born as he was some years after the close of the Civil War, of which the story is an episode. In assembling the good qualities of the book, we must name also the quick eye for color which is shown on every page, and not for the mere externals of color alone, but 37

for the inner significance of its relation to the events and emotions under hand. Metaphors and similes, too, abound in rich profusion, not strung on for effect, but living and actual as Homer’s. The whole book, in fact, is full of primitive elements; it differs from the type of an Augustan age, with its artificial restraints and its faint perfumes, as a virgin forest from a trim Italian garden. We do not say this wholly to commend; there are certain roughnesses of phrase—the recurrence of “too” as a conjunction at the beginning of a sentence, or such expressions as “were being rended,” “a little ways,” “the clangoring of the churchbell,”—which suggest improvement; and in the writing of dialect (always a delicate matter), the incessant representation of “you” by “yeh” becomes irritating. We question, moreover, whether certain expletives current among soldiers at least since the days of memorable campaigns in Flanders do not lose force, without gaining propriety, when they are written “dum” or “dumb,” or, with still more cryptic reserve, “a heluva row.” But all these are small matters compared with the genuine force which must set Mr. Crane, as was said of him when he was even younger, among those who are henceforth to be reckoned with.

failings, and inner life of individual combatants been drawn by so masterly a hand. The principal figure is one Henry Fleming (usually called “the youth”), a farm boy who catches the soldier fever and enlists on the Federal side in an imaginary 304th Regiment, which, as a body, is as green as its last recruit when it goes into action. Our author does not give us any date or locality, or the names of commanders on either side, and so the battle in which “the youth” is engaged may be typical. It might easily be one of those fought in the Shenandoah Valley or around Winchester (Va.)— bulldog struggles in which one side got the better of it one day, and the other the next. It serves Mr. Crane as the foundation of a series of psychological studies of remarkable power and truth. We cannot condense them any more than we could condense a steel chain. We might say of the material chain there are so many links, and it is altogether too long; but in the metaphysical one every link is differently fashioned, and clings to its fellows on either side in a different way. We could label them Conceit, Sulks, Suspicion, Fear of Becoming Afraid, Animal Savagery, SelfExaltation, Panic, Shame, Remorse, Heroism; but there is no formula for the subtle alchemy with which the metals, true and base, are blended. This is done with no uncertain hand, and no waste of words. Mr. Crane works as a smith works on the rose-hot iron. The blows are quick and true, and the sparks fly. His descriptive powers are also forcible and vivid, as such passages as the following will show:— “The battle-flag in the distance jerked about madly. It seemed to be struggling to free itself from an agony . . . It suddenly sank down, as if dying. Its motion as it fell was a gesture of despair.” “The regiment was like a firework that, once ignited, proceeds superior to circumstances until its blazing vitality fades.” “The captain of the youths’ company had been killed in an

“Novels.” Manchester Guardian, December 31, 1895, p. 10 There is no “pride and pomp” in an episode of the American Civil War which Mr. Stephen Crane has written under the title of The Red Badge of Courage and as to “circumstance,” this is mostly on the seamy side, and seldom have the feelings, 38

early part of the action. His body lay stretched out in the position of a tired man resting, but upon his face was an astonished and sorrowful look, as if he thought some friend had done him an illturn.” Of the battle flags, “they splashed bits of warm colour upon the dark lines of troops . . . They were like beautiful birds strangely undaunted in a storm.” “These parts of the opposing armies were two long waves that pitched upon each other madly at dictated points. Once the youth saw a spray of light forms go in hound-like leaps towards the waving blue lines. There was much howling, and presently it went away with a vast mouthful of prisoners. Again he saw a blue wave dash with such tremendous force against a grey obstruction that it seemed to clear the earth of it.” There is no story except that of this battle, or rather such parts of it as “the youth” sees in the regiment, or away from it, during his intervals of pluck and panic. In one of the latter he falls in with a crowd of badly wounded men, some of his own corps. Here amongst these poor fellows, mangled by shot and shell and mad with excitement, we get some character sketches, strong and pathetic, done without effort, in anything but heroic language, and giving the conviction that they are real. We need not follow “the youth” all through his two days’ fight and his ups and downs of bravery and despair. The final verdict upon him as a soldier, given by his lieutenant, was that he is a “jimbeckey,” which seems to be a superlative form of praise. Of him as a man it is written, “Gradually he put away the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels, and felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive, but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they might point. He had been to touch the great death, and found out that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.”

George Wyndham. “A Remarkable Book.” New Review 14 (January 1896), pp. 30–40 All men are aware of antagonism and desire, or at the least are conscious even in the nursery, that their hearts are the destined theatres of these emotions; all have felt or heard of their violence; all know that, unlike other emotions, these must often be translated into the glittering drama of decisive speech and deed; all, in short, expect to be lovers, and peer at the possibility of fighting. And yet how hard it is for the tried to compare notes, for the untried to anticipate experience! Love and war have been the themes of song and story in every language since the beginning of the world, love-making and fighting the supreme romances of most men and most nations; but any one man knows little enough of either beyond the remembered record of his own chances and achievements, and knows still less whither to turn in order to learn more. We resent this ignorance as a slur on our manhood, and snatch at every chance of dispelling it. And at first, in the scientific “climate” of our time, we are disposed to ask for documents: for love-letters, and letters written from the field of battle. These we imagine, if collected and classified, might supply the evidence for an induction. But, on second thoughts, we remember that such love-letters as have been published are, for the most part, not nearer to life than romantic literature, but further removed from it by many stages: that they are feeble echoes of conventional art—not immediate reflections, but blurred impressions of used plates carelessly copied from meretricious paintings. And so it is with 39

the evidence at first hand upon war. The letters and journals of soldiers and subordinate officers in the field are often of a more pathetic interest than most loveletters; but to the searcher after truth they are still disappointing, for they deal almost exclusively with matters beyond the possibilities of the writer’s acquaintance. They are all of surmises—of what dear ones are doing at home, or of the enemy’s intentions and the general’s plans for outwitting him: they reflect the writer’s love and professional ambition, but hardly ever the new things he has heard and seen and felt. And when they attempt these things they sink to the level of the love-letters, and become mere repetitions of accepted forms. I can remember one letter from an English private, describing an engagement in which some eighty men were killed and wounded out of a force of eight thousand; he wrote of comrades in his own battalion “falling like sheep,” and gave no clue to the country in which he served. It might have been in Siberia or the Sahara, against savages or civilised troops; you could glean nothing except that he had listened to patriotic songs in music halls at home. Perhaps the most intimate loveletters and battle-letters never get printed at all. But, as it is, you cannot generalise from collections of documents as you can from collections of ferns and beetles: there is not, and there never can be, a science of the perceptions and emotions, which thrill young lovers and recruits. The modern soldier is a little less laconic than his mediæval forbear. Indeed he could hardly surpass the tantalising reserve of, say, Thomas Denyes, a gentleman who fights at Towton, and sums up the carnage of thirty-eight thousand men in a single sentence:—“Oure Soveraign Lord hath wonne the feld.” But it is astonishing to note how little even the modern soldier manages to say. He receives rude and swift

answers in the field to the questions that haunted his boyish dreams, but he keeps the secret with masonic self-possession. Marbot’s Memoirs and, in a lesser degree, Tomkinson’s Diary of a Cavalry Officer are both admirable as personal accounts of the Peninsular Campaign, but the warfare they describe is, almost as obsolete as that of the Roses, and, even if it were not so, they scarcely attempt the recreation of intense moments by the revelation of their imprint on the minds that endured them. And, on the score of art and of reticence, one is glad that they do not. Their authors were gallant soldiers waging war in fact, and not artists reproducing it in fiction. They satisfy the special curiosity of men interested in strategy and tactics, not the universal curiosity of Man the potential Combatant. He is fascinated by the picturesque and emotional aspects of battle, and the experts tell him little of either. To gratify that curiosity you must turn from the Soldier to the Artist, who is trained both to see and tell or inspired, even without seeing, to divine what things have been and must be. Some may rebel against accepting his evidence, since it is impossible to prove the truth of his report. But it is equally impossible to prove the beauty of his accomplishment. Yet both are patent to every one capable of accepting truth or beauty, and by a surer warrant than any chance coincidence of individual experience and taste. Mr. Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage, is a great artist, with something new to say, and consequently, with a new way of saying it. His theme, indeed, is an old one, but old themes re-handled anew in the light of novel experience, are the stuff out of which masterpieces are made, and in The Red Badge of Courage Mr. Crane has surely contrived a masterpiece. He writes of war—the ominous and alluring possibility for every man, since the heir of all 40

the ages has won and must keep his inheritance by secular combat. The conditions of the age-long contention have changed and will change, but its certainty is coeval with progress: so long as there are things worth fighting for fighting will last, and the fashion of fighting will change under the reciprocal stresses of rival inventions. Hence its double interest of abiding necessity and ceaseless variation. Of all these variations the most marked has followed, within the memory of most of us, upon the adoption of long-range weapons of precision, and continues to develop, under our eyes, with the development of rapidity in firing. And yet, with the exception of Zola’s la ˆ D´ebacle, no considerable attempt has been made to pourtray war under its new conditions. The old stories are less trustworthy than ever as guides to the experiences which a man may expect in battle and to the emotions which those experiences are likely to arouse. No doubt the prime factors in the personal problem—the chances of death and mutilation—continue to be about the same. In these respects it matters little whether you are pierced by a bullet at two thousand yards or stabbed at hands’ play with a dagger. We know that the most appalling death-rolls of recent campaigns have been more than equalled in ancient warfare; and, apart from history, it is clear that, unless one side runs away, neither can win save by the infliction of decisive losses. But although these personal risks continue to be essentially the same, the picturesque and emotional aspects of war are completely altered by every change in the shape and circumstance of imminent death. And these are the fit materials for literature—the things which even dull men remember with the undying imagination of poets, but which, for lack of the writer’s art, they cannot communicate. The sights flashed indelibly on the retina of the eye; the sounds that after long silences suddenly cypher; the stenches that sicken in

after-life at any chance allusion to decay; or, stirred by these, the storms of passions that force yells of defiance out of inarticulate clowns; the winds of fear that sweep by night along prostrate ranks, with the acceleration of trains and the noise as of a whole town waking from nightmare with stertorous, indrawn gasps—these colossal facts of the senses and the soul are the only colours in which the very image of war can be painted. Mr. Crane has composed his palette with these colours, and has painted a picture that challenges comparison with the most vivid scenes of Tolsto¨ı’s la Guerre ˆ et la Paix or of Zola’s la D´ebacle. This is unstinted praise, but I feel bound to give it after reading the book twice and comparing it with Zola’s S´edan and Tolsto¨ı’s account of Rostow’s squadron for the first time under fire. Indeed, I think that Mr. Crane’s picture of war is more complete than Tolsto¨ı’s, more true than Zola’s. Rostow’s sensations are conveyed by Tolsto¨ı, with touches more subtile than any to be found even in his S´ebastopol, but they make but a brief passage in a long book, much else of which is devoted to the theory that Napoleon and his marshals were mere waifs on a tide of humanity or to the analysis of divers characters exposed to civilian experiences. Zola, on the other hand, compiles an accurate catalogue of almost all that is terrible and nauseating in war; but it is his own catalogue of facts made in cold blood, and not the procession of flashing images shot through the senses into one brain and fluctuating there with its rhythm ˆ gives of exaltation and fatigue. La D´ebacle the whole truth, the truth of science, as it is observed by a shrewd intellect, but not the truth of experience as it is felt in fragments magnified or diminished in accordance with the patient’s mood. The terrible things in war are not always terrible; the nauseating things do not always sicken. On the contrary, it is even these which sometimes lift the soul to heights 41

from which they become invisible. And, again, at other times, it is the little miseries of most ignoble insignificance which fret through the last fibres of endurance. Mr. Crane, for his distinction, has hit on a new device, or at least on one which has never been used before with such consistency and effect. In order to show the features of modern war, he takes a subject—a youth with a peculiar temperament, capable of exaltation and yet morbidly sensitive. Then he traces the successive impressions made on such a temperament, from minute to minute, during two days of heavy fighting. He stages the drama of war, so to speak, within the mind of one man, and then admits you as to a theatre. You may, if you please, object that this youth is unlike most other young men who serve in the ranks, and that the same events would have impressed the average man differently; but you are convinced that this man’s soul is truly drawn, and that the impressions made in it are faithfully rendered. The youth’s temperament is merely the medium which the artist has chosen: that it is exceptionally plastic makes but for the deeper incision of his work. It follows from Mr. Crane’s method that he creates by his art even such a first-hand report of war as we seek in vain among the journals and letters of soldiers. But the book is not written in the form of an autobiography: the author narrates. He is therefore at liberty to give scenery and action, down to the slightest gestures and outward signs of inward elation or suffering, and he does this with the vigour and terseness of a master. Had he put his descriptions of scenery and his atmospheric effects, or his reports of overheard conversations, into the mouth of his youth, their very excellence would have belied all likelihood. Yet in all his descriptions and all his reports he confines himself only to such things as that youth heard and saw, and, of these, only to such as

influenced his emotions. By this compromise he combines the strength and truth of a monodrama with the directness and colour of the best narrative prose. The monodrama suffices for the lyrical emotion of Tennyson’s Maud; but in Browning’s Martin Relf you feel the constraint of a form which in his Ring and the Book entails repetition often intolerable. Mr. Crane discovers his youth, Henry Fleming, in a phase of disillusion. It is some monotonous months since boyish “visions of broken-bladed glory” impelled him to enlist in the Northern Army towards the middle of the American war. That impulse is admirably given:—“One night as he lay in bed, the winds had carried to him the clangouring of the church bells, as some enthusiast jerked the rope frantically to tell the twisted news of a great battle. This voice of the people rejoicing in the night had made him shiver in a prolonged ecstasy of excitement. Later he had gone down to his mother’s room, and had spoken thus: ‘Ma, I’m going to enlist.’ ‘Henry, don’t you be a fool,’ his mother had replied. She had then covered her face with the quilt. There was an end to the matter for that night.” But the next morning he enlists. He is impatient of the homely injunctions given him in place of the heroic speech he expects in accordance with a tawdry convention, and so departs, with a “vague feeling of relief.” But, looking back from the gate, he sees his mother “kneeling among the potato parings. Her brown face upraised and stained with tears, her spare form quivering.” Since then the army has done “little but sit still and try to keep warm” till he has “grown to regard himself merely as a part of a vast blue demonstration.” In the sick langour of this waiting, he begins to suspect his courage and lies awake by night through hours of morbid introspection. He tries “to prove to himself mathematically that he would not run from a 42

battle”; he constantly leads the conversation round to the problem of courage in order to gauge the confidence of his messmates.

process of accomplishment:—“One grey morning he was kicked on the leg by the tall soldier, and then, before he was entirely awake, he found himself running down a wood road in the midst of men who were panting with the first effects of speed. His canteen banged rhythmically upon his thigh, and his haversack bobbed softly. His musket bounced a trifle from his shoulder at each stride and made his cap feel uncertain upon his head.” From this moment, reached on the thirtieth page, the drama races through another hundred and sixty pages to the end of the book, and to read those pages is in itself an experience of breathless, lambent, detonating life. So brilliant and detached are the images evoked that, like illuminated bodies actually seen, they leave their fever-bright phantasms floating before the brain. You may shut the book, but you still see the battle-flags “jerked about madly in the smoke,” or sinking with “dying gestures of despair,” the men “dropping here and there like bundles”; the captain shot dead with “an astonished and sorrowful look as if he thought some friend had done him an ill-turn”; and the litter of corpses, “twisted in fantastic contortions,” as if “they had fallen from some great height, dumped out upon the ground from the sky.” The book is full of sensuous impressions that leap out from the picture: of gestures, attitudes, grimaces, that flash into portentous definition, like faces from the climbing clouds of nightmare. It leaves the imagination bounded with a “dense wall of smoke, furiously slit and slashed by the knife-like fire from the rifles.” It leaves, in short, such indelible traces as are left by the actual experience of war. The picture shows grisly shadows and vermilion splashes, but, as in the vast drama it reflects so truly, these features, though insistent, are small in size, and are lost in the immensity of the theatre. The tranquil forest stands around; the

“How do you know you won’t run when the time comes?” asked the youth. “Run?” said the loud one, “run?—of course not!” He laughed. “Well,” continued the youth, “lots of good-a-’nough men have thought they was going to do great things before the fight, but when the time come they skedaddled.” “Oh, that’s all true, I s’pose,” replied the other, “but I’m not going to skedaddle. The man that bets on my running will lose his money, that’s all.” He nodded confidently. The youth is a “mental outcast” among his comrades, “wrestling with his personal problem,” and sweating as he listens to the muttered scoring of a card game, his eyes fixed on the “red, shivering reflection of a fire.” Every day they drill; every night they watch the red campfires of the enemy on the far shore of a river, eating their hearts out. At last they march:— “In the gloom before the break of the day their uniforms glowed a deep purple blue. From across the river the red eyes were still peering. In the eastern sky there was a yellow patch, like a rug laid for the feet of the coming sun; and against it, black and pattern-like, loomed the gigantic figure of the colonel on a gigantic horse.” The book is full of such vivid impressions, half of sense and half of imagination:— The columns as they marched “were like two serpents crawling from the cavern of night.” But the march, which, in his boyish imagination, should have led forthwith into melodramatic action is but the precursor of other marches. After days of weariness and nights of discomfort, at last, as in life, without preface, and in a lull of the mind’s anxiety, the long-dreaded and long-expected is suddenly and smoothly in 43

“fairy-blue of the sky” is over it all. And, as in the actual experience of war, the impressions which these startling features inflict, though acute, are localised and not too deep: are as it were mere pin-pricks, or, at worst, clean cuts from a lancet in a body thrilled with currents of physical excitement and sopped with anæsthetics of emotion. Here is the author’s description of a forlorn hope:—

appeals, bended its glittering form and swept toward them. The men wavered in indecision for a moment, and then with a long wailful cry the dilapidated regiment surged forward and began its new journey. Over the field went the scurrying mass. It was a handful of men splattered into the faces of the enemy. Toward it instantly sprang the yellow tongues. A vast quantity of blue smoke hung before them. A mighty banging made ears valueless. The youth ran like a madman to reach the woods before a bullet could discover him. He ducked his head low, like a football player. In his haste his eyes almost closed, and the scene was a wild blur. Pulsating saliva stood at the corner of his mouth. Within him, as he hurled forward was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag that was near him. It was a creation of beauty and invulnerability. It was a goddess radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture to him. It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the voice of his hopes. Because no harm could come to it he endowed it with power. He kept near, as if it could be a saver of lives, and an imploring cry went from his mind.

As the regiment swung from its position out into a cleared space the woods and thickets before it awakened. Yellow flames leaped toward it from many directions. The line swung straight for a moment. Then the right wing swung forward; it in turn was surpassed by the left. Afterward the centre careered to the front until the regiment was a wedge-shaped mass . . . the men, pitching forward insanely, had burst into cheerings, mob-like and barbaric, but tuned in strange keys that can arouse the dullard and the stoic . . . There was the delirium that encounters despair and death, and is heedless and blind to odds . . . Presently the straining pace ate up the energies of the men. As if by agreement, the leaders began to slacken their speed. The volleys directed against them had a seeming wind-like effect. The regiment snorted and blew. Among some stolid trees it began to falter and hesitate . . . The youth had a vague belief that he had run miles, and he thought, in a way, that he was now in some new and unknown land.

This passage directly challenges comparison with Zola’s scene, in which the lieutenant and the old tradition, of an invincible Frenchman over-running the world “between his bottle and his girl,” expire together among the morsels of a bulleteaten flag. Mr. Crane has probably read ˆ la D´ebacle, and wittingly threw down his glove. One can only say that he is justified of his courage. Mr. Crane’s method, when dealing with things seen and heard, is akin to Zola’s: he omits nothing and extenuates nothing, save the actual blasphemy and obscenity of a soldier’s oaths. These he

The change withers away, and the lieutenant, the youth, and his friend run forward to rally the regiment. In front of the colours three men began to bawl, “Come on! Come on!” They danced and gyrated like tortured savages. The flag, obedient to these 44

indicates, sufficiently for any purpose of art, by brief allusions to their vigour and variety. Even Zola has rarely surpassed the appalling realism of Jim Conklin’s death in Chapter X. Indeed, there is little to criticise in Mr. Crane’s observation, except an undue subordination of the shrill cry of bullets to the sharp crashing of rifles. He omits the long chromatic whine defining its invisible arc in the air, and the fretful snatch a few feet from the listener’s head. In addition to this gift of observation, Mr. Crane has at command the imaginative phrase. The firing follows a retreat as with “yellings of eager metallic hounds”; the men at their mechanic loading and firing are like “fiends jigging heavily in the smoke”; in a lull before the attack “there passed slowly the intense moments that precede the tempest”; then, after single shots, “the battle roar settled to a rolling thunder, which was a single long explosion.” And, as I have said, when Mr. Crane deals with things felt he gives a truer report than Zola. He postulates his hero’s temperament—a day-dreamer given over to morbid self-analysis who enlists, not from any deep-seated belief in the holiness of fighting for his country, but in hasty pursuit of a vanishing ambition. This choice enables Mr. Crane to double his picturesque advantage with an ethical advantage equally great. Not only is his youth, like the sufferer in The Fall of the House of Usher, super-sensitive to every pin-prick of sensation: he is also a delicate meter of emotion and fancy. In such a nature the waves of feeling take exaggerated curves, and hallucination haunts the brain. Thus, when awaiting the first attack, his mind is thronged with vivid images of a circus he had seen as a boy: it is there in definite detail, even as the Apothecary’s shop usurps Romeo’s mind at the crisis of his fate. And thus also, like Herodotus’ Aristodemus, he vacillates between cowardice and heroism. Nothing

could well be more subtile than his selfdeception and that sudden enlightenment which leads him to “throw aside his mental pamphlets on the philosophy of the retreated and rules for the guidance of the damned.” His soul is of that kind which, “sick with self-love,” can only be saved “so as by fire”; and it is saved when the battle-bond of brotherhood is born within it, and is found plainly of deeper import than the cause for which he and his comrades fight, even as that cause is loftier than his personal ambition. By his choice of a hero Mr. Crane displays in the same work a pageant of the senses and a tragedy of the soul. But he does not obtrude his moral. The “tall soldier” and the lieutenant are brave and content throughout, the one by custom as a veteran, the other by constitution as a hero. But the two boys, the youth and his friend, “the loud soldier,” are at first querulous braggarts, but at the last they are transmuted by danger until either might truly say:— We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still, And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind; It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill; I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind, I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned. Let no man cast a stone of contempt at these two lads during their earlier weakness until he has fully gauged the jarring discordance of battle. To be jostled on a platform when you have lost your luggage and missed your train on an errand of vital importance gives a truer pre-taste of war than any field-day; yet many a well-disciplined man will denounce the universe upon slighter provocation. It is 45

enough that these two were boys and that they became men. Yet must it be said that this youth’s emotional experience was singular. In a battle there are a few physical cowards, abjects born with defective circulations, who literally turn blue at the approach of danger, and a few on whom danger acts like the keen, rare atmosphere of snowclad peaks. But between these extremes come many to whom danger is as strong wine, with the multitude which gladly accepts the “iron laws of tradition” and finds welcome support in “a moving box.” To this youth, as the cool dawn of his first day’s fighting changed by infinitesimal gradations to a feverish noon, the whole evolution pointed to “a trap”; but I have seen another youth under like circumstances toss a pumpkin into the air and spit it on his sword. To this youth the very landscape was filled with “the stealthy approach of death.” You are convinced by the author’s art that it was so to this man. But to others, as the clamour increases, it is as if the serenity of the morning had taken refuge in their brains. This man “stumbles over the stones as he runs breathlessly forward”; another realises for the first time how right it is to be adroit even in running. The movement of his body becomes an art, which is not self-conscious, since its whole intention is to impress others within the limits of a modest decorum. We know that both love and courage teach this mastery over the details of living. You can tell from the way one woman, out of all the myriads, walks down Piccadilly, that she is at last aware of love. And you can tell from the way a man enters a surgery or runs toward a firing-line that he, too, realises how wholly the justification of any one life lies in its perfect adjustment to others. The woman in love, the man in battle, may each say, for their moment, with the artist, “I was made perfect too.” They also are

of the few to whom “God whispers in the ear.” But had Mr. Crane taken an average man he would have written an ordinary story, whereas he has written one which is certain to last. It is glorious to see his youth discover courage in the bedrock of primeval antagonism after the collapse of his tinsel bravado; it is something higher to see him raise upon that rock the temple of resignation. Mr. Crane, as an artist, achieves by his singleness of purpose a truer and completer picture of war than either Tolsto¨ı, bent also upon proving the insignificance of heroes, or Zola, bent also upon prophesying the regeneration of France. That is much; but it is more that his work of art, when completed, chimes with the universal experience of mankind; that his heroes find in their extreme danger, if not confidence in their leaders and conviction in their cause, at least the conviction that most men do what they can or, at most, what they must. We have few good accounts of battles—many of shipwrecks; and we know that, just as the storm, rises, so does the commonplace captain show as a god, and the hysterical passenger as a cheerful heroine. It is but a further step to recognise all life for a battle and this earth for a vessel lost in space. We may then infer that virtues easy in moments of distress may be useful also in everyday experience.

“Fiction.” Speaker 13 (January 11, 1896), p. 50 “The Red Badge of Courage” has the rare and distinctive merit of originality. We do not know of any other book which is quite like it, though, in a certain degree, it suggests some of the Erckmann–Chatrian 46

novels. The whole book is an account of a young soldier’s experiences in the first engagement with the enemy, the war being that between North and South in the United States. The time occupied by the tale is barely a couple of days, and the scene never moves more than a mile or two from the same spot. Yet every page is crowded, not merely with incidents such as the war correspondent describes, but with the tragedy of life. The reader sees the battle, not from afar, but from the inside. He hears the laboured breathing of the wearied soldiers, sees the colour rising and falling in their cheeks, and feels at heart as they themselves did in this first act in the tremendous drama which so many people talk about and so few understand. Two days seem but a brief space, even in the short life of man, but they suflice to turn the hero of this tale from a wavering, terror-stricken rustic into a soldier; and at the end of those two days of marching and counter-marching, of charge and retreat, of sickening apprehension and sudden exultation, he has shown himself entitled to carry henceforth the red badge of courage. A book like this, with its vivid picture of the realities of war, and of the way in which the heroic strife affects the individual combatants, is more likely to cool the blood of the Jingo, on whichever side of the Atlantic he may be found, than a hundred sermons or tracts from the Peace Society; for it helps to bring home to the mind the fact that in the last resort it is not somebody else, but one’s own self, that must enter into the fight, to be bruised and beaten and slain, or else to maim and slay others, in furious disregard of all the precepts which the generations have handed down, and of the very instincts by which, in ordinary days, our actions are naturally controlled. As a work of art, “The Red Badge of Courage” deserves high praise. As a moral lesson that mankind still needs, the praise it deserves is higher still.

Harold Frederic. “Stephen Crane’s Triumph.” New York Times, January 26, 1896, p. 22 Who in London knows about Stephen Crane? The question is one of genuine interest here. It happens, annoyingly enough, that the one publishing person who might throw some light on the answer is for the moment absent from town. Other sources yield only the meagre information that the name is believed to be a real, and not an assumed, one, and that its owner is understood to be a very young man, indeed. That he is an American, or, at least, learned to read and write in America, is obvious enough. The mere presence in his vocabulary of the verb “loan” would settle that, if the proof were not otherwise blazoned on every page of his extraordinary book. For this mysteriously unknown youth has really written an extraordinary book. The Red Badge of Courage appeared a couple of months ago, unheralded and unnoticed, in a series which, under the distinctive label of “Pioneer,” is popularly supposed to present fiction more or less after the order of The Green Carnation, which was also of that lot. The first one who mentioned in my hearing that this Red Badge was well worth reading happened to be a person whose literary admirations serve me generally as warnings what to avoid, and I remembered the title languidly from that standpoint of selfprotection. A little later others began to speak of it. All at once, every bookish person had it at his tongue’s end. It was clearly a book to read, and I read it. Even 47

as I did so, reviews burst forth in a dozen different quarters, hailing it as extraordinary. Some were naturally more excited and voluble than others, but all the critics showed, and continue to show, their sense of being in the presence of something not like other things. George Wyndham, M. P., has already written of it in The New Review as “a remarkable book.” Other magazine editors have articles about it in preparation, and it is evident that for the next few months it is to be more talked about than anything else in current literature. It seems almost equally certain that it will be kept alive, as one of the deathless books which must be read by everybody who desires to be, or to seem, a connoisseur of modern fiction. If there were in existence any books of a similar character, one could start confidently by saying that it was the best of its kind. But it has no fellows. It is a book outside of all classification. So unlike anything else is it that the temptation rises to deny that it is a book at all. When one searches for comparisons, they can only be found by culling out selected portions from the trunks of masterpieces, and considering these detached fragments, one by one, with reference to the Red Badge, which is itself a fragment, and yet is complete. Thus one lifts the best battle pictures from Tolstoi’s great War and Peace, from Balzac’s Chouans, from Hugo’s Les Mis´erables, and the forest fight in “93,” from Prosper M´erim´ee’s assault of the redoubt, from Zola’s La ˆ D´ebacle and Attack on the Mill, (it is strange enough that equivalents in the literature of our own language do not suggest themselves) and studies them side by side with this tremendously effective battle painting by the unknown youngster. Positively they are cold and ineffectual beside it. The praise may sound exaggerated, but really it is inadequate. These renowned battle descriptions of the big men are made

to seem all wrong. The Red Badge impels the feeling that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before. In construction the book is as original as in its unique grasp of a new grouping of old materials. All the historic and prescribed machinery of the romance is thrust aside. One barely knows the name of the hero; it is only dimly sketched in that he was a farm boy and had a mother when he enlisted. These facts recur to him once or twice, they play no larger part in the reader’s mind. Only two other characters are mentioned by name—Jim Conklin and Wilson; more often even they are spoken of as the tall soldier and the loud soldier. Not a word is expended on telling where they come from, or who they are. They pass across the picture, or shift from one posture to another in its moving composition, with the impersonality of one’s chance fellow-passengers in a railroad car. There is a lieutenant who swears new oaths all the while, another officer with a red beard, and two or three still vaguer figures, revealed here and there through the smoke. We do not know, or seek to know, their names, or anything about them except what, staring through the eyes of Henry Fleming, we are permitted to see. The regiment itself, the refugees from other regiments in the crowded flight, and the enemy on the other side of the fence, are differentiated only as they wear blue or gray. We never get their color out of our mind’s eye. This exhausts the dramatis personae of the book, and yet it is more vehemently alive and heaving with dramatic human action than any other book of our time. The people are all strangers to us, but the sight of them stirs the profoundest emotions of interest in our breasts. What they do appeals as vividly to our consciousness as if we had known them all our life. The central idea of the book is of less importance than the magnificent graft of 48

externals upon it. We begin with the young raw recruit, hearing that at last his regiment is going to see some fighting, and brooding over the problem of his own behavior under fire. We follow his perturbed meditations through thirty pages, which cover a week or so of this menace of action. Then suddenly, with one gray morning, the ordeal breaks abruptly over the youngster’s head. We go with him, so close that he is never out of sight, for two terribly crowded days, and then the book is at an end. This cross-section of his experience is made a part of our own. We see with his eyes, think with his mind, quail or thrill with his nerves. He strives to argue himself into the conventional soldier’s bravery; he runs ingloriously away; he excuses, defends, and abhors himself in turn; he tremblingly yields to the sinister fascination of creeping near the battle; he basely allows his comrades to ascribe to heroism the wound he received in the frenzied “sauve qui peut” of the fight, he gets at last the fire of combat in his veins, and blindly rushing in deports himself with such hardy and temerarious valor that even the Colonel notes him, and admits that he is a “jimhickey.” These sequent processes, observed with relentless minutiae, are so powerfully and speakingly portrayed that they seem the veritable actions of our own minds. To produce the effect is a notable triumph, but it is commonplace by comparison with the other triumph of making us realize what Henry saw and heard as well as what he felt. The value of the former feat has the limitations of the individual. No two people are absolutely alike; any other young farm boy would have passed through the trial with something different somewhere. Where Henry fluttered, he might have been obtuse; neither the early panic nor the later irrational ferocity would necessarily have been just the same. But the picture of the trial itself

seems to me never to have been painted as well before. Oddly enough, The Saturday Review and some other of the commentators take it for granted that the writer of the Red Badge must have seen real warfare. “The extremely vivid touches of detail convince us,” says The Review, “that he has had personal experience of the scenes he depicts. Certainly, if his book were altogether a work of imagination, unbased on personal experience, his realism would be nothing short of a miracle.” This may strike the reader who has not thought much about it as reasonable, but I believe it to be wholly fallacious. Some years ago I had before me the task of writing some battle chapters in a book I was at work upon. The novel naturally led up to the climax of a battle, and I was excusably anxious that when I finally got to this battle, I should be as fit to handle it as it was possible to make myself. A very considerable literature existed about the actual struggle, which was the Revolutionary battle of Oriskany, fought only a few miles from where I was born. This literature was in part the narratives of survivors of the fight, in part imaginative accounts based on these by later writers. I found to my surprise that the people who were really in the fight gave one much less of an idea of a desperate forest combat than did those who pictured it in fancy. Of course, here it might be that the veterans were inferior in powers of narration to the professional writer. Then I extended the test to writers themselves. I compared the best accounts of Franco–German battles, written for the London newspapers by trained correspondents of distinction who were on the spot, with the choicest imaginative work of novelists, some of them mentioned above, who had never seen a gun fired in anger. There was literally no comparison between the two. The line between 49

journalism and literature obtruded itself steadily. Nor were cases lacking in which some of these war correspondents had in other departments of work showed themselves capable of true literature. I have the instance of David Christie Murray in mind. He saw some of the stiffest fighting that was done in his time, and that, too, at an early stage of his career, but he never tried to put a great battle chapter into one of his subsequent novels, and if he had I don’t believe it would have been great. Our own writers of the elder generation illustrate this same truth. Gen. Lew Wallace, Judge Tourg´ee, Dr. Weir Mitchell, and numbers of others saw tremendous struggles on the battlefield, but to put the reality into type baffles them. The four huge volumes of The Century’s Battles and Leaders of the Civil War are written almost exclusively by men who took an active part in the war, and many of them were in addition men of high education and considerable literary talent, but there is not a really moving story of a fight in the whole work. When Warren Lee Goss began his Personal Recollections of a Private, his study of the enlistment, the early marching and drilling, and the new experiences of camp life was so piquant and fresh that I grew quite excited in anticipation. But when he came to the fighting, he fell flat. The same may be said, with more reservations, about the first parts of Judge Tourg´ee’s more recent Story of a Thousand. It seems as if the actual sight of a battle has some dynamic quality in it which overwhelms and crushes the literary faculty in the observer. At best, he gives us a conventional account of what happened; but on analysis you find that this is not what he really saw, but what all his reading has taught him that he must have seen. In the same way battle painters depict horses in motion, not as they actually move, but as it has been agreed by numberless generations of draughtsmen to

say that they move. At last, along comes a Muybridge, with his instantaneous camera, and shows that the real motion is entirely different. It is this effect of a photographic revelation which startles and fascinates one in The Red Badge of Courage. The product is breathlessly interesting, but still more so is the suggestion behind it that a novel force has been disclosed, which may do all sorts of other remarkable things. Prophecy is known of old as a tricky and thankless hag, but all the same I cannot close my ears to her hint that a young man who can write such a first book as that will make us all sit up in good time.

“Book Notices.” Bachelor of Arts 2 (March 1896), pp. 570–572 The university does one thing for the student—it teaches him to admire the best classic forms. It teaches him to avoid in literary effort the sin of obscurity, the sin of trickery, the sin of insincerity, the sin of audacity. Stephen Crane, had he had the benefit of college training would not have committed all these sins in the volume of “lines” before us. As we point out to the person to whom these effusions are dedicated, in regard to his Rose, it is not creditable in an author to flout what is best; it is rather a sign of ignorance. And in ignorance of what is best in life, in poetry or art, Mr. Crane and Mr. Garland come forward to be heard. And, because they say they have found something new, many critics have heaped praise where pity should have been bestowed. Mr. Crane’s “lines” have no especial originality in their 50

meaning, but have an originality of printed form—that is all. A vast effort is made to startle, to compel attention to some very old pessimisms. Take, for example, these lines, p. 33; Mr. Crane prints them in small capitals, thus:

his own and no one else’s! Here the desert is the world; the naked creature is man; his heart is his life. Holding it in his hands means, he may do what he wishes with his life. There is nothing true here which is new, and nothing new which is not false. When we consider his Red Badge of Courage, we concede that Stephen Crane rises at times, almost to the height of genius. He is himself. He is not attitudinizing now, any more than he was in Maggie. He is giving us solidly-drawn, strong, truthful detail of a two days’ battle of the Civil War, from the subjective standpoint of a common soldier. It is new, original— tremendous. We look into the mind of a volunteer of twenty in his first camp life and first battle. Henry Fleming is a country farm boy, “‘Ma, I’m enlisted’ he said diffidently. There was a short silence. ‘The Lord’s will be done, Henry,’ she had finally replied, and had then continued to milk the brindle cow.” Coming from such homely up-country (N. Y. State) stock, the reader is continually asking, “How can this illiterate fellow whose previous life had let him from the house to the barn, to the fields, to the barn, to the house—how can he be credited with such perception, such poet-like fancies, such mental perturbation?” Such a youth is all action. Mr. Crane makes him sensitive, self-communing, full of abstraction, deep musing, contemplative. But be the boy who and what he was at home, in the army life he is a Thoreau shouldering a musket. And what pictures of battle he sees! They must be true because they are all so carefully and minutely drawn. We have the minuteness of the modern French landscapists—a bit of field, a bit of woods, the leaves fluttering down cut by stray bullets. “The white-topped wagons strained and stumbled in their exertions like fat sheep.” “Over some foliage they could see the roof of a house.” “The air was always

Two or three angels Came near to the earth; They saw a fat church, Little black streams of people Came and went in continually, And the angels were puzzled To know why the people went thus, And why they stayed so long within. The sneer that rich churches are useless, that heaven is not attained by means of them, that rituals are nonsense, is not new. The day for such misconception of the church is past, however. The fact that the spiritual and practical sides of religion are interwoven is beginning to be understood. Mr. Crane is a hater of the Mosaic God of Anger. It is probable, also, that he has the narrow intolerance of a Philistine for all that the church stands for. In the Red Badge, etc., God only appears in his pages in an oath, never in a prayer or in a religious use. “Where there is no vision the people perish.” It seems to us that this boorish attitude toward God and the church is one of extreme ignorance of youth and lack of culture, to say the least. Mr. Crane is but twentyfour. Here is another obscurity: “In the desert I saw a creature naked, bestial, who, squatting upon the ground, held his heart in his hands and ate of it.” I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is—bitter—bitter,” he answered. “But I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.” That is to say, the animal man eats his own life up in his grovelling nakedness. Sensuality is always bitter and unhappy. Why does he like it? Because his life pleasures and sorrows are 51

of praise in the English papers has been very extravagant, but it is noticeable that so far, at least, the American papers have said very little about the merits or demerits of the book itself. They simply allude to the noise made over it abroad, and therefore treat its author as a coming factor in our literature. Even The Dial’s very acute and usually very discerning critic of contemporary fiction (Mr. Payne) treats the book and the author (in your issue of Feb. 1) in very much this way—that is, as a book and an author to be reckoned with, not because of any good which he himself finds in them, but because they have been so much talked about. The book has very recently been reprinted in America, and would seem to be an American book, on an American theme, and by an American author, yet originally issued in England. If it is really an American production one must suppose it to have been promptly and properly rejected by any American publishers to whom it may have been submitted, and afterward more naturally taken up by an English publisher. It is only too well known that English writers have had a very low opinion of American soldiers, and have always, as a rule, assumed to ridicule them. “Blackwood’s Magazine” is quoted by a recent writer as saying during the War: “We cannot even pretend to keep our countenance when the exploits of the Grand Army of the Potomac are filling all Europe with inextinguishable laughter,” and adds “we know not whether to pity most the officers who lead such men, or the men who are led by such officers” (Vol. 90, pp. 395–6). And again, in January, 1862: “Englishmen are unable to see anything peculiarly tragical in the fact that half a million of men have been brought together in arms to hurl big words at each other across a river” (Vol. 91, p. 118). Again, in April, 1862, “Blackwood” tells us that

occupied by a blaring.” “The bugles called to each other like brazen gamecocks.” Mr. Crane has the Shakespearean and Meredithian quickness for metaphor, and as he lives in a time which calls for startling adventure, he combines in this book the man of courage and adventure with the study of mental action—a feat sometimes attempted by the great successor of Scott, who lies buried in the far islands of the Pacific, and attempted sometimes without the splendid success of this living author. We can only beg Mr. Crane to give us similar pictures of life to the Red Badge of Courage. Let him describe a miner’s perils, or a seaman’s mental attitude toward a hurricane, or a railway engineer’s story of a fearful accident, or Siberian prisoners, or, finally, a poor author’s experience with a publisher—but let him not burlesque his talent in the conceits of the Black Riders, and decadent mysticism. He has too great a gift to be a degenerate or a Philistine.

A[lexander] C. McClurg. “The Red Badge of Hysteria.” Dial 20 (April 16, 1896), pp. 227–228 Must we come to judge of books only by what the newspapers have said of them, and must we abandon all the old standards of criticism? Can a book and an author, utterly without merit, be puffed into success by entirely undeserved praise, even if that praise come from English periodicals? One must ask these questions after he has been seduced into reading a book recently reprinted in this country entitled “The Red Badge of Courage, an Episode of the American Civil War.” The chorus 52

Americans “do not demand our respect because of their achievements in art, or in literature, or in science, or philosophy. They can make no pretence to the no less real, though less beneficent, reputation of having proved themselves a great military power” (Vol. 91, p. 534). And in October, 1861, “Blackwood” said exultantly: “The venerable Lincoln, the respectable Seward, the raving editors, the gibbering mob, and the swift-footed warriors of Bull’s Run, are no malicious tricks of fortune, played off on an unwary nation, but are all of them the legitimate offspring of the Great Republic,” and is “glad that the end of the Union seems more likely to be ridiculous than terrible” (Vol. 90, p. 396). We all know with what bitterness and spitefulness the “Saturday Review” always treats Americans; and with what special vindictiveness it reviews any book upon our late struggle written from the Northern standpoint. And so it is with all British periodicals and all British writers. They are so puffed up with vain-glory over their own soldiers who seldom meet men of their own strength, but are used in every part of the world for attacking and butchering defenseless savages, who happen to possess some property that Englishmen covet, that they cannot believe that there can be among any peoples welldisciplined soldiers as gallant and courageous as their own. Under such circumstances we cannot doubt that “The Red Badge of Courage” would be just such a book as the English would grow enthusiastic over, and we cannot wonder that the redoubtable “Saturday Review” greeted it with the highest encomiums, and declared it the actual experiences of a veteran of our War, when it was really the vain imaginings of a young man born long since that war, a piece of intended realism based entirely on unreality. The book is a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies.

The hero of the book (if such he can be called—“the youth” the author styles him) is an ignorant and stupid country lad, who, without a spark of patriotic feeling, or even of soldierly ambition, has enlisted in the army from no definite motive that the reader can discover, unless it be because other boys are doing so; and the whole book, in which there is absolutely no story, is occupied with giving what are supposed to be his emotions and his actions in the first two days of battle. His poor weak intellect, if indeed he has any, seems to be at once and entirely overthrown by the din and movement of the field, and he acts throughout like a madman. Under the influence of mere excitement, for he does not even appear to be frightened, he first rushes madly to the rear in a crazy panic, and afterward plunges forward to the rescue of the colors under exactly the same influences. In neither case has reason or any intelligent motive any influence on his action. He is throughout an idiot or a maniac, and betrays no trace of the reasoning being. No thrill of patriotic devotion to cause or country ever moves his breast, and not even an emotion of manly courage. Even a wound which he finally gets comes from a comrade who strikes him on the head with his musket to get rid of him; and this is the only “Red Badge of Courage” (!) which we discover in the book. A number of other characters come in to fill out the two hundred and thirty-three pages of the book,—such as “the loud soldier,” “the tall soldier,” “the tattered soldier,” etc., but not one of them betrays any more sense, self-possession, or courage than does “the youth.” On the field all is chaos and confusion. “The young lieutenant,” “the mounted officer,” even “the general,” are all utterly demented beings, raving and talking alike in an unintelligible and hitherto unheard-of jargon, rushing about in a very delirium of madness. 53

No intelligent orders are given; no intelligent movements are made. There is no evidence of drill, none of discipline. There is a constant, senseless, and profane babbling going on, such as one could hear nowhere but in a madhouse. Nowhere are seen the quiet, manly, self-respecting, and patriotic men, influenced by the highest sense of duty, who in reality fought our battles. It can be said most confidently that no soldier who fought in our recent War ever saw any approach to the battle scenes in this book—but what wonder? We are told that it is the work of a young man of twenty-three or twentyfour years of age, and so of course must be a mere work of diseased imagination. And yet it constantly strains after socalled realism. The result is a mere riot of words. Although its burlesques and caricatures are quite enough to dismiss it from attention, it is worth while to give some samples of its diction to show that there is in it an entire lack of any literary quality. Notice the violent straining after effect in the mere unusual association of words, in the forced and distorted use of adjectives. Notice, too, the absurd similes, and even the bad grammar. Startling sentences are so frequent they might be quoted indefinitely; but here are a few:

“Another [mounted officer] was galloping about bawling. His hat was gone, and his clothes were awry. He resembled a man who has come from bed to go to a fire. The hoofs of his horse often threatened the heads of the running men, but they scampered with singular fortune. In this rush they were apparently all deaf and blind. They heeded not the largest and longest of oaths which were thrown at them from all directions” (p. 51). “The battle reflection that shone for an instant in the faces on the mad current made the youth feel that forceful hands from heaven would not have been able to have held him in place if he could have got intelligent control of his legs” (p. 52). “A small thrillful boy” (p. 53). “The cartridge-boxes were pulled around into various positions, and adjusted with great care. It was as if seven hundred new bonnets were being tried on” (p. 53). “Buried in the smoke of many rifles, his anger was directed not so much against the men whom he knew were rushing toward him as against the swishing battle phantoms which were choking him, stuffing their smoke robes down his parched throat” (p. 57). “There was a blare of heated rage” (p. 58). “The officers at their intervals rearward . . . were bobbing to and fro roaring directions. The dimensions of their howls were extraordinary” (p. 59). “To the youth it was like an onslaught of redoubtable dragons. He became like the man who lost his legs at the approach of the red and green monster. He waited in a sort of horrified, listening attitude. He seemed to

“A brigade ahead of them and on the right went into action with a rending roar. It was as if it had exploded” (p. 45). “The lieutenant of the youth’s company was shot in the hand. He began to swear so wondrously that a nervous laugh went along the regimental line. The officer’s profanity sounded conventional. It relieved the tightened senses of the new men. It was as if he had hit his fingers with a tack hammer at home” (p. 49). 54

shut his eyes, and wait to be gobbled” (p. 68). “A crimson roar came from a distance” (p. 82). “With the courageous words of the artillery and the spiteful sentences of the musketry mingled red cheers” (p. 85). “The youth had reached an anguish when the sobs scorched him” (p. 94). “They were ever up-raising the ghost of shame on the stick of their curiosity” (p. 104). “The new silence of his wound made much worryment” (p. 124). “The distance was splintering and blaring with the noise of fighting” (p. 139). “ . . . began to mutter softly in black curses” (p. 201). “His corpse would be for those eyes a great and salt reproach” (p. 215).

Charles Dudley Warner. “Editor’s Study.” Harper’s Magazine 92 (May 1896), pp. 961–962 Is literature becoming a mere scheme of color? We do not hear much now of “local color”; that has rather gone out; and there seems to be a belief that you can somehow dye the language and make it more expressive to the reading eye. “Local color” had a fine run while it lasted, and it seemed as easy of accomplishment as one of Rembrandt’s pictures. You could go and get it, sometimes buy it in the shops, and put it on like pigment. The process was, unfortunately, not patented, and so much color was produced that the market broke down. It was an external affair, and its use was supposed to serve the gospel of Realism. Given a theme or a motive for a story or sketch, the problem was how to work it out so that it would appear native and Real. The author had only to go to the “locality” that he intended to attack and immortalize, or write to a friend there residing, in order to pick up the style of profanity there current, the dialect, if any existed; if not, to work up one from slovenly and ungrammatical speech, procure some “views” of scenery and of costume, strike the kind of landscape necessary to the atmosphere of the story—endless prairie, iridescent desert, weird passes, smiling valleys, though smiling valleys were not in much request—and the thing was done. As soon as the reader saw the “local color” thus laid on he knew that the story was a real story of real life. He was deceived by the striking appearance, and it was some time before he began to suspect that the artist had begun to put on color before he knew how to draw.

It is extraordinary that even a prejudiced animus could have led English writers to lavish extravagant praise on such a book; it is still more extraordinary that an attempt should be made to foist it upon the long-suffering American public, and to push it into popularity here. Respect for our own people should have prevented its issue in this country. There may have been a moderate number of men in our service who felt and acted in battle like those in this book; but of such deserters were made. They did not stay when they could get away: why should they? The army was no healthy place for them, and they had no reason to stay; there was no moral motive. After they had deserted, however, they remained “loud soldiers,” energetic, and blatant,— and they are possibly now enjoying good pensions. It must have been some of these fellows who got the ear of Mr. Crane and told him how they felt and acted in battle. 55

Now we never thought of “local color” in the writing of the masters, in Shakespeare, or Scott, or Tolstoi, or Turgenieff, or Thackeray, or Cervantes. All they did was vividly a representation of human life, and was unconsciously stamped with the character of the country, the race, the scenery even, which was not daubed on the picture, or worked in with design, but was part of the texture, the very woof and warp of their literature. No man studied particulars more carefully, no man was more exacting in all the details of the environment of his characters, than Balzac. But he did his work before the invention of “local color” as a kind of commodity. But color is essential, and high color attracts even the uneducated taste. Some writers are putting it on their pages in blotches, simply for effect upon the eye. The experiment is an interesting one. Some years ago a volume of sketches and poems was published in Louisville, printed in inks of many colors—shades to match the sentiment of the effusions. The fashion did not spread; and now the color scheme is tried in a more subtle form—that is, by suggestions of real colors in words. We read of an ethical motive as “a yellow light thrown upon the color of his ambitions”; in the army a soldier is part of “a vast blue demonstration”; we read of “liquid stillness” and “red rage,” a “black procession” of oaths, the “red sickness of battle,” and so on, and so on. The attempt in the book from which these expressions are taken is to make every page blaze with color, in order to affect the mind through the eye. It is all very interesting. Every page is painted, perhaps I should say saturated, with this intensity of color. Undeniably the reader is strongly affected by it—though the effect is weakened in time. The natural eye cannot stand a constant glare of brilliant light, and the mind soon wearies of the quality that has come to be called “intensity” in literature. Great literature

is always calm, and produces its effects by less apparent effort. This is of course a truism, but at the same time the reader does love warmth and color and the occasional show of vivid pictures on the printed page. The story to which I have referred is in many respects a remarkable one. It is the description of the feeling and experience of a raw soldier lad in a couple of days of battle, and it has gained foreign approval as one of the most real pictures of war ever made, one that could only have been drawn from personal experience. I believe, in fact, that it is purely the work of imagination, and it might not have been written but for Tolstoi’s Sevastopol. And yet it is quite original in its manner. I have been curious to hear what the “Realists” would say about it. The conversations are plainly vernacular, and there is no attempt to idealize the persons of the vivid drama. There is a studied commonplaceness about the talk and the characters, which seems nature itself. But I have talked with many soldiers of what they actually saw and felt in great battles, and I never got from any of them such a literary appreciation of a battle as this, nothing, in fact, half so interesting. I would not dare to say, from internal evidence, that this young soldier was “not in it,” but any man who could see these pictures, have these sensations, and go through this mental and moral struggle in such circumstances ought not to be food for powder. He is needed in the New York drama. I do not wish to be misunderstood. I liked the book very much. I was carried along by its intensity, and felt at the end as if I had experienced a most exciting and melodramatic dream, which I could not shake off when waking. I do not know how much of this effect was due to the scheme of color. It is almost a poem— quite, except in form. It is real, in a way. But what worried me was the thought of the verdict of the Realists. Would they not call it lurid realism? 56

and cares. It is not strange nor inconceivable, that in a land so torn by discord and battle as has been this union of ours; so haunted with memories of the many who went and never came back, who loved and fought, struggled and fell, and now lie in lone, uncared for graves, that there should rise a heart made up of the memories and bitterness of the past, and throbbing with a deep, innate sentiment for all the old woes and old terrors. It is not strange, but rather to be expected, and Stephen Crane, the first, is not necessarily the greatest nor last, for the mighty woes of the rebellion have not yet dwindled into a song nor a story, either. Crane is brilliant, The Red Badge of Courage, a proud effort, but it is only one novel after all, and this earth has had its battles by scores and multi-scores, while the human heart has been wrung as only as the dead know or could tell, were they permitted to live again and speak.

“Edward Al” [Theodore Dreiser]. “Literary Notes.” Ev’ry Month 2 (May 1896), pp. 11–12 But if literary failures are always dreary and disagreeable to contemplate, all the more pleasant is it to chronicle true literary success. There is no joy to be gained by pointing out the weak spots of writers who aspire to literary distinction. Sometimes, having been duped by some means or other into reading a miserable makeshift novel the spirit revolts, and one feels like saying, bitterly, truthful things, but that is only for the moment. None of the American critics are very severe, and it would surprise many to know how many really bad novels are allowed to pass with a sort of half praise, when in all justice they should have been left unnoticed or dismissed with crisp and concise contempt. However, dismissing all this halfwriting to the winds, it is pleasant to think of Stephen Crane and his splendid war story, The Red Badge of Courage. Here is a novelist for you, if you want an American; strong, incisive, bitter and brilliant, who has the genius which perceives and appreciates (without physical experience to any great extent) and which expresses sentiments that are nothing, if not the whisperings of an oversoul. He never could have witnessed personally what he writes of, and his heart is too young, too free and enthusiastic, to have ever raged with such wondrous fear and frantic terror as swells in the heart of his hero. This is not necessarily paradoxical for some hearts seem to grow out of graves of the anguished dead, and to throb with all the griefs and passions that went to the soil with the body when it ceased its toil

D. Appleton & Company [Ripley Hitchcock]. “‘The Red Badge of Courage’—A Correction.” Dial 20 (May 1, 1896), p. 263 It is with a certain hesitation that we write you to correct the author of a somewhat bitter letter published in your journal for April 16, for we recognize the signature as that of a gallant soldier, as well as a student of literature. But as the author of that letter labors under several misapprehensions, we think that he will be glad to learn the facts. “The Red Badge of Courage” was read and accepted by us in December, 1894, 57

and, in book form, it was first published in this country in October, 1895. Although the book was copyrighted in England at the same time, it was not formally published there for two months. Meantime the American journals had reviewed it and had begun an almost universal chorus of eulogy. October 19, 1895, the “New York Times” devoted a column and a half to a strong review of “this remarkable book.” On October 13, the “Philadelphia Press” compared Mr. Crane and Bret Harte, not to the disadvantage of the former. On October 26, the “New York Mail and Express,” in one of several notices, said, “The author has more than talent—there is genius in the book.” On October 26, the “Boston Transcript,” in speaking of “this tremendous grasping of the glory and carnage of war,” added at the close of a long and enthusiastic review, “The book forces upon the reader the conviction of what fighting really means.” Other favorable reviews appeared in October issues of the following American newspapers: “New York Herald,” “Brooklyn Eagle,” “Cleveland World,” “St. Paul Pioneer Press,” “Boston Daily Advertiser,” “New York World,” “St. Paul Globe,” “New York Commercial Advertiser,” “Kansas City Journal,” “Chicago Evening Post,” “Boston Courier,” “Cleveland Plain Dealer,” “Boston Beacon,” “Hartford Times,” “Sioux City Times,” “New Haven Leader,” and “Minneapolis Journal,” and to these names, taken almost at random, we might add many others. These journals reviewed “The Red Badge” favorably in October, and others, including weeklies like “The Critic” and “The Outlook,” followed in November with emphatic recognition of the strength and high talent shown in the book. It was not until the end of November, two months after publication here,

that the first reviews appeared in England. By that time American reviewers from Maine to California had “greeted” the book with the highest “encomiums.” The English “encomiums” became specially marked in late December, January, and February. We state these facts in view of your correspondent’s remarks that “So far, at least, the American papers have said very little about the merits or demerits of the book,” and, “The book has very recently been reprinted in America,” and, “Respect for our own people should have prevented its issue in this country.” “Our country” was the first to recognize Mr. Crane’s genius, and our people have read his book so eagerly that it continues to be the most popular work of fiction in the market, and it has been the one most talked of and written about since October last. A glance at the back of the “Red Badge” title-page would have shown that the book could not have been “first published” in England and “reprinted” here, while the literary departments of journals throughout our country, and the opinions of American men of letters like Mr. Howells and Mr. Hamlin Garland, have proved, happily, that Americans are ready to recognize American talent, and that, pace your correspondent, a prophet is not without honor even in his own country. As to other points, against the opinion of the gallant veteran who criticizes the book might be put the opinions of other veterans who have found only words of praise.

58

this young writer was an intense desire to insult America. It sounds oddly, does n’t it? But he has chapter and verse to prove it. He comes across some cruel, senseless gibes at the Union soldiers in “Blackwood’s Magazine.” They are over thirty years old, and to-day, from one end of England to the other, you could not find a man to express anything but the bitterest shame of them. But what of that? “There,” exclaims “A. C. McC.” exultantly, “that is why these English are praising Stephen Crane. The hero of his book is a coward. Thirty years ago an ignorant British magazine talked of ‘the swift-footed warriors of Bull’s Run.’ Don’t you see the connection? It is all a deep-laid plot to throw mud at American soldiers.” To be sure! And so when I sat, pipe in mouth, a peaceable, jaded reviewer, happy to have come across a book above the dull dead level, my mind was really full of schemes for avenging Bunker’s Hill! Your correspondent’s letter is a compound of misjudged patriotism and bad criticism. Take only these two sentences. “The book,” he says, “is a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies.” “Respect for our own people should have prevented its issue in this country.” A curious attitude to take up towards a book, unworthy of an American, as it seems to me, and peculiarly unworthy of an American who, as I hear, fought through the war with distinction. I will say at once that no such idea ever presented itself to a single Englishman into whose hands the book fell. The most insignificant thing about the book, the one point which every sensible reviewer would at once dismiss from his mind as quite immaterial, is the fact that the hero fought for the North. If he had been an Englishman in the ditches before Sebastopol, or a Frenchman at Sedan, the book would have been just as remarkable, and the praise of the English journals no less warm. But to

Sydney Brooks. “Mr. Stephen Crane and his Critics.” Dial 20 (May 16, 1896), 297–298 It really requires some courage to confess it, but I was one of the first English reviewers to whose lot fell the reviewing of Mr. Stephen Crane’s book, “The Red Badge of Courage.” Worse still—a quite damning fact, I fear—I even ventured to praise it. Mr. Crane I had never heard of when his book came to me in the ordinary course of business, but I read the volume with the greatest interest; I thought it in many ways a remarkable performance, and I did my best to give reasons for the faith that was in me. But apparently it is a subtle insult for an Englishman to praise an American book. I used to think that a good book was a good book the whole world over. It is only since landing in this country and picking up The Dial of April 16 that I have learned better. Your correspondent, “A. C. McC.,” is my authority. Now, I am truly sorry that any criticisms of mine or of my brother reviewers in London should have so annoyed your correspondent, for he evidently was very much annoyed. He came out on the warpath, arrested Mr. Crane as a literary spy, court-martialled him, and shot the poor fellow off-hand. This book, says “A. C. McC.” in effect, cannot be a good one for Americans to read because the English have praised it. He puts the whole thing in a nutshell, you see. This English praise, he is convinced, is a Grecian gift. I personally thought I was merely pointing out the merits of what seemed to me a book that deserved some notice. But he saw the ambush we English reviewers were laying. Deep under our affected enthusiasm for 59

Badge of Courage,” the prevailing argument used in its favor has, both here and abroad, almost invariably been founded on the text of the story’s surpassing originality. Never was there so vivid a written dissection of the inside of a man in battle, say the critics. We are told that Tolstoi, Zola and, in another line, Verestchagin, are outdone by the precocious prot´eg´e of the Philistines. The curious part about all of this is that it is not so. That not a single critic in America should, in referring to the “Red Badge,” have remembered Mr. Ambrose Bierce’s “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians,” and seen that Mr. Crane has merely done crudely what Mr. Bierce did most admirably, is enough to make one wonder whether the critics really read at all, or whether they merely listen to the conversation of people who think they do. The subject of both these books is practically the same. They describe, in prose of very differing quality, the sensations, the horror, the grewsomeness of the carnage of battle, the feelings of human beings exposed to it. It is admitted that Mr. Crane has imagination. Against that, however, Mr. Bierce has not only imagination, but also experience—for he fought through the civil war—and a mastery of one of the most perfect prose styles now being written in the English language. Throughout the Pacific Coast region this writer has long been known for his faultless and vigorous English, and in England his books have had some vogue with those finer appreciations outside of the vast crew of log-rollers. The Athenaeum, indeed, in reviewing Mr. Crane’s book, referred to Mr. Bierce as “a somewhat neglected author.” Neglected! Well, yes! When his book of stories was sent to the critics a few years ago the Christian Union referred to him as a “new writer.” Here is the contention: Mr. Crane simply has done worse and later what

“A. C. McC.” Mr. Crane’s one unforgivable crime lies in portraying a Northerner who fled from the field. Scarcely less wrong-headed is your correspondent’s criticism of the book as a piece of literature. He has missed the whole point of the tale. Part of Mr. Crane’s plan, I take it, was to give an idea of the impressions made on a raw recruit by the movements of a regiment in battle. Who can doubt that to a man who but yesterday was working at the plough the whole thing appears one intolerable confusion? As for the style in which the book is written, “A. C. McC.” finds in it “an entire lack of any literary quality.” Mr. Crane, once more, is an author “utterly without merit.” No half-measures with “A. C. McC.” Again quotations are at hand. Detached sentences are given, and anything disapproved of is italicised. The odd part about it is that most of the expressions thus crucified seem to me admirable and picturesque. That there is a youthful and occasionally reckless daring about some, is true enough. But on the whole I am prepared to back Mr. Crane’s sense of language against “A. C. McC.’s.” However, I am concerned little here with the merits of Mr. Crane’s work. The book can take care of itself quite well. I was surprised at “A. C. McC.’s” singular criticisms, and thought that a few words from “the other side” might be fairly called for.

Percival Pollard. “In the Matter of a Badge.” New York Journal, May 22, 1896, p. 4 In all the chorus of inflamed appreciation directed at Mr. Crane’s story of “The Red 60

Mr. Bierce did in the book already mentioned. I defy any Crane enthusiast to show a passage in the “Red Badge” so vividly and so truly descriptive of the wounded crawling over a battlefield as you may find in Bierce’s “Chickamauga.” If there is as searching an analysis of the sensations of a man enduring the most appalling of physical tortures to be found in Mr. Crane’s story as in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” I am willing to have it pointed out to me. Crudely, with the weapons of a schoolboy, Mr. Crane has attempted to do what has already been done almost flawlessly. Let us consider the matter of the English used. To those not acquainted with Mr. Bierce’s fictional style, it is enough to assert that since Poe no man has so combined the ability to make terror vivid, the mastery over the element of surprise, and an English that satisfies the theory of Flaubert, while losing nothing in its effect upon the unlettered reader. Against that I choose at random some sentences from “The Red Badge of Courage:”

from the positive, has been hailed as the most successful American writer of flction appearing on our horizon for years. If to pose with impossible poetry and write bad prose are to become the requisites for success, it should be easy of attainment. In fact, one can think of but few of the gentlemanly beings that preside over ribbon counters that might not so succeed. It is true that they might find it hard to gain the all-powerful aid of a large publishing firm, or the laughter—exciting admiration of East Aurora, but—there are doubtless others. As between the English of the two men, no comparison or argument is possible. In the matter of the effect gained, the truth mirrored, I hold that the San Francisco writer is first, Mr. Crane nowhere in particular. Another point. The fact that Mr. Crane has given the popular notion of courage a blow in the face has also been accounted to him for surpassing originality. Have the critics never heard of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man?” Mr. Barnum’s famous sentence seems still to hold good. And what is more, most critics seem determined to help that good thing along.

Set upon it was the hard and dark lines. (p. 222). There was no obvious questionings, nor figurings, nor diagrams. There was apparently no considered loopholes. (p. 219.) He departed laden. The youth went with his friend, feeling a desire to throw his heated body onto the stream. (p. 179.) Once he found himself into a swamp. (p. 79.) The majesty of he who dares. (p. 68.) He could not flee no more than a little finger can commit a revolution from the hand. (p. 56.)

“Recent Fiction.” Sunday-School Times 38 (June 6, 1896), pp. 367–368 A book that has been much exploited and praised recently is Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, a psychological study of the mind of a Union private in the war of the Rebellion, depicting his cowardice and subsequent valor in two days

In other words, this writer, who does not know singular from plural, the nominative from the genitive, the negative 61

of battle. Picturesqueness of description allied to a grim realism of dialogue and frequent imaginative strokes of a somber sort make this story striking. But the immaturity of the writer is exhibited in many sins of diction, in a self-conscious forcing of metaphors, and in not a few untruths to human nature in the situations delineated. The novel is rather a young performance of promise than the finished work of art for which it is being hailed in some quarters,—curiously enough, in England especially. Unquestionably, its daring as a study, by such a writer, of the feelings and resultant conduct of a young soldier under fire for the first time, and of the influence of his surroundings and companions, has much to do with its remarkable popularity. The writer had no experience of his own to guide him, yet he has interested many old soldiers in his analysis of a soldier’s feelings, although, again, others have taken issue with him at this point. The chief importance of the work is not as a literary performance, but as a psychological study. The opinions of masters in that field are important to a right judgment of its power.

been praised as a novel; we are inclined to praise it chiefly as an interesting and painful essay in pathology. The substance and “thesis” of the book, as the serious theatrical reviewers might say, consists in a presentation of the effects of physical danger, in the thousand forms which danger wears in modern warfare, upon the human nervous system. Nor is this all; the nervous system on which Mr. Crane chooses to illustrate his prelection is not a normal organism but an abnormal one,—morbid, hypersensitive, and overconscious. Mr. Crane notes the effect upon his patient of each day and hour and minute of pained experience with a precision which would do credit to Mr. Lauder Brunton or a brother specialist. We are inclined to believe that his notes are the exact production by an extraordinary memory of moments that have been lived; yet it is believed that Mr. Crane has seen nothing of actual fighting. As an achievement in imagination, in the art of placing one’s self in the situation of another— of an exceptional other in exceptional surroundings—Mr. Crane’s document can hardly be praised too much. It convinces; one feels that not otherwise than as he describes did such a man fall wounded and another lie in the grasp of corruption. But when we are asked to say that a specialised record of morbid introspection and an exact description of physical horrors is good art we demur; there is art in The Red Badge of Courage—an infelicitous title by the way—but the general effect which it leaves behind it is not artistic. But it is time to cease generalising. The scene, to come to detail, is laid in the American Civil War, and the hero is one Harry Fleming, who is spoken of invariably as “The Youth.” We may note here an adroitness of Mr. Crane’s. A narrative told in the first person must have been a limited affair. The Author desires primarily

“‘The Red Badge of Courage.’” Spectator 76 (June 27, 1896), p. 924 The Red Badge of Courage: an Episode of the American War is a remarkable book, and has been received by English reviewers with an unanimity of praise which we are in no wise desirous that its author— a young man, as it is understood—should have been deprived of. But we believe that Mr. Stephen Crane, the author in question, has received his good marks not exactly on right grounds. His episode has 62

to show us the nervous system under fire. But “The Youth,” left to tell his story, could have given us only his own blurred impression of the terrible background of war which Mr. Crane, in the interest of the truth, as he conceives it, desires to present to us. Accordingly, “The Youth’s” impressions are given in the third person, and he is presented to us totus, teres, atque rotundus, and against the lurid background of his adventures. It is a tactful arrangement. “The Youth” then enlisted in a Northern regiment, and has been some months a soldier when we are introduced to him. He has never met the enemy, and is weary of the tedium which has succeeded the first excitement of leaving home with his regiment. He has had time to fall back on his nerves, and the problem has begun to front him: will he or will he not run away?—

great trial like a babe, and the flesh over his heart seemed very thin. He seized time to look after him calculatingly. But he instantly saw that it would be impossible for him to escape from the regiment. It enclosed him. And there were iron laws of tradition and law on four sides. He was in a moving box. The recorded sensations which follow in the youth’s mind are far too many and too minute to pursue. But there are conspicuous moments which may be given as examples of many. The youth, it should be said, did run away at first, his regiment, it must be understood, retiring in disorder:— He wondered what they would remark when later he appeared in camp. His mind heard howls of derision. Their density would not enable them to understand his sharper point of view. He began to pity himself acutely. He was ill-used. He was trodden beneath the feet of an iron injustice. He had proceeded with wisdom and from the most righteous motives under Heaven’s blue, only to be frustrated by hateful circumstances.

A sufficient time before he would have allowed the problem to kick its heels at the outer portals of his mind, but now he felt compelled to give serious attention to it. A little panic-fear grew in his mind. As his imagination went forward to a fight, he saw hideous possibilities. He contemplated the lurking menaces of the future and failed in an effort to see himself standing stoutly in the midst of them. He recalled his visions of broken-bladed glory, but in the shadow of the impending tumult he suspected them to be impossible pictures.

In this key of self-pity and self-defence he stumbled on a dead man:— He was being looked at by a dead man, who was seated with his back against a column-like tree. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the grey skin ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip.

At last he finds himself face to face with danger, and Mr. Crane’s descriptions of approaching conflict are wonderfully right and picturesque:— The sun spread disclosing rays, and one by one, regiments burst into view like armed men first born of the earth. The youth perceived that the time had come. He was about to be measured. For a moment he felt in the face of his

Presently he came on a line of wounded men, the description of whom is the best thing in the book. This encounter was his salvation. He got back with them to the 63

reaction is not strange; and this has already taken, in some quarters, a form quite unjust and unfair. Certainly any one who spent so much as a week or two in camp, thirty years ago, must be struck with the extraordinary freshness and vigor of the book. No one except Tolstoi, within my knowledge, has brought out the daily life of war so well; it may be said of these sentences, in Emerson’s phrase, “Cut these and they bleed.” The breathlessness, the hurry, the confusion, the seeming aimlessness, as of a whole family of disturbed ants, running to and fro, yet somehow accomplishing something at last; all these aspects, which might seem the most elementary and the easiest to depict, are yet those surest to be omitted, not merely by the novelists, but by the regimental histories themselves. I know that when I first read Tolstoi’s War and Peace, The Cossacks and Sevastopol, it seemed as if all other socalled military novels must become at once superannuated and go out of print. All others assumed, in comparison, that bandbox aspect which may be seen in most military or naval pictures; as in the well known engraving of the death of Nelson, where the hero is sinking on the deck in perfect toilette, at the height of a bloody conflict, while every soldier or sailor is grouped around him, each in spotless garments and heroic attitude. It is this Tolstoi quality—the real tumult and tatters of the thing itself—which amazes the reader of Crane’s novel. Moreover, Tolstoi had been through it all in person; whereas this author is a youth of twenty-four, it seems, born since the very last shot fired in the Civil War. How did he hit upon his point of view? Yet this very point of view, strange to say, has been called a defect. Remember that he is telling the tale, not of a commanding general, but of a common soldier—a pawn in the game; a man who

body of the regiment, and the sight of his comrades, notably the heroic death of one of them, made a beginning of the end in his egoism. After a series of endeavours to play the man he succeeded, was the first in a rush by the men of his regiment, and won his way not to glory but to self-respect:— He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them. With this distinction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive, but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had to touch the great death to find that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man. A story like this is a mosaic. It is impossible to illustrate its effect by fragments. Tolstoi and another author, whose war stories are too little known, though it seems probable that Mr. Crane knows them—Mr. Ambrose Bierce to wit—have given us the aspect of war as war is seen by ordinary men; and Tolstoi, of course, with the epic touch of a great literary artist. But as a bundle of impressions received by a temperament especially sensitive, The Red Badge of Courage is a remarkable performance, and we believe without example.

T[homas] W[entworth] Higginson. “A Bit of War Photography.” Philistine 3 (July 1896), pp. 33–38 After the applause won by Mr. Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, a little 64

sees only what is going on immediately around him, and, for the most part, has the key to nothing beyond. This he himself knows well at the time. Afterward, perhaps, when the affair is discussed at the campfire, and his view compared with what others say, it begins to take shape, often mixed with all sorts of errors; and when it has reached the Grand Army Post and been talked over afterward for thirty years, the narrator has not a doubt of it all. It is now a perfectly ordered affair, a neat and well arranged game of chess, often with himself as a leading figure. That is the result of too much perspective. The wonder is that this young writer, who had no way of getting at it all except the gossip— printed or written—of these very old soldiers, should be able to go behind them all, and give an account of their life, not only more vivid than they themselves have ever given, but more accurate. It really seems a touch of that marvelous intuitive quality which for want of a better name we call genius. Now is it a correct criticism of the book to complain, as one writer has done, that it does not dwell studiously on the higher aspects of the war? Let the picture only be well drawn, and the moral will take care of itself; never fear. The book is not a patriotic tract, but a delineation; a cross section of the daily existence of the raw enlisted-man. In other respects it is reticent, because it is truthful. Does any one suppose that in the daily routine of the camp there was room for much fine talk about motives and results—that men were constantly appealing, like Carlyle’s Frenchman, “to posterity and the immortal Gods”? Fortunately or unfortunately, the Anglo Saxon is not built that way; he errs on the other side; habitually understates instead of overstating his emotions; and while he is making the most heroic sacrifices of his life, usually prefers to scold about rations or

grumble at orders. He is to be judged by results; not by what he says, which is often ungracious and unornamental, but by what he does. The very merit of this book is that in dealing with his men the author offers, within this general range, all the essential types of character—the man who boasts and the man who is humble—the man who thinks he may be frightened and is not, and the man who does not expect to be, but is. For his main character he selects a type to be found in every regiment— the young man who does not know himself, who first stumbles into cowardice, to his own amazement, and then is equally amazed at stumbling into courage; who begins with skulking, and ends by taking a flag. In Doyle’s Micah Clarke the old Roundhead soldier tells his grandchildren how he felt inclined to bob his head when he first heard bullets whistle, and adds “If any soldier ever told you that he did not, the first time that he was under fire, then that soldier is not a man to trust.” This is putting it too strongly, for some men are born more stolid, others more nervous; but the nervous man is quite as likely to have the firmer grain, and to come out the more heroic in the end. In my own limited experience, the only young officer whom I ever saw thoroughly and confessedly frightened, when first under fire, was the only one of his regiment who afterwards chose the regular army for his profession, and fought Indians for the rest of his life. As for The Red Badge of Courage, the test of the book is in the way it holds you. I only know that whenever I take it up I find myself reading it over and over, as I do Tolstoi’s Cossacks, and find it as hard to put down. None of Doyle’s or Weyman’s books bear re-reading, in the same way; you must wait till you have forgotten their plots. Even the slipshod grammar seems a part of the breathless life and action. 65

How much promise it gives, it is hard to say. Goethe says that as soon as a man has done one good thing, the world conspires against him to keep him from doing another. Mr. Crane has done one good thing, not to say two; but the conspiracy of admiration may yet be too much for him. It is earnestly to be hoped, at least, that he may have the wisdom to stay in his own country and resist the temptation to test his newly-found English reputation by migrating—an experiment by which Bret Harte has been visibly dwarfed and Henry James hopelessly diluted.

Checklist of Additional Reviews “Men, Women and Books.” New York Recorder, October 6, 1895, p. 26. “Literary Field.” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 13, 1895, part 2, p. 3. “A Picture of Battle That Almost Equals Tolstoi.” New York Press, October 13, 1895, part 5, p. 4. Philadelphia Press, October 13, 1895, p. 30. “Books of the Hour.” Saint Paul Daily Globe, October 20, 1895, p. 18. “The Red Badge of Courage.” Boston Evening Transcript, October 26, 1895, p. 7. “The Red Badge of Courage.” Boston Times, October 27, 1895. N[ancy] H. B[anks]. “The Novels of Two Journalists.” Bookman 2 (November 1895), pp. 217—220. “New Publications: Children’s Books of the Season.” Baltimore Sun, November 23, 1895, p. 7. “How a Hero was Made.” Sketch 12 (December 18, 1895), supplement, p. 4. “A Promising American Realist.” Munsey’s Magazine 14 (January 1896), pp. 503–504. National Observer 15 (January 11, 1896), p. 272. John D. Barry. “New York Letter.” Literary World 27 (January 11, 1896), p. 13. Sydney Brooks. “In the School of Battle: The Making of a Soldier.” Saturday Review 81 (January 11, 1896), pp. 44–45. William M. Payne. Dial 20 (February 1, 1896), p. 80. John Northern Hilliard. “The Hideousness of War: Stephen Crane

“Fiction: ‘The Nigger of The Narcissus.’” Speaker 17 (January 15, 1898), p. 83 “The Red Badge of Courage” has much to answer for. That remarkable feat of the imagination has inspired a whole school of descriptive writers of a new class, who aspire to make visible to us the inside of great scenes—battlefields, shipwrecks, moving incidents of every kind. Mr. Conrad, who has given us more than one remarkable study of Eastern life, has now followed in the footsteps of Mr. Stephen Crane, and in “The Nigger of The Narcissus” has painted for us a picture of sea-life as it is lived in storm and sunshine on a merchant-ship, which in its vividness, its emphasis, and its extraordinary fulness of detail, is a worthy pendant to the battlepicture presented to us in “The Red Badge of Courage.”

66

and The Red Badge.” Rochester Union and Advertiser, February 8, 1896, p. 2. Jeannette L. Gilder. New York World, February 23, 1896, p. 18. “Droch” [Robert Bridges]. “The Psychology of War.” Life 27 (March 5, 1896), pp. 176–177. John T. Roberts. “The Red Badge of Courage.” Syracuse University Forum 1 (March 10, 1896), pp. 272–274. “Two Historical Novels.” Graphic 53 (April 11, 1896), pp. 442, 444. J. L. Onderdonk. “A Red Badge of Bad English.” Dial 20 (May 1, 1896), pp. 263–264.

Paul Pry. “Bookland: Paul Pry Wanders at Sweet Will.” Birmingham State Herald, June 21, 1896, p. 15. Arthur George Sedgwick. Nation 63 (July 2, 1896), p. 15. E. St. Elmo Lewis. “Stephen Crane.” Book News 15 (September 1896), pp. 10–11. W. L. Courtney. “Books of the Day: ‘The Nigger of the “Narcissus.”’” Daily Telegraph, December 8, 1897, p. 7. James Marchand. “War Stories Past and to Come.” Criterion 18 (May 21, 1898), p. 23.

67

GEORGE’S MOTHER New York: Edward Arnold 1896

which we are duly thankful to him. Pictures of what is styled low life will always find admirers, and there is little doubt that, if only for this reason, “George’s Mother” will be popular, at least for a season. My opinion is that Mr. Crane can, and probably will, do better work than he has done here. In the present instance he has given us a very faithful picture of life as he found it, and if he continues to give us such pictures, though not always of slum life, he will acquire an enviable reputation as a story writer.

“Scenes of Low Life: Strong Characters and Incidents Depicted by Stephen Crane in George’s Mother.” New York Herald, June 6, 1896, p. 13 A very clever writer is Stephen Crane, and he has written nothing more clever than “George’s Mother,” which has just been published by Edward Arnold. A small book it is, and the story is a simple one. The characters in it are not attractive, and the incidents are vulgar, and will to some hypersensitive readers seem repulsive. Mr. Crane has drawn the characters and described the incidents with considerable skill, and if workmanship alone is to be considered “George’s Mother” is in some degree a work of art. But workmanship is not the only factor in a literary production, and more than faultless workmanship is needed if a book is to have enduring vitality. Great works of fiction endure from generation to generation, because their characters are either true to life or are stamped with an individuality which renders it impossible for us to forget them. Mr. Crane may some day give us one or two such characters, but I see no trace of them in “George’s Mother.” As an authority on slum life he takes high rank, but is it necessary to tell us so very much about life in the slums? Zola has treated this subject with unparalleled skill, and yet at times we even weary of Zola. Mr. Crane depicts beer saloons and their unsavory occupants with great minuteness, and it is evident that he has taken considerable pains to give us true pictures, for all of

“New Books and New Editions.” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, June 6, 1896, p. 9 Stephen Crane, whose “Red Badge of Courage” has won international recognition, is striking while the iron is hot. “George’s Mother,” his latest story, is not a very serious effort. Mr. Crane has doubtless modified an earlier manuscript and offered it to the amiable and long-suffering General Reader. The plot is thin, but the development of the story is fairly clever. Kelcey is a tenement youth who falls into questionable company, drinks too freely of beer, and wounds the fond love of his poor, old mother. In the end, the “little woman” passes sadly away. Indeed, Mr. Crane has written a romance, if such it may be entitled, which should receive a place on the fat shelves of our Sundayschool libraries. The young should read it for the lesson it unfolds.

71

told that he has certain books in preparation which will see the light next fall, one of which Mr. Howells is said to regard as greater than “The Red Badge of Courage.” It would have been better for Mr. Crane’s reputation as a literary worker, and as the possessor of some quality which is called genius, if he had had the courage to suppress “George’s Mother” and had been content to rest upon fame acquired, until such time as the reading world could have formed its judgment as to the soundness of Mr. Howells’ estimate. He has gained nothing that will last by the issue of the new book. It purports to be an episode of east side tenement life. It cannot be said to rise to the dignity of a story, for there is no plot. It is simply a succession of dull and uninteresting events. The book means nothing. The writer has simply described certain common enough incidents in the life of the tenement district, which do not possess any striking significance. A good share of the book—which is not large—is taken up with the description of a booze in a saloon and a debauch in the home of one of the persons who figure on the canvas. Now, the idiosyncracies of a “drunk” participated in by a collection of “tanks” in the back room of an east side gin mill may have some scientific interest for students of mental pathology, but it is pretty poor stuff to put into literature. Indeed, it is a misuse of terms to call it literature. The scalpel-like analysis of the beery convolutions of drink laden brains have no possible interest for anybody, and yet that is one of the chief features of Mr. Crane’s book. He begins with a young mechanic on the street, he carries him into a saloon upon the invitation of a friend, he tells the story of the evening spent amid the sociability of the place, there is much minute description of what went on there while the group sat about the table and guzzled. A good deal of east side slang is put into the conversation and the author has made

“New Books: Stephen Crane’s Recent Work.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 7, 1896, p. 19 It is one of the misfortunes of literature incident to the weakness of human nature that when an author has made a pronounced success, there is at once a demand for everything he has written, without much regard for its intrinsic merit. Not many men have the moral courage or are cool headed enough to resist such a call. The result very often is the rushing forth of works that had better never have seen daylight. We do not know the exact facts in the case of Stephen Crane’s latest novel, “George’s Mother,” just issued by Edward Arnold, but judging from the announcements preceding its publication, there is a fair degree of probability that it comes within the classification outlined above. We are told that it was written a year ago. That was before Mr. Crane had found fame as a story writer with the aid of his “Red Badge of Courage.” Since the publication of that book he has been hailed with a degree of praise and adulation that is not good for any young man. He has been told that he is a genius of remarkable power, that his future is rosy with promise, in effect that he is a new star that is climbing toward the zenith with remarkable speed. Yet he has given us nothing since the appearance of “The Red Badge of Courage,” which can be accepted as any fulfillment of the promise in that volume. He has printed some verse, socalled, and written certain “lines” which are claimed by his admirers to be poetry. They are alluded to elsewhere. His new, or year-old-novel comes before the public as a fresh evidence of his powers. We are 72

a considerable effort to give the vernacular of the phase of social existence where he finds his characters. He has caught some of the dialect, but its flavor has evaded him. It is such a description as a curious explorer might write after witnessing it for the first time. The “Mother” is a little old woman, the mother of the young mechanic. The best thing in the book is the description of her narrow, ignorant, sordid, grimy life, keeping house in a tenement, making a home for this graceless son, and finding her sole pleasure outside of it in the chapel prayer meetings to which she tries to lure the boy. It is not strange that he finds the back room of the saloon a pleasanter resort. There is a second and more elaborate description of a debauch, told with a degree of particularity that is nauseating. There is no sparkle to it. It is as stale as the beer slops the next morning. The world is not interested in descriptions of the successive stages through which a party of inebriates progress to complete drunkenness. If Mr. Crane is possessed of the pearls of genius he has no right to waste his God given gifts upon swine. The gradual development of the youth into a drunkard is slightly outlined, until such time as the mother dies with some degree of suddenness, and there the book ends. It begins nowhere, and it ends in the air. As a picture of the life of that vast, restless multitude which we vaguely lump together under the title “the East side,” it does not compare with Townsend’s or Julian Ralph’s sketches for strength of drawing or brilliancy of coloring. The passions and emotions of the human units that make up a battle field are worthy subjects for the most vivid pen. Mr. Crane has put his powers to a worthless use in this volume. Attention is called also to some evidences of Mr. Crane’s work in another direction. He has been published in a new and prettily printed quarterly, issued from the Roycroft press in East Aurora, in this

state, though the book is in larger part given over to the narrative of the dinner held in that village by Mr. Crane and the Society of Philistines, with letters received from Mr. Bok, Mr. Howells and other remarkable men on that occasion. There is truly nothing remarkable in the eight or ten specimens of the young man’s art contained in the book except their audacity. To be great in our time poetry must be difficult to understand. Most of the verses in the magazines have to be studied very hard in order to find out what the poet was thinking about, and sometimes it is not worth while. Mr. Crane usually speaks clearly despite his affectations, and his purpose is to put an incident or situation before the reader, rather than to inspire, to moralize, or even to suggest. Some of his things are merely crazy, like his “Black Riders,” which puts forth that the writer saw a man chasing the horizon and when accosted with the remark “You can never—” merely sang out “You lie,” and sped on. If that means the chaser was pursuing ideals it is not put in a very happy way, because one thinks of that sort of a chase as a progress, but this is only going “round and round.” But no matter what it means to the poet. So long as it does not touch the heart of people it might as well have been unwritten. We have no puzzle poetry among the Iliad and Paradise [Lost]. Not all of the spasmodic utterances of Mr. Crane are of this kind, however. He occasionally has an idea that is expressed as clearly as it is tersely. His economy of words is as great as Emerson’s—if there is a little difference in their freight—and he occasionally draws for us an impressionistic picture that entertains the fancy for a moment. There is no law to keep Mr. Crane from going on in this way just as long as he likes and as long as magazine editors and syndicate magazines are willing to pay for it; but if he is 73

to keep his name up he must one of these days write something as well worth while as his “Red Badge of Courage.” The new books promised next fall may fulfill present expectations in that direction, but it will be wise to wait a bit and see what the outcome will be. Mr. Crane is a very young man and the crudenesses of his present period and method will pass as the morning mist if the root of the matter is in him. There is so much that is timid and tame in the literature of the country that we can forgive a young barbarian for jumping into the arena now and again with a most compelling yawp. It gives satisfactory evidence that somebody is alive.

explains this preternatural power by the fact that Mr Crane had a great mother. When a man is being posed as one of the great lights of literature it is well to examine his methods somewhat narrowly, to see what lessons may be drawn from them. Mr Crane’s remarkable color scheme has been commented upon at some length in speaking of “The Red Badge of Courage;” it only remains to inquire into the source of his peculiar sentence form, which is well illustrated in his novel, “George’s Mother,” just published by Edward Arnold of Fifth avenue, New York. The impression which the reader is likely to gain is that the book ought to be printed in extra large type for little eyes. It is full of such beautiful idylls as this:— A man with a red, mottled face put forth his head from a window and cursed violently. He flung a bottle high across two back yards at a window in the opposite tenement. It broke against the brick of the house, and the fragments fell crackling upon the stones below. The man shook his fist.

“Stephen Crane and Little Rollo.” Springfield Sunday Republican, June 7, 1896, p. 13 “Where did you get that style?” cried Jeffrey, when Macaulay sprang full-armed into the arena of letters. A similar inquiry, but in a less reverent spirit, subsequently became popular as to the source of headgear. Now the same inquiry, with or without reverence, according to the bias of the critic, is made in regard to the eccentric performances of Stephen Crane. We are told that his insight into the feelings of recruits in battle is due to his birth in the period of recrimination following the war. But other admirers find this to restrict his genius too much: “I can imagine no conditions of life,” says one apostle, in language that Shakespeare might have accepted as not unflattering, “that might entangle a man or woman within its meshes that Stephen Crane could not fully comprehend and appreciate.” So he

Now, some readers have been so much puzzled by this literary phenomenon that they have searched the whole literary field over for its source, finally coming to the conclusion that Mr Crane is a decadent, and the product of some of the fin-de-siecle French schools which ape Maeterlinck. The theory is not unreasonable, on the face of it. The sentence in English prose has been characteristically long, the sentence in French prose characteristically short. De Quincey wrote in eloquent yard-long periods to say in rebuke of what he considered English newspaper style—it is not the newspaper style of the present day:— Every man who has had any experience in writing knows how natural it is for hurry and fulness of matter to discharge itself by vast 74

sentences, involving clause within clause ad infinitum—how difficult it is, and how much a work of time to break up this huge fasciculus of cycle and epicycle into a graceful succession of sentences, long intermingled with short, each modifying the other, and arising musically by links of spontaneous connection. Now the plethoric form of period, this monetary model of sentences, bloated with decomplex intercalations, and exactly repeating the form of syntax which distinguishes an act of parliament, is the prevailing mode of newspaper eloquence.

present day, both in French and in English. There is no longer the smooth billowy rise and fall which De Quincey so accurately characterizes. Instead, we have such sentences as:— His pipe irritated him by going out frequently. He was too busy in amiable conversations to attend to it. When he arose to go for a match he discovered that his legs were a trifle uncertain under him. They bended and did not precisely obey his intent. At the table he lit a match and then, in laughing at a joke made near him, forgot to apply it to the bowl of his pipe. He succeeded with the next match after annoying trouble. He swayed so that the match would appear first on one side of the bowl and then on the other. At last he happily got it directly over the tobacco. He had burned his fingers.

And from the newspapers, so he held, it had insidiously crept into English literature, while the French, taking conversation for their guide, run to the opposite extreme:— Hence it is that in French authors, whatever may otherwise be the difference of their minds, or the differences of their themes, uniformly we find the periods short, rapid, unelaborate— Pascal or Helvetius, Condillac or Rousseau, Montesquieu or Voltaire, Buffon or Duclos, all alike are terse, perspicuous, brief . . . One rise in every sentence, one gentle descent,—that is the law for French composition, even too monotonously so—and thus it happens that such a thing as a long or an involved sentence could not be produced from French literature, though a sultan were to offer his daughter in marriage to the man who should find it.

The plunkity-plunk, plunkity-plunk of the car wheels as you lie awake in the night is a symphony in comparison. Many guesses as to the source of the infection have been made, some suggesting Maeterlinck, whose influence has certainly been very great in the younger generation, as the most potent cause. There is of course some superficial resemblance, especially when one of the characters of the Belgian Ollendorff makes a speech of more than two consecutive words:— I wish to go with them! They are already on the lawn . . . They are at the edge of the pool now. There is a breeze; it is raining; there is water; there is air! Oh if you had at least put her to death in the open air! But here, in a little room. In a poor little room! I am going to open the windows.

But this comparative reasonableness of length—“one rise in every sentence, one gentle descent”—which De Quincey found monotonous, and which is truly incapable of the highest levels of prose, seems almost periodic compared with the jerky singsong of some of the younger writers of the

But it is hardly necessary to go so far afield for Mr Crane’s style. Nor need we attribute his detached style to the copy of 75

certain of the French realists, who have a similar mannerism. The true explanation is far simpler. When we remember that in 1868 or 1869, when Mr Crane first began to utter red cries, the masterpieces of that nursery classic, Jacob Abbott, were again passing through the press, and that on these beautiful tales his infant mind must have been molded, the thing becomes simplicity itself. Others have forgotten the simple notes of childhood; upon the receptive mind of genius they made an indelible impression. To those who are familiar with the mad scarlet words of “Rollo Learning to Read,” there can be no mystery in the matter:—

remembered that Mr Crane is still young, and that he is almost as celebrated as a short-stop—is there a subtle connection between this fact and his use of the fullstop?—as in the field of letters. What more natural than to suppose that he has not had time yet to master the use of the relative pronoun, without which a sentence cannot be “bloated with decomplex intercalations,” as De Quincey so lucidly puts it? It must not be supposed that the short sentence has not its uses. When a series of pregnant, pithy statements, each of which is to be emphasized, is to be uttered, each should be put by itself. The short sentence is like a hammer-stroke. It commands attention. It is the most powerful form of emphasis known. But where everything is emphasized, there is no emphasis. There is none in “Rollo”; there is none in Mr Crane’s writing. Kipling was bad enough in this respect when he began his career, but his style was almost flowing compared with that of the author of “The Red Badge of Courage.” The subject of the story is as beautiful and touching as the passages quoted would indicate. It tells at great length and with realistic minuteness how George got drunk, how he felt the next morning, what his poor old mother thought about. There are at least two “bats” depicted, but the whole book groups itself naturally under these three heads. At the end George’s mother dies, and he feels very badly to think that he has been off “scrapping” for his share of a pail of free beer, while she was sick. It would make an excellent Sunday-school book if there were not so many curious words, like “mug” and “youse” and “tanks,” that no Sundayschool scholar could possibly understand. But it is not a great contribution to literature, though we shall perhaps hear that as the author was never intoxicated in his life, there is a wonderful exhibition of

One evening Rollo was sitting on the floor by the side of the fire playing with his blocks. He was trying to build a meeting-house. He could make the meeting-house very well, all except the steeple, but the steeple would tumble down. Presently his father said:— “Rollo, you may put your blocks into the basket.” Rollo liked reading very well for a day or two, but he soon became tired. He thought the quarter of an hour was very long, and that Mary called him too soon. He was mistaken, however, in this. Mary was always very exact and punctual. He found, too, that he got along very slowly. Can any one compare this diet of children with any passage from the author of “The Red Badge of Courage,” and doubt that he has solved the riddle? This is truly “the very false gallop” of prose, “the right butter-women’s rank to market,” as Touchstone says. When Dr Nordau gets hold of Mr. Crane he will doubtless be unkind enough to seize upon the resemblance as an instance of degeneration, showing a reversion to childishness. That would be needlessly harsh. It must be 76

imaginative power in the realization of the next morning’s details:—

others, which will be reviewed in THE COMMERCIAL ADVERTISER in their turn. Some observers doubt whether Mr. Crane will be able to maintain the rapid gait with which he has begun to tread the flowery paths of letters, but he has certainly not shown any fatigue so far . . . It is an interesting turn of style that Stephen Crane has made in his last published story, “George’s Mother.” From the blue-smoke and swirl and the thunderous guns of a mighty war to the commonplace experience of a weak-willed young laboring man in New York City, is a step that only an author who is sure of himself would care to take. Mr. Crane has taken it safely. The rugged power, the picturesque descriptions, the independent choice of words that give to his sentences a suggestion of recklessness, are all in “George’s Mother,” as they are in other works by this young man. He has the valuable faculty of picturing familiar things in striking colors that give them a new surface aspect, while emphasizing their essential characteristics. The people we meet in “George’s Mother” we have known for years, but we have passed them carelessly, just because we have known them so well, without recognizing in them the humanity which shines so clearly on the canvas that bears Mr. Crane’s clever brushstrokes. Take the opening picture of the book, which describes the city on a rainy evening and George going home from work. Have you not plodded through New York streets on just such an afternoon or night, and do you not know that the impressions given by Crane have been your own, only you have never thought to transfer them to paper with his lusty pen. This is Crane’s picture of it:

He ate the greater part of his breakfast in silence, moodily stirring his coffee and glaring at a remote corner of the room with eyes that felt as if they had been baked. When he moved his eyelids there was a sensation that they were cracking. In his mouth there was a singular taste. It seemed to him that he had been sucking the end of a wooden spoon. We cannot vouch for the accuracy of the description, but it has the ring of truth. To return for a moment to the peculiarities of Mr Crane’s English, it may be remarked that if this book is recent work, he still sees red: “They had had the comprehension of red lobsters”; “He perceived all the futility of a red existence.” We hope when his heated imagination cools he will indulge in some grays and greens by way of contrast.

C. C. J. “George’s Mother Gives a View of New York Slums.” New York Commercial Advertiser, June 13, 1896, p. 16 What an industrious young man is Stephen Crane! He has flourished his sword ’mid the din and crash of battle with such good effect that his work is in demand. He believes he sees a field for his endeavor in the lowly byways of the city, and he is working it in his own fashion of literary husbandry. “George’s Mother” is his new book of this kind, but he has written

[Quotes “In the swirling rain . . .” to “. . . the raised veins of his hands 77

showed him to be a man who worked with his muscles.”]

Stories full of East Side slang are common enough—and often bad enough. But in “George’s Mother” the dialect of toughdom is used only because it is in the photograph of lowly life that Mr. Crane has taken. You can hear his beery loafers talking in the vernacular he has written, and you know that “the old woman” could not have expressed herself in other terms than are given in the book. There is a sad humor and a humorous pathos pervading this story, and one or the other may be found on every page. Mr. Crane seems disposed to place other stories among the slums of the city. If his future work is as good as “George’s Mother” he may become more generally identified with sketches of everyday humble existence than with the silhouettes of war that have brought him into prominence.

This “brown young man,” George Kelcey, falls into the society of a tough city gang, drinks beer, and worries his poor, old mother. At last she dies suddenly, and the story leaves George stricken with remorse for the worry he has caused her. There is no particular plot to the story, as plot is usually understood. There are no heavy villains and no heroes—for you cannot call George a hero. He is a type of the discontented young man that exists by the thousand in all large cities—the young man who plods to work and back again, and can see no better possible recreation than beer and corner-loafing. But the description of his first visit to the saloon in which the gang meets, the “blow-out at Old Bleecker’s,” and other incidents that come in the sordid way of George Kelcey, make him a type worth studying. Mr. Crane has studied him, evidently, and to interesting purpose. Then the poor old woman, with the nervous hands, to whom her boy was everything! Is not the whole sad condition of things enveloping her and George, now that he is breaking away from her, conveyed in this bitter sentence:

“Two Books by Stephen Crane.” Critic 26 (June 13, 1896), p. 421 The problem which we have always with us, which presses more and more for an answer, and which we are only beginning to study, is that upon which Mr. Crane aims to throw some light in these two books. He offers no solution; he does not even state the problem. He simply turns on the light, and we perceive at once what the actual conditions of life are to the other nine-tenths, in New York. What rules in New York, rules in every large city of the world supposed to be civilized—but with a difference. There is what may be called a special atmosphere here; and it is Mr. Crane’s chief merit as a novelist of low life that he has known how to reproduce it with fidelity. It is naturally denser in low places, such as those which

[Quotes “Once, when the little old woman was going out to buy something for her son’s supper” to “youths who were superior to mothers.”] There is an attempt on the part of the gang to draw George Kelcey into a fight. Fidsey Corcoran tells another member of the gang, euphoniously called “Blue Billie,” that if he “goes jollyin’ ’round,” he’ll “git done.” [Quotes “‘Who’ll do me?’” to “‘Yeh’s better run! She’s awful sick.’”] George’s mother is dead! 78

he has chosen to illumine, but it is the same atmosphere, only more rarefied, higher up. Broaden the traits a very little, and the supremely contemptuous truck-driver, whose glory is in a phenomenal “jam,” and whose habit, on ordinary occasions, it is to fix “his eye on a high and distant object, commanding his horses to start, and then going into a trance of observation,” indifferent as to what may happen to mere foot-passengers—this haughty and self-contained being may represent the modern Juggernaut, Trade, quite as well as any other “driver” or “pusher” behind desk or counter. Not one of them but rejoices in like manner in the glory of the fray; not one but observes with the same air of abstract content the crushing progress of the machine. Maggie is the life history of one of the crushed. Through infancy and youth, she is the slave of the stronger members of her family. When she is led “to the bad” by a resplendent barkeeper, her brother, the high and mighty driver of the truck, feels his honor assailed, and there is a gory and glass-shivering quarter of an hour in the saloon. When Maggie returns, she is held up to the execration of the tenement, for having disgraced her family; and when her drowned body is brought home, the drunken mother is with difficulty prevailed upon by a sympathetic neighbor to “forgive” her. George’s Mother, dwelling in the same tenement, is another of the crushed ones. She is a country-bred, mildly fanatical little woman, and her life is one long and spirited warfare against the devils of dirt and sin. Religious enthusiasm flourishes in her, it might be said on air. She attends on Thursday evenings a small conventicle, austere in its appointments, the refuge of a few souls from imminent perdition. Her great grief is that her only surviving son will not accompany her there. For George, imaginative like his mother, has

found another refuge, where also a chosen few, out of place in a harsh world, “fitted for a tree-shaded land, where everything was peace” are used to congregate. Here the decorations are of a more cheerful character. A rite frequently repeated consists in the bringing of fresh glasses and the taking away of others that have been emptied. It is a paradise of wit and fancy, affection and sentiment, where whiskey prophesies smooth things by the mouths of its worshippers. But, as a consequence of too frequent attendance at this shrine, George loses his job. It is an article of faith with his correligionists, as with those of other persuasions, not to lend money. He is mourned over a little; then dropped. And now the manly and martial qualities of the youths whose glorious deeds half fill the former book engage his attention. They, at least, squarely face the world as it is, undismayed, needing neither refuge nor consolation. They successfully tackle its most perplexing problems, have their way by force of fists and obtain what they want without paying for it. They are the lords of life, the cream and fine flower of our civilization, its most expressive product. Shaking off his dreams, George violently fights his way into full communion with these choice spirits. The little mother finds her mystic warfare becoming too much for her: she is overpowered by the demons and dies tormented by visions like those that scare the dying sinner in mediæval picture-books. It is greatly to Mr. Crane’s credit that he indulges in no rhetoric and is never denunciatory. It is such an easy trick of art, and such a convenience to good people who want a definite object of attack, to throw all the blame for our social disorder upon some particular class—the monopolists, the rum-sellers, the politicians, the clergy,—that it is little wonder that such is the course usually pursued by writers who take their themes from the slums. But 79

their books are bad art, and only add to the muddle they profess to depict. Mr. Crane is not yet a skilled artist: he indulges too frequently in needless repetition, and is not always as careful as he should be about the construction of his sentences. But he knows that the essential thing in his line of work is to focus the vital facts in a given field of observation, without distortion; and this he succeeds in doing.

George is introduced to several of the semi-respectable habitu´es of the place. They all sit in a little back room and continue drinking, while Mr. Crane describes the various colours that can be noticed in their surroundings. George presently goes home, and a few nights later he attends a drinking-bout in another back room where one of his new friends lives. On this occasion he drinks more than is good for him, and sees as many colours as even Mr. Crane can well enumerate. Some glasses are broken by the revellers, and an infinitive is split by Mr. Crane. Some days after this, George attends a prayer-meeting, but it does not interest him. There is a shadowy girl whom George sees occasionally, and whom he thinks he could fascinate if he tried; but he doesn’t try, and she is apparently interested in some one else, so George drinks still more and gets in the way of hanging around barroom doors and affiliating with a “gang.” His mother dies one day while he is so engaged. George is summoned by a small boy whose own mother spanks him because he does not come fast enough when she calls. The book ends with the spanking and the coincident death of George’s mother. This is sorry stuff. Even if it were well done, it is not worth the doing; and it is not well done. There is absolutely no reason why it should have been done at all. The whole thing is simply an incoherent fragment, told with no purpose and fraught with no interest. Who cares about what George said to the bartender or what the bartender said to George? There is no meaning to any of it. Some one will say that it is a bit of intense realism; but that is just what it isn’t. Anyone can hang around a bar-room and jot down the conversation and also print it, but this is not realism. Literary realism would perhaps take such wretched material as this for its own purposes, but it would use it with some insight, some psychology,

Harry Thurston Peck. “‘George’s Mother.’” Bookman 3 (July 1896), pp. 446–447 So far as we know, the public has not been told authoritatively just when Mr. Crane actually wrote the book that is now before us. If, however, we may form a conjecture regarding the date of its composition from a consideration of the internal evidence, we should say that its first draft must belong to the time when he wrote and published Maggie. Judged by the qualities of style and strength we should, in fact, pronounce it to be even earlier, and probably one of Mr. Crane’s first attempts at serious composition; for it is altogether crude and unsatisfactory. Were it from the pen of an unknown writer, we should dismiss it in a dozen lines. George Kelcey, a young workingman, whom Mr. Crane with his usual chromatic characterisation describes as “brown,” lives in a tenement-house with his mother. The mother is a member of the W. C. T. U., and is proud of George, but doesn’t show it. George meets a former acquaintance named Jones, and they drink together. Later they visit a “smiling saloon” and drink some more, and 80

some grasp upon the essential meaning of it all. We are not going to object to the narrative of a squalid debauch, but we do assert that if a writer forces it upon our notice, he shall justify himself by limning it with some power and artistic sense, as Zola drew, in L’Assommoir, that Rabelaisian revel at which Coupeau and Lantier met and opened up the way for the ˆ final d´ebacle. Rhyparography is the lowest form of art, but at least it should be good of its kind. Mr. Crane’s rhyparography is in this book incongruous, formless, and deadly dull. The book is a small one, yet its publication seems to us to involve a principle. When an English author by any chance attains a sudden and definite success, he is always extremely solicitous that his earlier and imperfect books should not be dragged out and thrust upon the public in a violent effort to take advantage of his “boom.” He rather suppresses them altogether, as Anthony Hope has tried to do with some of his early stories, or at least he rewrites them, as Thomas Hardy rewrote Desperate Remedies. And he does this partly out of regard to his own literary reputation, and partly from an honourable feeling of what is due to the public that admires him. We commend this precedent to Mr. Crane, and beg to suggest that an author who within a single year has forced critics to compare his work with that of the greatest living realists, ought not, as a mere matter of self-respect, to rake over his literary ash-barrel and ask us to accept his old bones and junk as virgin gold.

“Recent Fiction by English and American Authors.” New York Tribune, July 1, 1896, p. 8 Mr. Stephen Crane is doing his best to destroy the little reputation built up for him on the strength of “The Red Badge of Courage.” That story, in spite of its crudities and lapses of taste, dealt with a theme which suggested intentional roughness, and left room for hope that the writer owed some of his most glaring faults to youth and bad models. But the almost simultaneous publication of “Maggie” and “George’s Mother,” his first and his latest efforts, strips away the pretence of conscious art as the excuse for brutality, and reveals a writer who handles the common side of life in a uniformly coarse and commonplace way. “George’s Mother” is a less offensive book than “Maggie.” It is less profane, and does not leave so strong an impression of hopeless earthiness. But its virtue is purely negative, and if it shocks less often it is all the more unrelieved vacuity. It is not much more interesting to learn that the hero swears “a tangled mass of oaths” than to be compelled to hear those oaths in their baldness. The pious mother and the wayward son are not new types in slum stories, and Mr. Crane is not at all original in the delineation of them. Of local color Mr. Crane has nothing; his tenements are any tenements and his streets any streets. A few shadowy figures belong to a gang of roughs who serve no purpose except to introduce hints of beer cans and brawls in vacant lots; and other indistinct loafers of a slightly higher class people the saloons. Mr. Crane’s 81

highest flight of imagination and psychologic insight is found in a description of George meeting with his friends, drinking himself into a stupor, falling down with “a yellow crash” and waking the next day to perceive “all the futility of a red existence.” The mother is a peevish and pious countrywoman, whose dialect belongs neither to the country nor the town. When she worked about the house “she sprang from her rest and began to buffet with her shrivelled arms. In a moment the battle was again in full swing. Terrific blows were given and received,” but whether the return blows were given by the drippingpan or cobwebs or the sound spirit of her voice, that “had a broken wing,” is not revealed. Other grotesque figures of speech destroy all impression of serious characterization. George and his friend went into the saloon “that sat blinking jovially at the crowds. It engulfed them with a gleeful motion of its two widely smiling lips.” After that even oaths lose their reality and become fantastic fabrications. “George’s Mother” fails both as a picture of slum life and as a character study, and does not even suggest a story. The actuality to which it pretends is entirely fictitious and unembodied. The book bristles with coarseness and dulness, but there is no vitality anywhere which makes them anything but coarseness and dulness. They are mere qualities put in print, not necessary features of a defined human character. Mr. Crane conveys the information that there are vulgar and selfish sons who will not go to prayer-meeting with their mothers, but prefer drinking and swearing, and think they are misunderstood. It did not need more than a hundred and fifty pages of saloon talk to carry conviction of that fact, and when it is all finished that is the sum total of the accomplishment.

“Stephen Crane’s Stories of Life in the Slums.” TheWave, July 4, 1896, p. 13 In Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane has written a story something on the plan of the episode of Nana in L’Assommoir, the dialect and local color being that of the Bowery. Mr. Crane strikes no new note in his picture of the other half. Most of his characters are old acquaintances in the world of fiction and we know all about—or, at least, certain novelists have pretended to tell us all about the life of the mean streets of a great city. In ordinary hands the tale of Maggie would be “twice told.” But Mr. Crane is, of course, out of the ordinary. I think that the charm of his style lies chiefly in his habit and aptitude for making phrases—short, terse epigrams struck off in the heat of composition, sparks merely, that cast a momentary gleam of light upon whole phases of life. There are hundreds of them throughout this tale of Maggie. Indeed, it is the way Mr. Crane tells his story. The picture he makes is not a single carefully composed painting, serious, finished, scrupulously studied, but rather scores and scores of tiny flashlight photographs, instantaneous, caught, as it were, on the run. Of a necessity, then, the movement of his tale must be rapid, brief, very hurried, hardly more than a glimpse. One of the best of these “flash-lights” is that of the “truck driver.” At first one is tempted to believe that it is a “long exposure,” but on second thought I conclude that it is merely a great number of

82

snap-shots taken at the same subject. It is as follows:

began frenziedly to seize bridles and beat the soft noses of the irresponsible horses.

Jimmy became a truck driver. There was given to him the charge of a painstaking pair of horses and a large, rattling truck. He invaded the turmoil and tumble of the down-town streets, and learned to breathe maledictory defiance at the police, who occasionally used to climb up, drag him from his perch, and punch him. In the lower part of the city he daily involved himself in hideous tangles. If he and his team chanced to be in the rear he preserved a demeanor of serenity, crossing his legs and bursting forth into yells when foot passengers took dangerous dives beneath the noses of his champing horses. He smoked his pipe calmly, for he knew that his pay was marching on. If his charge was in the front, and if it became the key-truck of chaos, he entered terrifically into the quarrel that was raging to and fro among the drivers on their high seats, and sometimes roared oaths and violently got himself arrested. The greatest cases of aggravated idiocy were, to his mind, rampant upon the front platforms of all of the street cars. At first his tongue strove with these beings, but he eventually became superior. In him grew a majestic contempt for those strings of street cars that followed him like intent bugs. He fell into the habit, when starting on a long journey, of fixing his eye on a high and distant object, commanding his horses to start and then going into a trance of observation. Multitudes of drivers might howl in his rear, and passengers might load him with opprobrium, but he would not awaken until some blue policeman turned red and

Good though the story is and told in Mr. Crane’s catching style, the impression left with the reader is one of hurry; the downfall of Maggie, the motif of the tale, strikes one as handled in a manner almost too flippant for the seriousness of the subject. George’s Mother seems to me better than Maggie. For a short novel it is less pretentious, has fewer characters and more unity, conveying one distinct impression. It is the story of a “little old woman” and her boy George. The boy starts well enough, stays at home in the evening, and even goes—at least on one occasion—to prayer meeting with his mother. But he falls into bad company and becomes perverted. Incidentally the mother dies, of grief and disappointment, so Mr. Crane implies. There is something about this death of “the little old woman” that rings surprisingly true: Through the doorway he saw the oilcloth covering of the table catching a glimmer from the warm afternoon sun. The window disclosed a fair, soft sky . . . At intervals the woman out by the stove moved restlessly and coughed. Over the transom from the hallway came two voices. “Johnnie!” “Wot!” “You come right here t’ me! I want yehs t’ go t’ d’ store fer me!” “Oh, ma; send Sally!” “No, I will not; you come right here!” “All right, in a minnet!” “Johnnie!”

83

“In a minnet, I tell yeh!” “Johnnie!”—there was the sound of a heavy tread, and later a boy squealed. Suddenly the clergyman started to his feet. He rushed forward and peered. The little old woman was dead.

W[illiam] D[ean] Howells. “New York Low Life in Fiction.” New York World, July 26, 1896, p. 18

It is most remarkable in Crane’s novels to observe the truly marvelous fashion in which he feels and seizes the most subtle and hardly expressed moods and emotions. This quality of his was apparent on almost every page of the Red Badge. We have it again in George’s Mother, coming out in such admirable analysis as this where George is beginning to fall in love with Maggie Johnson:

IT IS a long time since I have seen the once famous and popular play “A Glance at New York,” but I distinctly recall through the misty substance of some forty-five very faded years the heroic figures of the volunteer fireman and his friends, who were the chief persons of the piece. I do not remember the others at all, but I remember Mose, and Sikesy, and Lize. Good and once precious fragments of the literature linger in my memory, as: “‘Mose,’ says he, ‘git off o’ dem hose, or I’ll swat you over der head wid der trumpet.’ And I didn’t get off o’ der hose, and he did swat me over der head wid der trumpet.” Other things have gone, things of Shakespeare, of Alfieri, of Cervantes, but these golden words of a forgotten dramatist poet remain with me. It is interesting to note that the first successful attempt to represent the life of our streets was in dramatic form. Some actor saw and heard things spoken with the peculiar swagger and whopper-jaw utterance of the b’hoy of those dreadful old days, when the blood-tubs and the pluguglies reigned over us, and Tammany was still almost purely American, and he put them on the stage and spread the poison of them all over the land, so that there was hardly anywhere a little blackguard boy who did not wish to act and talk like Mose. The whole piece was painted with the large brush and the vivid pigments of romanticism, and yet the features were real. So it was many long years later

He laid clever plans by which he encountered her in the halls, at the door, on the street. When he succeeded in meeting her he was always overcome by the thought that the whole thing was obvious to her. He could feel the shame of it burn his face and neck. To prove to her that she was mistaken he would turn away from her with a granite stare. But though these stories make interesting reading, the reader is apt to feel that the author is writing, as it were, from the outside. There is a certain lack of sympathy apparent. Mr. Crane does not seem to know his people. You are tempted to wonder if he has ever studied them as closely as he might have done. He does not seem to me to have gotten down into their life and to have written from what he saw around him. His people are types, not characters; his scenes and incidents are not particularized. It is as if Mr. Crane had merely used the “machinery” and “business” of slum life to develop certain traits or to portray certain emotions and passions that might happen anywhere. With him it is the broader, vaguer, human interest that is the main thing, not the smaller details of a particular phase of life. 84

when Mr. Harrigan came to the study of our low life in his delightful series of plays. He studied it in the heyday of Irish supremacy, when Tammany had become almost purely Celtic, and he naturally made his heroes and heroines Irish. The old American b’hoy lingered among them in the accent and twist of an occasional barkeeper, but the brogue prevailed, and the high-shouldered sidelong carriage of the Americanized bouncer of Hibernian blood. The treatment, however, was still romanticistic, though Mr. Harrigan is too much of a humorist not to return suddenly to nature, at times from the most exalted regions of “imagination.” He loves laughing and making laugh, and that always saved him when he was in danger of becoming too grand, or fine, or heroic. He had moments when he was exactly true, but he allowed himself a good many friendly freedoms with the fact, and the effect was not always that of reality. It seemed to me that so far as I could get the drift of a local drama in German which flourished at one of the East Side theatres a winter ago, that the author kept no more faithfully to life than Mr. Harrigan, and had not his sublime moments of absolute fidelity. In fact, the stage is almost as slow as criticism to perceive that there is no other standard for the arts but life, and it keeps on with the conventional in motive even when the matter is honest, apparently in the hope that by doing the stale falsehood often enough it will finally affect the witness like a fresh verity. It is to the honor of the stage, however, that it was first to recognize the value of our New York low life as material; and I shall always say that Mr. Harrigan, when he was not overpowered by a tradition or a theory, was exquisitely artistic in his treatment of it. He was then true, and, as Tolstoy has lately told us, to be true is to be moral.

The fiction meant to be read, as distinguishable from the fiction meant to be represented, has been much later in dealing with the same material, and it is only just beginning to deal with it in the spirit of the great modern masters. I cannot find that such clever and amusing writers as Mr. Townsend, or Mr. Ralph, or Mr. Ford have had it on their consciences to report in the regions of the imagination the very effect of the life which they all seem at times to have seen so clearly. There is apparently nothing but the will that is wanting in either of them, but perhaps the want of the will is the want of an essential factor, though I should like very much to have them try for a constant reality in their studies; and I am far from wishing to count them out in an estimate of what has been done in that direction. It is only just to Mr. Stephen Crane, however, to say that he was first in the field where they made themselves known earlier. His story of “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,” which has been recently published by the Appletons, was in the hands of a few in an edition which the author could not even give away three years ago; and I think it is two years, now, since I saw “George’s Mother,” which Edward Arnold has brought out, in the manuscript. Their present publication is imaginably due to the success of “The Red Badge of Courage”; but I do not think that they will owe their critical acceptance to the obstreperous favor which that has won. As pieces of art they are altogether superior to it, and as representations of life their greater fidelity cannot be questioned. In “The Red Badge of Courage” there is a good deal of floundering, it seems to me. The narration repeats itself; the effort to imagine, to divine, and then to express ends often in a huddled and confused effect; there is no repose, such as agony itself assumes in the finest art, and 85

there is no forward movement. But in these other books the advance is relentless; the atmosphere is transparent; the texture is a continuous web where all the facts are wrought with the unerring mastery of absolute knowledge. I should say that “The Red Badge of Courage” owed its excellence to the training the author had given himself in setting forth the life he knew in these earlier books of later publication. He learned to imagine vividly from seeing clearly. There is a curious unity in the spirit of the arts; and I think that what strikes me most in the story of “Maggie” is that quality of fatal necessity which dominates Greek tragedy. From the conditions it all had to be, and there were the conditions. I felt this in Mr. Hardy’s “Jude,” where the principle seems to become conscious in the writer; but there is apparently no consciousness of any such motive in the author of “Maggie.” Another effect is that of an ideal of artistic beauty which is as present in the working out of this poor girl’s squalid romance as in any classic fable. This will be foolishness, I know, to the foolish people who cannot discriminate between the material and the treatment in art, and who think that beauty is inseparable from daintiness and prettiness, but I do not speak of them. I appeal rather to such as feel themselves akin with every kind of human creature, and find neither high nor low when it is a question of inevitable suffering, or of a soul struggling vainly with an inexorable fate. My rhetoric scarcely suggests the simple terms the author uses to produce the effect which I am trying to report again. They are simple, but always most graphic, especially when it comes to the personalities of the story: the girl herself, with her bewildered wish to be right and good; with her distorted perspective; her clinging and generous affections; her hopeless environments; the horrible old drunken mother,

a cyclone of violence and volcano of vulgarity; the mean and selfish lover, a dandy tough, with his gross ideals and ambitions; her brother, an Ishmaelite from the cradle, who, with his warlike instincts beaten back into cunning, is what the b’hoy of former times has become in our more strenuously policed days. He is indeed a wonderful figure in a group which betrays no faltering in the artist’s hand. He, with his dull hates, his warped good-will, his cowed ferocity, is almost as fine artistically as Maggie, but he could not have been so hard to do, for all the pathos of her fate is rendered without one maudlin touch. So is that of the simple-minded and devoted and tedious old woman who is George’s mother in the book of that name. This is scarcely a study at all, while Maggie is really and fully so. It is the study of a situation merely: a poor, inadequate woman, of a commonplace religiosity, whose son goes to the bad. The wonder of it is the courage which deals with persons so absolutely average, and the art that graces them with the beauty of the author’s compassion for everything that errs and suffers. Without this feeling the effects of his mastery would be impossible, and if it went further or put itself into the pitying phrases it would annul the effects. But it never does this; it is notable how in all respects the author keeps himself well in hand. He is quite honest with his reader. He never shows his characters or his situations in any sort of sentimental glamour; if you will be moved by the sadness of common fates you will feel his intention, but he does not flatter his portraits of people or conditions to take your fancy. In George and his mother he has to do with folk of country origin as the city affects them, and the son’s decadence is admirably studied; he scarcely struggles against temptation, and his mother’s only art is to cry and to scold. Yet he loves her, in a way, and she is devotedly proud of 86

him. These simple country folk are contrasted with simple city folk of varying degrees of badness. Mr. Crane has the skill to show how evil is greatly the effect of ignorance and imperfect civilization. The club of friends, older men than George, whom he is asked to join, is portrayed with extraordinary insight, and the group of young toughs whom he finally consorts with is done with even greater mastery. The bulldog motive of one of them, who is willing to fight to the death, is most impressively rendered. The student of dialect ought to be interested in the parlance of the class Mr. Crane draws upon for his characters. They are almost inarticulate; not merely the grammar, but the language itself, decays in their speech. The Theta sound, so characteristic of English, disappears altogether, and the vowels tend to lose themselves in the obscure note heard in fur and stir. What will be the final language spoken by the New Yorker? We shall always write and print a sort of literary English, I suppose, but with the mixture of races the spoken tongue may be a thing composite and strange beyond our present knowledge. [Howells discusses Yekl, a Tale of the New York Ghetto by Abraham Cahan.] There is much that is painful in his [Cahan’s] story, as there is much that is dreadful in Mr. Crane’s work, but both of these writers persuade us that they have told the truth, and that such as conditions have made the people they deal with, we see their people. If we have any quarrel with the result we cannot blame the authors, who have done their duty as artists and for a moment have drawn aside the thick veil of ignorance which parts the comfortable few from the uncomfortable many in this city. The life they know lives before us, as we read; and the saddest thing about it is that this life as we see it after a generation of New York in Mr. Crane’s stories is more hopeless than it is as we find

it in Mr. Cahan’s tale, which deals with the first years of his hero’s contact with our civilization. Doubtless, also, temperament has something to do with this effect. Mr. Crane is essentially tragical, and Mr. Cahan, without being less serious, is essentially humorous.

Vance Thompson. “The Art of Stephen Crane.” New York Commercial Advertiser, August 7, 1896, p. 4 Mr. Stephen Crane’s short career has been so happy that he may be pardoned for fancying himself a sort of Scipio, at whom the dogs may not bark as he climbs to the Capitol. He has been praised by the “Saturday Review,” which is woful, and (which is wofuller) by Mr. W. D. Howells. Even his vilest writing has been praised, and for one who can write so well it is marvellous how ill he can write. There is, in fact, a great deal of the gambler’s temper in his work. He risks everything on a throw of the dice. Unfortunately, even that supremest gambler, Napoleon, could not always throw sixes. At his best Mr. Crane is very good. He has virility. He has entered the lists with a strong lance. He has, to be sure, togged himself in fantastic armor. One is not wholly without suspicion that his helmet is a barber’s basin. As I have said, his style at its best is admirable—simple, idoneous, direct. But he does not often give one of his best. It has been held that it was well with the author who used common words to say uncommon things. Mr. Crane is fond of doing 87

just the opposite. He has a grasp for the out-of-the-way phrase, the contorted construction. He affects an acrobatic style, as anaemic girls go in for golf. A habit of this sort may be due merely to a lack of comprehensive culture. Falstaff bade ancient Pistol to say what he had to say “like a man of this world.” Again, this ancient Pistol style of writing lays one under the suspicion of never having had the pleasure of definite ideas. Clear thinking means clear writing. Grand and lofty tumbling, even of the verbal sort, is not conducive to sober thought. Mr. Crane would probably assure one that he does not think, that he simply records impressions. The wantonness and perkiness of his way of writing he would lay at the door of his sincerity. The ghastly cruelty of war, the intensity of the fighting animals’ emotions are not to be expressed in terms of slippered and easy-chaired sobriety. Unquestionably this is true. And yet when one finds the description of an old woman cooking supper (“George’s Mother”) given with the frantic gesticulation of an epileptic war correspondent, one may well doubt the sincerity of his author’s method. All great powers are dangerous to beginners. None, I think, is more dangerous than the power of coercing words. It grows upon one as the habit of beating women grew upon Captain Florian, the fabulist. It destroys one’s respect for the language. And since most of us think in words, the affected phrase presupposes an insincere thought. Mr. Crane’s method is almost Gilbertian in its topsy-turviness. He does not say to himself: “This is my meaning; how shall I say it?” The query that seems more natural to him is: “If I say this what will it mean?”

And so, in spite of his vigor, stress and poignancy, it is not amiss to say that Mr. Crane writes like a woman—a woman Amazonic, unimammiferous, to be sure— rather than a man. The reasoning faculty is not conspicuous in him. By way of compensation he has the faculty, intuitive, feminine of taking the near and simple view of things, of being what is in front of his nose, as Schopenhauer would say. Equally feminine, I think, is the habit of saying something and then looking into it for a meaning. The former quality lends to his work that realism which brackets the Death Angel and the check shirt. You remember the jingle: The Death Angel smote Alexander McGlue And gave him protracted repose; He wore a check shirt and a No. 9 shoe, And He had a pink wart on his nose. This realistic method, discerningly applied, makes, I admit, for literature of a very high order—makes, indeed, for such work as Mr. Crane’s best. The habit of saying something and then looking into it for a meaning is not altogether bad. It explains how women often say clever things and then look up with the startled air of the educated flea, that, in pulling a thread, has fired a cannon. Much good work is done by a fluke. I cannot help thinking that when Mr. Crane pulled the thread of “The Red Badge of Courage” he was startled at the detonation that followed. And this is not to be made a matter of wonder. The book, in spite of its affectation of directness, is a remarkable psychological study. It has the best realism—the realism of mood. To praise it is superfluous. It has long since been accepted at its face value. But between “The Red Badge of Courage,” this inexplicable fluke, and Mr. Crane’s 88

other work, an immense gulf is fixed. His verse is merely the word exercise of the clever sixth-form boy. Almost every lad has written of “The chatter of a death demon from a tree-top—blood!” That is the sort of thing that animated children write and into which fond parents try to read a meaning. His short tales and sketches have the pseudo-intellectualism and the pseudo-realism of the expert journalist. But “The Red Badge of Courage” is Amazonic. It demonstrates the fact that now and then a writer may be born, not made; and if, being born, he still needs a great deal of making, time and opportunity are on his side.

things happen in the literary china-shop, one is justified in likening Mr. Crane to a rocket. Whether Mr. Crane himself admits his alleged superiority to Zola and Tolstoi or not; after all this riotous praise, it is impossible that he should not take himself seriously. It is to be hoped that he does—seriously enough to look with anxious eye at his future. It cannot be denied that he has arrived. But the rocket arrives, too, and then drops back into oblivion, the profounder for its flaring swan-song. But literary rockets have wings, and often need only to preen them and train their erratic swoops into steady exaltation to hold their sky-place. Of all the writers in real renown, Mr. Crane has the most manifest faults to correct. So glaring are they, indeed, that many cannot see beyond them into the virtues that justify Mr. Crane’s place in contemporary repute. Without presuming on patronage, it is self-evident that Mr. Crane’s future is now in its most critical stage. Hard work, merciless selfcriticism, and vigilance that the value of a marked individuality may not warp off into the nagging of a mere eccentricity are now vital to his sustained success. The best writers nod into grammatical errors that their own greatness cannot authorize, but of all the authors with any claim on serious attention that I have ever read, Mr. Stephen Crane is the most flagrant desecrator of the memory of Sts. Lindley and Dionysius Thrax. Many of these errors are such as no conceivable proofreaders—those obscure protectors of many an orthographical and grammatical reputation—would have let pass without positive instructions. And such instructions are as inconceivable as such proofreaders. In the book of poems, No. VII., addressed to a “Mystic Shadow,” queries “Whence come ye?” though, of course, “ye” is only a plural pronoun. The use of

“Chelifer” [Rupert Hughes]. “The Rise of Stephen Crane.”Godey’s Magazine 133 (September 1896), pp. 318–319 So sudden a bound into fame as that of the young Mr. Crane has not been permitted to an author for many a weary year. To call his ascent rocket-like is not to overlook his previous and terrestrial efforts, because even a rocket must attract a certain local attention by its vigor preparatory to the abrupt leap at the clouds. But when a youth whose acquaintance with the Twenties is only of short standing is suddenly set about with a mob of “indolent reviewers” grown suddenly violent, and when he is tossed to their shoulders as the superior of Tolstoi and Zola and all other war-painters—in spite of the fact that the war he pictures ended long before he began—when all these unusual 89

“who” and “which” in restrictive clauses where “that” should be used is a bit of slovenliness in which Mr. Crane goes along with too much otherwise goodly company to deserve special attention. The misuse of the solemnities approaches illiteracy in a case like “If thou can see,” which fault is further magnified by the addition of the words “Into my heart that I fear thee not” (LIII.). In LVIII. there is a so-called “sage” who says, “This one is me.” In LXI. it is reiterated that “There was a man and a woman who sinned.” The famous “Red Badge of Courage” bristles more with false grammar than with bayonets. It may be priggishly nice to object to speech about “men who advocated that there were,” etc. (p. 3), or the use of “made fun at” (p. 10), or the misuse of the reflexive “himself” for “him” (p. 27), or “he felt carried along by the mob” (p. 35), or the manneristic placing of “too” at the beginning of a sentence (pp. 24, 163), or to object to the cleft infinitives of pp. 13, 74, 157, etc. But there can surely be no justification for “he wished that he was at home again” (p. 27, cf. p. 165). “There was perspiration and grumblings” with no punctuation to save the construction; “the din became crescendo” (p. 45); “he could not flee no more than a little finger can commit a revolution from a hand” (p. 56): “—the emblem. They were like beautiful birds” (p. 63); “as if he was wearing invisible mittens” (p. 67), and “as if the regiment was” (p. 68, cf. also p. 102); “the majesty of he who,” etc. (p. 68); “some sort of a bundle” (p. 80; “his feet caught aggravatingly,” which does not seem to mean that they swelled (p. 80); “beginning to act dumb and animal-like” (p. 101); “He would have liked to have used” (p. 109); “a soldier would arouse and turn” (p. 135, cf. 139); the continual dialectic abbreviation of “of” into “a’” instead of “o’”;

the use (p. 191) of “epithets” to refer to the noun “mule-drivers”; “whom he knew to be him” (p. 216); “There was, apparently, no considered loopholes” (p. 219), and “brutalities liable to the imagination” (p. 224). “George’s Mother,” too, though short on inspiration, is long on errors, like the continued misuse of “aggravation” (p. 34), “liable” (p. 61), and “aroused” (p. 175). Mr. Crane, in his remarkable aptitude for bold and striking effect, is not only led into a frequent neglect of the timehallowed rights of certain words, but is so tireless in the pursuit of color and vividness that he falls occasionally into almost ludicrous mishap, like the mention of Henry’s mother’s cheeks as “scarred” by tears (“Red Badge,” p. 7), or the reference to a “dauntless statue” (p. 25), as if a statue could be either dauntless or dauntful; on p. 106 we have “terror-stricken wagons;” on p. 195 smoke is “lazy,” which one can understand; but it is more, it is “ignorant.” Page 211 gives us human auricles as “perched ears,” and compels one to wonder if their noses had gone home to roost. Having run on the words “sputtering of musketry” (p. 154), I wrote in the margin, “We have had ‘spattering,’ and ‘splattering,’ and now ‘spluttering.’ The next must be ‘spluttering.’” On 189 I could cry “Eureka!” nay, more, the word occurred twice after that, and on p. 215 we got “gluttering.” What this unrecorded thing may mean one can only guess. It must be one of Wonderland Alice’s “portmanteau words,” formed from “gutter” and “leaking,” perhaps. If the book had been a three-volume edition, the etymologist might perforce have turned entomologist and picked up strange lavender creatures like schruttering, phthuttering, bjuttering, and mnuttering. Mr. Crane is prone to repetition, too—a sort of selfencoring that always saps the reader’s former enthusiasm. It gets on one’s nerves, 90

and one is afraid to approve some novel expression for fear that Mr. Crane also dotes on it and will bring it back like a music-hall performer in reply to a deafening silence of applause. One character in the “Red Badge” is called “the loud soldier” a dozen times; one hears of “a blue demonstration,” till he becomes part of it. At least two times Henry expects the corpses to start up and “squawk” at him; smoke is “slashed” by fire more than once; there is a “m´el´ee” of noise twice in five pages. Everything is “like” something or other till the little word takes on the torment of the waterdrops of the Japanese torture-chamber. Mr. Crane is much noted for his colorscheming. Psychologists and a few of us laymen have met people that see the whole language prismatically, each letter of the alphabet having a definite permanent color that tinges all the words it is part of. Then there are musicians that do not speak of the colors of music merely analogically or rhetorically, but have definite and permanent hues for every chord. A friend of a friend of mine could play you any picture or paint you any sonata you could produce. With such people dispute is impossible for the more blear-eyed of us. De rotis nil disputandum. But Mr. Crane goes further than alphabets and triads. Actions are rainbows to his unscaled eyes. Red is his favorite color. He began painting literature with it in his first book, “Maggie.” The first thousand reds give a bizarre effect and a notable vividness. Thereafter a stack of reds has not the cheer we once imputed to it. We have “a crimson roar” (“Red Badge” p. 82), “crimson fury” (p. 81), “red rage” (p. 57), “the red sickness of battle” (p. 232), “a yellow light on . . . his ambitions” (p. 6), “black words” (p. 201). We have all shades of red oaths except crushed strawberry and peachblow. In “George’s Mother” a man “fell with a yellow crash” (p. 93); there

is “a gray stare” (p. 150); and things go on so luridly that so harmless a thing as “crimson curtains” (p. 173) makes the badgered reader believe himself a bull and Mr. Crane a picador and all the other —dors of the arena. There must hereafter be a “Red Badge of Crane-age.” Mr. Crane has, most of all writers, the defects of his qualities. But the good thing and the rare thing is to have the qualities. These he has. His work is distinctive and his attitude his own. For the sake of these fine things much can be forgiven. His first book, “Maggie,” is now reissued. Its original appearance brought no crimson royalties, though it won reddish praise from the few that examined it. In our issue of November, 1895, we praised it as the strongest representative of American slum-fiction. It has the inevitableness of a Greek tragedy, and the reader that grants to the fate of Euripides’s fanciful “Medea,” an import and significance he refuses to see in the predestined ugliness of the end of this well-meaning “Maggie,” has an outlook on life that is too literary to be true. Indeed, he has misread his classics, if the woes of their creatures leave him uneducated into sympathy with the miseries of the miserables of his own town. As for style, this story is by far the best-balanced thing Mr. Crane has done. It makes no lunge at oddity, and is yet full of fearlessness and vigor. Its truth is patent to any one that knows the life it transcribes. In the new edition one notes many revisions, all of them unimportant and almost all of them ill-advised. It was “The Black Riders” that brought Mr. Crane his first notice. The book was received with wild howls of derision, tempered by an occasional note of abashed praise. That it is neither rimed nor metrical should not excite an admirer of Oriental poetry. That its “lines” were uniformed with small caps, is a matter of little moment. This eccentricity was doubtless 91

only a desire to get out from under the overshadowing mountain of Walt Whitman; and novelty is always a partial excuse. Some of these little chunks of sentiment are mere drivel; most of them are full of marrow. Take this example (VIII.):

expression. Two of the most effective are X. and XXXVII.: Should the wide world roll away, Leaving black terror, Limitless night. No God, nor man, nor place to stand Would be to me essential, If thou and thy white arms were There, And the fall to doom a long way.

I looked here; I looked there; Nowhere could I see my love. And—this time— She was in my heart. Truly, then, I have no complaint, For though she be fair and fairer, She is none so fair as she In my heart.

On the Horizon the peaks assembled; And as i looked. The march of the mountains began. As they marched, they sang, “Aye! we come! we come!”

That is to say that things that are identical are not the same with themselves. Where is the Daniel to translate the latter half of XVI.? But Mr. Crane has been thinking—that is the main thing—and if in his thought experiments he sometimes lands in a blind alley, so do the greatest scientists. The work of the thinker that dares to be unconventional is always beer and skittles for the parodist. The keenest of the Crane parodies is probably this from Town Topics:

But it remained for “The Red Badge” to aggravate the flutter caused by “The Black Riders” into a literary sensation. The American reviewers were excited; the English fairly lost their heads with enthusiasm. His faithfulness to the actuality of war was proclaimed above that of Tolstoi’s “Sebastopol” or Zola’s “La D´ebacle.” All these books forsake the tra´ ditional beauty of battle and go into a devoted study of dead bodies and carnage generally. Mr. Crane is chiefly different in the Yankee irreverence for solemnity that aids in giving realism to the book. Its verisimilitude is marvellous. Mr. Crane must have interviewed many a veteran with the truth-reaching powers of the trained reporter he once was. The work is of the modern school in that even the most heroic things are done with studied awkwardness and innobility. The tone is kept down always where one anticipates a height, as in Henry’s farewell to his mother and to his sweethearts. Even in the charges men do not forget to be plebeian

A Bat on a church steeple. A gray cat on a wall. Wa-a-ow! Do you hear the cat? You are a liar! The grim wail was the yawp Of green-dead hopes— Dead and decayed. Tag ! you are it. But the individuality that, in its excess, gave justice to such a parody, gave birth, too, to a neat thought, or a big thought, here and there; and much of it that is not new is made new by the new way of its 92

and timorous. After the standard-bearer falls, two youths struggle for the flag in the midst of flying bullets; and yet down in their hearts each wishes the other to get it. The psychological value of the book is great. The development of a country gawk who goes to war for no particular reason, and runs away in the first battle, but is finally developed into a brave soldier, is a theme of much dignity, handled with devout earnestness. The book is frankly a study of the details of battle from the limited scope of a private. The scenes with the cowards, with the wounded, and with the victorious are all filled with touches of most intense humanity. The language is frequently of amazing strength and suggestiveness, and one gets from the whole book a view of war that is new, and has every evidence of truth. The episode of the tall spectral soldier who is mortally wounded, but stalks grimly in search of a fit “rendezvous” with death, is one of the most grewsome incidents in our literature, and on a footing with some of Poe’s best work. The final charge is a triumph for the book as well as for the army and the work ends with calm nobility. It fills a niche previously unattempted in our war-romance, and is so fine where it is good that its many errors cannot harm it much. In the “Red Badge” Mr. Crane was a slapdash impressionist. In “George’s Mother” he attains the very peak of the realistic inconsequential. The book has one good scene, Kelcey’s first intoxication. It has a few bits of neat observation. But on the whole, it is not worthy of mention in the same breath with the three other books. All in all Mr. Crane’s vigor is so great and his individuality so distinct that he takes a hardly disputed place at the very head of the American story-writers of the younger school.

“The New American Novelists.” Saturday Review 82 (September 5, 1896), pp. 262–263 UNTIL the languages differentiate, it is necessarily an unscientific method to draw hard-and-fast lines between groups of American and English writers. Yet there are educational differences between the States and this country that are distinctly traceable in the workmanship of the younger writers. The system of the English public school and university, essentially a survival, finds no real counterpart in America; and the consequent predominance of Latin and Greek learning, the tradition of secluded scholarship, the want of intelligent appreciation of commerce and manufacture, the academic habit of criticizing deductively from admitted classics, are less conspicuous in the intellectual life of the States. And in the past English periodical literature and criticism were largely, and are so still to a distinctive extent, under the control of the graduate of Oxford or Cambridge. Through these influences a large amount of the enterprise of our younger men is directed along the line of imitation, the sham antique, the historical novel: the exhausted tradition of Scott dominates many of them, even fatally. From the point of view of artistic development the literary culture of the Universities is almost worse than no culture at all, since it establishes a barrier against all imperfect novelty, and all novelty is necessarily more or less imperfect. The influence of Tolsto¨ı, for instance, of Ibsen, or of Turgenev, is robbed of half its potentialities In this country by the slim self-satisfaction engendered by the academic training. Turgenev, perhaps more 93

than Tolsto¨ı, has influenced us in England, and that chiefly through the French studio and the French critic. His methods are particularly in evidence in the work of Messrs. George Gissing and George Moore. It would be hard to find the suggestions of Tolsto¨ı dominant among contemporary English work. But in the last decade American criticism has become noticeably emancipated from its subservience to the English academic tradition, and the more extensive use of scientific study in higher education there has resulted in a broader and more intelligent view of method and construction. To turn from the amiable fatuities of Mr. Lang in such an English magazine as “Longman’s” to the altogether less graceful and incomparably saner writing of Mr. Boyesen is to turn from the old learning to the new. Clearly there has been an enormous amount of mental activity among the ambitious young men across the Atlantic, and in Mr. Crane and Mr. Cody we have the first-fruits of the growth. Mr. Crane, albeit much more of a theoretical product than critics here have recognized, is evidently a young man of very exceptional ability; Mr. Cody is even more typical in that his mental stature is not conspicuously above that of the common man. And they are both indebted to Tolsto¨ı to an extent out of all comparison with any English writer. The distinction of Tolsto¨ı from the purely descriptive or scientific school of which Turgenev is the prince and Mr. George Gissing the most prominent English exponent lies in the extraordinary use in narrative of sustained descriptions of the mental states of his characters. Great lengths of story are told in a kind of monologue in the third person. Mr. Crane outdoes his master in this direction in the present book almost as much as in “The Red Badge of Courage,” which has already been reviewed in these

columns. And in Mr. Cody, too, to a lesser extent, this peculiarity of Tolsto¨ı prevails. But reading Mr. Cody, one comes upon the danger of the method. Nothing is so profoundly interesting, nothing appeals so vividly to the sympathetic imagination, as mental processes written with a masterly grip of the mind described. But without that masterly grip, or with that grip relaxed for a time! Witness Mr. Cody’s version of the mental processes of a town boy who has quarrelled with his father, and left him:— Alec had often heard how his father, Alexander senior, had gone to the city a poor boy, with only a dollar in his pocket and no immediate prospect of more, how he had worked and starved, and finally succeeded and grown rich. Now a brilliant idea came to him. Why should not he, Alexander junior, a poor city boy, come to the country with only two dollars in his pocket, and make his fortune? Fortune is a curious thing. You never know where it will turn up, and often it fails under the most propitious circumstances. As he lay there in the rosy light of dawn, Alec saw fortunes in farming: the cattle and sheep he had passed were walking mines of gold; country storeand hotel-keeping was an enormous business. At any rate, he was going to tackle the question with energy, and exhaust its possibilities. Yesterday he would have been glad to know where he was to get his next meal. But the episode of Maud’s dollar bill had put him on his mettle. Besides, without his knowing it, a new element had entered his mind. The dim figure of a woman lurked in the background of his thoughts and pricked him on. He pitied her, and it angered him that he was so helpless to help her. 94

That phrase “the rosy light of dawn” gives Mr. Cody’s quality very completely. With the remark that he contrives to keep a story, of such texture as this, interesting from start to finish, we may dismiss him. He has served to illustrate the Tolsto¨ı form in a cheap material, and that is his sole purpose here. But in Mr. Crane’s work not only is the method present, but the matter is admirably sound; young George getting drunk, for instance, in this passage:—

burned his fingers. He inspected them, laughing vaguely. The story in “George’s Mother” is this youngster’s progress along the primrose way, to headaches, fights, and the freedom of the streets. From first to last it goes with immense vigour and sympathy. But the story must be read for its power to be understood, quotation fails for the simple reason that it is bare story and nothing beyond. There are no purple passages, no decorations, no digressions. In the suppression of the author’s personality both these writers are as rigorous as the earlier Mr. George Gissing, and there these disciples of Tolsto¨ı join hands with our inheritors of Turgenev. There is no “style,” no “Charm”; from the standpoint of Mr. Le Gallienne such books as Mr. Crane’s cannot be literature. There it is that these new novelists break most conspicuously from the tradition of the English succession of Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, and Mr. Meredith. Suppression of the author’s personality means, among other things, a renunciation of satire, irony, laughter, and tears. One may doubt if any wide or enduring popular triumphs will reward the abstinence of this new school so long as it persists in the rigour of its method. Yet Falstaff shows that the charm of personality in a derivative form is still possible to a strictly dramatic method. It is well that in criticism the widening separation of novels into the severely descriptive on the one hand and the personal, the novel tinged with essay, on the other, should be clearly recognized. Practically they are already two distinct artistic forms. The great writers relying upon their own personality naturally do not establish schools, they merely engender a pest of imitators. If to-day there is a school of English writers in America following Tolsto¨ı, and a

Of a sudden Kelsey [sic] felt the buoyant thought that he was having a good time. He was all at once an enthusiast, as if he were at a festival of a religion. He felt that there was something fine and thrilling in this affair, isolated from a stern world, and from which the laughter arose like incense. He knew that old sentiment of brotherly regard for those about him. He began to converse tenderly with them. He was not sure of his drift of thought, but he knew that he was immensely sympathetic. He rejoiced at their faces, shining red and wrinkled with smiles. He was capable of heroism. His pipe irritated him by going out frequently. He was too busy in amiable conversations to attend to it. When he arose to go for a match he discovered that his legs were a trifle uncertain under him. They bended, and did not precisely obey his intent. At the table he lit a match, and then, in laughing at a joke made near him, forgot to apply it to the bowl of his pipe. He succeeded with the next match, after annoying trouble. He swayed so that the match would appear first on one side of the bowl and then on the other. At last he happily got it directly over the tobacco. He had 95

school here representing Turgenev, and none to be ascribed to Dickens save such a weakling as Mr. James, and none to Mr. Meredith save a few thieves of the phrase, it lies in that consideration. Apart from their distinctive qualities, English readers will welcome both these books as an indication of the growth of a real and independent critical method across the Atlantic, side by side and directing really original work. That emancipation from the hampering gentilities of the English scholar, one may remember— American readers perhaps stand in need of the reminder—was the dream of Poe.

to deal the book a sharp cut, I felt pleased with myself. That review gave a quotation from the story that seemed to me vulgar and commonplace. When, the other day, by the merest chance, the book came in my way and I read it, because there happened to be nothing else at hand to read, I saw why the reviewer had chosen that quotation. It was the only detachable bit that could misrepresent the story as he wanted to misrepresent it. Out of the context it had no meaning; in its place it was the keystone of the whole structure. But the reviewer did n’t speak of that; he had a point to make. The first chapter of George’s Mother seemed to me just gratuitously low. When I had finished the last I knew what the first chapter meant, and I changed my mind. In other words, the construction of the story is absolutely logical. Taken as a whole, there is nothing insignificant, nothing that does not make for the completeness of the picture, for the consummation of the ghastly tragedy. Then the truth of it, the nice observation and the exquisite humors revealing itself in a thousand little touches, so that you read slowly, not skipping a word, and, greatest of all, the awful pathos of it that makes you every now and then hurriedly lay the book down and sit perfectly still for a while! Yet this is the book, teeming with life, that is said to be dead. This is the book that raised a howl of rage and disgust from earnest reviewers who are supposed to encourage literature. For many reasons I feel profoundly grateful for it—not to the author, however, for a more impersonal story has never existed; if you think of him at all, it is only as the agent through which tremendous forces in nature have been marshaled and expressed. One of these reasons is that it has formulated to myself the justification of the use in literature of utterly squalid material. I can

John D. Barry. “A Literary Phoenix.” Daily Tatler 1 (November 12, 1896), pp. 6–7 When I told a friend that I was going to write an article on George’s Mother, he said, contemptuously, “Why, that was dead long ago.” Well, perhaps it was, if anything may be said to be dead that had hardly any life, for as soon as the book appeared a battalion of enraged reviewers fell upon it, hacked it and then turned exultingly away from the remains with the self-congratulatory manner of people who have done a good work. But is n’t there some animal that has a way of pretending to be dead and then springing up full of energy? I have a feeling that George’s Mother is like that animal. I could n’t read The Red Badge of Courage. I suspect that there are others—but I ’ll let that pass. So when George’s Mother first appeared I did n’t take the trouble to find what it was like. Then, when I saw the first of the reviews 96

imagine Mr. Crane’s theme treated in a way that would make it the really debasing thing the reviewers have called George’s Mother. But Mr. Crane’s book is its own justification; it teaches us what the lesson of the life it depicts would teach us if we were to know it at first hand, the dreadful pity of it. I do n’t see how any one could resent or blame the characters in George’s Mother; given the conditions surrounding them, and they had to be what they were. In this lies the whole pathos of all human life! The mystery of the treatment which George’s Mother has received bewilders me when I think of the intense humanity of the story. It is the most heartrending picture of mother-love that I have ever seen in literature, and mother-love is a theme that ought to touch even critics. Yet the book is not for one instant either mawkish or morbid! How exquisitely humorous is the sketch of that fierce little mother doing battle with her household gods before her boy’s return from work, pausing for rest, and then going wildly into the fray again. And how fine is the picture of the great young man at the little table at home, leaning back in his chair “in the manner of the man who is paying for things,” while the eager little mother “perched on the edge of her chair, ready to spring to her feet and run to the closet or the stove for anything he might need.” The description of their going to meeting together is a unique example of impressionism in literature, as wonderful as a picture by Claude Monet. For the matter of that the whole book is the work of a master of literary impressionism. Whatever Mr. Crane may be in The Red Badge of Courage, he is not a realist in George’s Mother. The little mother is real, but the son stands for a class, not an individual. Mr. Crane’s conversation I don’t believe in for a moment, nor do I believe that life is exactly as

he depicts it, any more than I think the pictures of the impressionists are like the life they see. But the impressionists think they see what they describe, and that is enough. In George’s Mother Mr. Crane has written a great book, and I shall be amazed if it does not have a revival.

R[obert] S[teed] D[unn]. “Book Notices: ‘George’s Mother.’” Harvard Monthly 23 (December 1896), p. 125 Half we hear of Mr. Crane to-day is spoken either with the sneer of the journalist, jealous at laurels so easily won, or the absurd adulation of some overzealous admirer. What we have not seen is a temperate treatment of the intent of Mr. Crane’s work. Whether or not he is with us to stay, in view of a possible influence on contemporary writers which they may exert, such books as The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie have made an impression on the literary public deep enough to demand serious discussion. George’s Mother is a brother work to Maggie. It is written in that same spirit of social pessimism that rouses in us anything but the pity of love for the other half of humanity. The theme, that of parental love, in whose service Mr. Crane wields his yellow adjectives, makes the work far stronger in appeal than Maggie. Certainly, as a tragedy, it is eminently more successful. But why will Mr. Crane always treat us to the tragic side of life? Some things have already been said of young writers’ insistence on dealing only with 97

the cynical: opinions have been urged that this is an easier, a meaner art. Yet whatever may be the significance of such an aspect of Mr. Crane’s work, we feel that George’s Mother, no less than his other three published works, should be read by all who have at heart the life of our literature. They are signs of the times, and we should seize our opportunity to judge for ourselves whether they point forward or downward.

“Books and Authors.” Boston Traveler, June 6, 1896, p. 10. New York Sun, June 13, 1896, p. 7. “Stephen Crane’s Stories.” Philadelphia Press, June 21, 1896, p. 36. New York Times, June 21, 1896, p. 27. “Some of the New Fiction.” Argonaut 38 (June 22, 1896), p. 9. “Among the Newest Books: Novels and Short Stories.” Book Buyer 13 (July 1896), pp. 357–358. “Notes.” Citizen 2 (July 1896), p. 177. “New Books.” New York Press, July 12, 1896, p. 26. Frank Rinder. Academy 50 (July 25, 1896), p. 64. “Book Notes.” Peterson Magazine 6 (August 1896), p. 871. “Novels.” Manchester Guardian, August 1, 1896, p. 10. Neith Boyce. “Book Notes and News.” Lotus 1 (September 1896), p. 983.

Checklist of Additional Reviews Jeannette L. Gilder. “Romance by Swinburne, and Realism by Crane.” New York World, May 31, 1896, p. 20.

98

MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS New York: D. Appleton and Company 1896

Henry Edward Rood. “Stephen Crane’s ‘Maggie.’” New York Mail and Express, May 30, 1896, p. 18 Several years ago Stephen Crane wrote a story of slum life in New York and printed it himself in brown paper covers with the title “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets.” During the last six months he has rewritten the tale, and soon it will be published by Messrs. D. Appleton & Co., through whose courtesy advance sheets have been carefully examined. And the conviction is forced upon one that by writing “Maggie” Mr. Crane has made for himself a permanent place in literature. It matters not if he continues to grind out grotesque verse and slipshod short stories. These may injure him temporarily so far as money returns are concerned. But it is enough that he has written “Maggie”—one of the most powerful, terrible and hideous studies of the dregs of humanity that have been produced in the English language. There will be discussion as to the advisability of writing for perusal by the general public such a book as “Maggie.” Some will say it is unfit for reading by decent people; others that its masterful presentation of existing barbarism in the chief of American cities will result in renewed effort to better the condition of those miserable, bestial creatures in human form who reside in certain portions of the East side. The few who will regard “Maggie” simply from a literary standpoint will realize that Zola himself scarcely has surpassed its tremendous portrayal of throbbing, breathing, moving life, and also will the few realize that Mr. Crane’s remark-

able work clothes vice, and debauchery, and crime not alluringly, but in such manner that they are intensely revolting. Yet “Maggie” is not a book fit to place before any but mature readers. Much of the action of the story takes place in the Rum Alley tenement, where Maggie lives with her brother Jimmie and her drunken, hypocritical mother, and where her father and a younger brother died. The brawls, the cruelty, the almost inhuman attitude of the tenement dwellers are vividly portrayed. Each character in the book is enveloped in an individual atmosphere of sickening sin, excepting Maggie herself; and for her alone is the reader compelled to feel pity unmixed with disgust as he follows her career of a few short years, from childhood at home to girlhood in a collar factory; and her betrayal by a bartender, who deserts her and forces her to take to the streets, and then to kill herself. Regardless of consequences Mr. Crane has placed before us a series of pictures of the lowest dregs of humanity, and with such masterful strength that the reader gasps as he follows the awful tale. Nothing is left to the reader’s imagination; all is put forth in detail. Spades are called spades every time. And yet, in stolidly refusing to mention the good work being done by Christian people to help the creatures of whom he writes, Mr. Crane is guilty of a very serious literary offense. He has exposed the nauseating, horrible ulcer; but he has deliberately declined even to mention the surgeons who are doing all in their power to cure the disease, and that, too, without money and without price. This attempted deception of the reading public—for it is nothing less—is the one weak point of the book. As to Mr. Crane’s literary workmanship, one cannot say that he has improved upon the foolish straining after effect so noticeable in “The Red Badge of

101

Courage.” Following are examples from “Maggie,” and they might be multiplied several times, if necessary: “From a window of an apartment house that uprose from amid squat ignorant stables there leaned a curious woman.” (p. 2) “They had a lurid altercation.” (p. 15) “He lived some red years without laboring.” (p. 28) “After a time his sneer grew so that it turned its glare upon all things.” (p. 32) “She received a stool and a machine in a room where sat twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent.” (p. 39) “He waved his hands like a man of the world who dismisses religion and philosophy, and says ‘Rats!’” (p. 41) “He had friends and people who were afraid of him.” (p. 50) “An orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men, on an elevated stage near the center of a great greenhued hall, played a popular waltz.” (p. 52) “He stood around looking heavy, while Maggie giggled in glee.” (p. 64) “Once at the menagerie, he went into a trance of admiration before the spectacle of a very small monkey ∗ ∗ ∗ ” (p. 64) “The latter spent most of his time out at soak in pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver rescuing aged strangers from villains.” (p. 68) “The quiet stranger had sprawled very pyrotechnically out on the sidewalk.” (p. 97) “A tall young man, smoking a cigarette with a sublime air, strolled near the girl. He had on evening dress, a mustache, a chrysanthemum, and a look of ennui, all of which he kept carefully under his eye.” (p. 141)

Mr. Crane has yet to learn that grotesque combinations of words and phrases do not constitute the basis of literary style.

“A Work by Stephen Crane.” New York Times, May 31, 1896, p. 31 Mr. Crane took out a copyright on this story in 1893, or about two years before he acquired fame as the author of “The Red Badge of Courage,” and a new copyright was taken out this year, which indicates revisions. But we are informed from the best sources that the story has never been actually published before, even in serial form. That Mr. Crane had written a story with this title was, however, known—at least to a limited circle. This fact will scarcely detract from the interest with which the story will now be received. On the contrary, it is likely to add to that interest. Whether or not Mr. Crane in 1893 found difficulty in securing a publisher, it will now seem hardly credible to readers that it went long in pursuit of one. The story is a sad one. Not one gleam of light or of humor falls across its sombre pages. Not only is it a story of a girl of the streets—one, however, who was far better than her environment—but a story of the lowest, most vicious tenement-house life. Save for this girl, there is not a character in the book who does not drink, curse, and fight. She alone was free from vices of those sorts, and after she had fallen such was the unconsciousness with which she fell that she never dreamed she was bad. From a home in which drink and blasphemy were constantly indulged in by her

102

father and mother, she had gone to live with a man who seemed to her a hero of the tenements, but who, as a matter of course, was a man of another sort. Mr. Crane pictures Maggie’s home with colors now lurid and now black, but always with the hand of an artist. And the various stages of her career, until in despair at being neglected she, we are led to believe, commits suicide by jumping into the river, are shown with such vivid and terrible accuracy as to make one believe they are photographic. Mr. Crane cannot have seen all that he describes, and yet the reader feels that he must have seen it all. This, perhaps, is the highest praise one can give the book. Mr. Crane is a master of slum slang. His dialogues are surprisingly effective and natural. The talk Pete indulges in while intoxicated makes one see in his mind’s eye the very figure of the loathsome beast for the loss of whom Maggie died. But Mr. Crane is, perhaps, as happy in some of his descriptive phrases. Here are examples: “Over on the island a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of a gray, ominous building and crawled slowly along the river’s bank.” “The little boy ran to the halls shrieking like a monk in an earthquake.” “The arms of the combatants whirled in the air like flails. The faces of the men, at first flushed to flame-colored anger, now began to fade to the pallor of warriors in the blood and heat of battle. Their lips curled back and stretched tightly over the gums in ghoul-like grins. Through their white, gripped teeth struggled hoarse whisperings of oaths. Their eyes glittered with murderous fire.” “He could appear to strut even while sitting still, and he showed that he was a lion of lordly characteristics by the air with which he spat.”

Mr. Crane’s story should be read for the fidelity with which it portrays a life that is potent on this island, along with the life of the best of us. It is a powerful portrayal, and, if sombre and repellent, none the less true, none the less freighted with appeal to those who are able to assist in righting wrongs.

“Recent Fiction.” New York Tribune, May 31, 1896, p. 26 Mr. Stephen Crane in “Maggie” studies New-York tenement-house life with the pretence of aggressive realism. He puts on paper the grossness and brutality which are commonly encountered only through actual contact with the most besotted classes. Oaths, drunkenness, rags, stained walls, cut heads, black eyes, broken chairs, delirious howlings, the flat staleness of a police report are his properties. In his finished book they are still raw material with the edge of their offensiveness in no way taken off: for Mr. Crane entirely lacks the ability which has enabled some other men to deal with sordid, disgusting and vicious themes in a way that made them at least entertaining. He has no charm of style, no touch of humor, no hint of imagination. His story is one of unrelieved dulness in which the characters interest neither by their words nor acts, are depraved without being either thrilling or amusing, are dirty without being picturesque. There is nothing enticing in their lives nor uplifting in the contemplation of their sorrows. There is nothing alluring in the evils they exhibit. They are not even piquantly wicked, and their talk is as dreary as their lives are empty. Mr. Crane has attempted the accurate reproduction of the tenement dialect,

103

but has succeeded in presenting only its brutal side. He has learned its billingsgate. He does not know anything of the quaint idiom and odd inflection which made Mr. Townsend’s slum talk at once alive and pleasing. Nor does he show any knowledge of the interesting human traits, the quick wit, the self conceit, the local sense of the cockney which make the Bowery Boy a character. He sees only dulness and dirt. The book shocks by the mere fact of its monotonous and stupid roughness. To read its pages is like standing before a loafer to be sworn at and have one’s face slapped twice a minute for half an hour. Mr. Crane was ill-advised to allow the present publication of this story. Three years ago he printed and circulated it as the work of Johnston Smith, and it attracted almost no attention. Now it is reissued to take advantage of the talk concerning his later work. It has been rendered somewhat less disgusting than formerly by the evident aid of some friendly editor who realises that there might be limits to the public appetite for profanity. About three “great crimson oaths” have been eliminated from each page. People now “trow fits” part of the time instead of “raising hell,” and the small boy threatens to “paste yeh” rather than “club hell outa yeh.” Plentiful dashes have also been judiciously introduced. The same hand might well have suppressed the whole book.

“Stephen Crane’s Slum Story.” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 6, 1896, p. 10 As prentice work this is a strong piece of lurid realism. From no hand save Kipling’s

has there come such a reeking, roaring, repulsive epitome of the nethermost slums. Though “Maggie” was written several years ago, before “The Red Badge of Courage,” it seemed it has never before been published anywhere. Even with the profanity and rum-soaked materials one can scarcely understand how it should have been refused by all the publishers. Like the maturer “Red Badge,” this story shows Mr. Crane’s strength to lie in an almost photographic realism, relieved at frequent intervals by dashes of peculiar objective color. A study of Mr. Crane’s work will show that his most characteristic feature is his trick of translating subjective emotions into objective imagery, accompanied with simple words of color. The idea is like that of the blind man who described the color of red as resembling a trumpet blast. Mr. Crane’s “black anger,” his “crimson curses,” his “livid fury,” his “lurid altercations,” all appeal to the mind through the color sense. On one of the first pages of “Maggie” one finds this characteristic color picture: “Over on the island a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of a gray ominous building and crawled slowly along the river’s bank.” The story opens with a bloody picture of a street fight among the children of the New York slums. “A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil’s Row, who were circling madly about the heap and pelting him . . . The little boys seemed to leer gloatingly at the blood upon the other child’s face. A stone had smashed in Jimmie’s mouth. Blood was bubbling over his chin and down his ragged shirt.” But this chapter is only the mild and dainty introduction to Jimmie’s home life. His father comes along, kicks him out of the fight, and drags him home, where his drunken mother pounds him and where

104

Jimmy greets his sister Maggie with fraternal blows. Maggie is the only bit of brightness in the whole appalling picture. Every other character breathes only oaths and alcoholic fumes. Maggie is a shade above the rest. The father drinks himself to death and the mother divides her time between the gutter and the lockup. Jimmie grows up “a man of leather.” “He lived some red years without laboring. During that time his sneer became chronic.” He became a truck driver with a proper contempt for all pedestrians and for street cars. “In him grew a majestic contempt for those strings of street cars that followed him like intent bugs. A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing that he loved with a distant, doglike devotion. It had been known to overturn a street car.” But Maggie found a hero—a lover— an “elegant” bartender. He was a smart youth with a correct sense of personal superiority. “He could appear to strut even while sitting still, and he showed that he was a lion of lordly characteristics by the air with which he spat.” Maggie adored him and went to see melodramas with him. “When anybody died in the pale green snow-storms the gallery mourned. They sought out the painted misery and hugged it as skin.” When Maggie’s fall comes she scarcely knows it, so little has she seen of higher things. The story wends its way about among black alleys and flaring saloons, amid the dregs of humanity: yet the pathos of Maggie’s world-old tragedy almost redeems the grossness of the surroundings. And when her death finally comes upon the streets one feels only the utter hopelessness of the struggle in the human gehennas of our great cities. The book is too redolent of the slums to be pleasant reading or to qualify it for a place on the center table in a refined home.

Yet one cannot deny that even the dirt is real dirt, and that it has been handled by one who, although often leaving traces of crudity, has in him the powers of a titanic artist. To those good people who enjoy the pastime of “slumming” Mr. Crane will be a most satisfactory guide. He will take them to a region whose smell they will not get off their clothes for a week.

“Mr. Crane’s ‘Maggie.’” Chicago Evening Post, June 6, 1896, p. 5 The temptation to turn several honest pennies has been too much for Stephen Crane and that fortune-favored young man rushes into print with two stories totally unworthy of the author of “The Red Badge of Courage.” “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets” was first printed at Mr. Crane’s own expense. Later it was noticed by W. D. Howells and now D. Appleton & Co. are about to publish it. From the advance sheets it appears that “Maggie” is a slum story of the most aggravated type. The author is vastly pleased to portray this phase of life, it would seem, and positively revels in things unclean and unsober and unhappy. He thoroughly identifies himself with his subjects and is quite to the gutter born, so lost is he to the people he describes. His men and women break all the commandments and more, too, and the only bright ray in the whole tale is the suggestion of the possibility of virtue in the girl Maggie, had circumstances admitted of her enjoyment of such a luxury. “Maggie” is a piece of work Stephen Crane may well be ashamed of, and it is to be hoped the future will see better things from this promising writer.

105

The second story, “George’s Mother,” published by Edward Arnold, treats of the same theme in a measure, though it is not so revolting as “Maggie.” Mr. Crane’s English is just as painful, but fortunately his stock of oaths has been exhausted, it seems, and altogether the air about this book is a little clearer and a little easier to breathe. The mistake is made here that photography is art and that a literal report of an incident is the highest interpretation of which the subject is capable. The result is that both stories abound in superfluous realism and are bald and poor beyond redemption. Mr. Crane will not make any new friends with “Maggie” and “George’s Mother,” and the danger is he will lose many old ones.

“Art and Letters.” Hartford Daily Courant, June 16, 1896, p. 8 The primary question for the critic concerning any book is: How has the author succeeded in his or her aim? Looked at this way Stephen Crane’s “Maggie” is a success. Mr. Crane tries to give with unreserved realism the sordid, vicious, brutal life of the New York tenements and saloons as it is, in accents and action, and he does it. We doubt if it has ever been better done. Maggie’s mother is a drunkard who beats her when she isn’t breaking the furniture—yet this mother is properly shocked when Maggie, seduced and then left by a bar-tender, ends her days in the river, and can only be brought to forgive the erring child at the solicitations of a neighbor. The satire of the situation lies in this mother’s unconsciousness of the fact that Maggie’s whole environment prepared her for sin and suicide. Whether

the moral conveyed, the sympathy excited, is sufficient excuse for the parading of so much low misery must be left to individual taste; it is debatable. Viewed as a work of art, it is enough to say that “Maggie” convinces and fulfills its purpose.

“New Books.” New York Sun, June 20, 1896, p. 7 “Maggie,” by Stephen Crane, is a story of a truck driver, a bartender, and a girl who worked in a collar and cuff factory. It is a story of impressionistic realism, like Mr. Crane’s war story, “The Red Badge of Courage,” which the London reviewers, with unanimity and enthusiasm, pronounced the real thing. “Maggie” is also the real thing, we should think, though it may be that it is not any the more lovely by reason of that circumstance. The truck driver’s name is Jimmie, and he and Maggie are brother and sister. It is wonderful that they should ever have grown up. The combined experience in war of Napoleon Bonaparte, Frederick the Great, Lord Nelson, Julius Caesar, and Scipio Africanus could scarcely have involved the turmoil and the violence that surrounded and befell this pair. In the first twenty pages of this story there is more noise and riot than we should have supposed it possible for even forty volumes of fiction to contain. Roars, valiant roars, roaring curses, and roaring babies fill the first twenty pages, and there is also, on page 10, a muffled “roar of conversation.” The first twenty pages would be remarkable in the book, perhaps, were it not for the circumstance that the other pages are a good deal like them. “Yer fader, d—n his soul.” “Jimmie sat nursing his various wounds.” “Maggie broke a plate.”

106

“‘Good Gawd!’ she howled.” “The little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake.” These are mere sentiments or impressions gathered by opening the pages of “Maggie” quite casually. They sound like the real thing, though we have absolutely no notion regarding the shouting of a monk in an earthquake. “The inexperienced fibres of the boy’s eyes were hardened at an early age. He became a young man of leather. He lived some red years without laboring. During that time his sneer became chronic.” That is about Jimmie. We should never dream of contradicting it. “Jimmie’s occupation for a long time was to stand on street corners and watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing of pretty women.” Surely we need not go on quoting: anybody can see from so much that the book is lurid enough to be forty times the real thing. There is a chapter of excellent humor, describing Jimmie’s manner of driving a truck; but not all the humor is intentional. Pete himself, and Jimmie, and Jimmie’s besotted mother come to no conclusion in the story. They are left to continue the blood-red life through the red years. Perhaps that is the proper punishment for them. Jimmie’s sneer is chronic, it is to be remembered, and the bartender must pay to have his jackets laundered.

“Literature.” Boston Budget 26 (June 21, 1896), p. 2

Yet the tale shows a great deal of talent— closeness of observation and a happy facility for description that brings a scene vividly before the mind’s eye. But it indicates no constructive ability. It is a series of detached pictures, in which the barroom and the concert saloon are the principal features. It paints the lowest of slum life in New York, and the dialogue is as gross and realistic as decency will permit. It is vigorous enough, a trifle too emphatic, in fact, and one soon wearies of the clipped words and the argot of the gutter. We doubt, too, if the older people would use the language put in the mouths for the younger. It is more likely that the former would employ some foreign brogue, even if they used Bowery slang occasionally. The author’s portrayal of character is that of a superficial looker on. He has no intimate knowledge of the life he attempts to depict. He is an excellent reporter in this volume, but not a profound student of human nature. Nevertheless, the present book, which was written before “The Red Badge of Courage,” though not published until recently, is creditable as the work of a young man barely out of the hobbledehoy period, who tells what he knows from the outside, and no more. There is no light and shade in the novel. It is the dismal record of the experiences of a girl who was foredoomed to shame. The only wonder is that she retained her virtue as long as she did among her disreputable surroundings.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 28, 1896, p. 28

If Stephen Crane had published “Maggie” before he gave to the world “The Red Badge of Courage” his fame as a novelist would have been like that of hundreds of others who have written stories for a day. It would not have lived beyond a year.

The only comfortable thing about “Maggie,” the latest story by Stephen Crane, which the Appletons have published, is a paragraph in the preface which tells us

107

that the story was written and copy righted three years ago. Mr. Crane is now about 24 years old and as a youthful offense “Maggie” may be forgiven and forgotten. The latter fate is sure to overtake it anyway. It is the work of a boy who has tried to see straight and tell plainly the conditions of the tenement house population of New York. The trouble with Mr. Crane’s vision is that he has seen only, or chiefly, the obvious things. He has seen and smelt and heard all the coarseness, drunkenness, profanity, crime and vice of the life and he has put as much of it into his story as the censorship over the press will allow: enough at any rate so that one can supply the things he omits. The result is that the repulsiveness of the situation is unrelieved by contrast and that the coarseness of the picture is as sickening as in Navy Street on a hot day when the garbage wagons have not been their rounds for weeks. There are traces of humor in the book but they are blunted and dulled by the prevailing coarseness. The realism is intended to be absolute and the dialect is that which newspaper stories of the East Side have taught us is the proper thing in this field. As Mr. Crane wrote the story three years since no doubt he is the original discoverer and the other reporters are the imitators in conveying this precious patois to the public. At best it is but a doubtful honor. Mr. Townsend got some fun out of the “W’at t’ell?” and other verbal vagaries of his Chimmie, but Mr. Crane is too earnest for fun and the similar phrases as he prints them, are simply coarse. Nevertheless, “Maggie” is a remarkable book. It seems the mistake of a man of genius, and when Mr. Crane shall have learned to see more and to tell less, his stories of the tenements may be profoundly tragic. There are half pages when it seems that “Maggie” is about to become that, but they never become whole pages.

Arthur George Sedgwick. Nation, 63 (July 2, 1896), p. 15 Mr. Stephen Crane is said never to have seen a battle; but his first book, “The Red Badge of Courage,” is made up of the account of one. The success of the story, however, is due, not merely to what Mr. Crane knows of battle-fields, but to what he knows of the human heart. He describes the adventures of a private—a raw recruit—in one of those long engagements, so common in our civil war, and indeed in all modern wars, in which the field of battle is too extensive for those in one part of it to know what is going on elsewhere, and where often a regiment remains in ignorance for some time whether it is victorious or defeated, where the nature of the country prevents handto-hand fighting, and a coup d’œil of the whole scene is out of the question. In such an action Mr. Crane’s hero plays an active part. It is what goes on in his mind that we hear of, and his experience is in part so exactly what old soldiers tell young soldiers to expect that Mr. Crane might easily have got it at second-hand. The hero is at first mortally afraid that he is going to be afraid, he then does his duty well enough, but later is seized with a panic and runs away, only to come out a hero again in the end. His panic and flight are managed well; the accidental wound which he luckily gets in running, helps him to a reputation for bravery before he has earned it. When he fights in the end, he fights like a devil, he saves the regimental flag, he is insane with the passion of battle; he is baptized into the brotherhood of those who have been to hell and returned alive. The book is undeniably clever; its vice is

108

over-emphasis. Mr. Crane has not learnt the secret that carnage is itself eloquent, and does not need epithets to make it so. What is a “crimson roar”? Do soldiers hear crimson roars, or do they hear simply roars? If this way of getting expression out of language is allowable, why not extend it to the other senses, and have not only crimson sounds, but purple smells, prehensile views, adhesive music? Color in language is just now a fashionable affectation; Mr. Crane’s originality does not lie in falling into it. “George’s Mother” is the story of a degenerate drunkard who breaks his mother’s heart; “Maggie” is a story of the Bowery, in the “dialect” of “Chimmie Fadden.” Taking all three stories together, we should classify Mr. Crane as a rather promising writer of the animalistic school. His types are mainly human beings of the order which makes us regret the power of literature to portray them. Not merely are they low, but there is little that is interesting in them. We resent the sense that we must at certain points resemble them. Even the old mother is not made pathetic in a human way; her son disgusts us so that we have small power of sympathy with her left. Maggie it is impossible to weep over. We can feel only that it is a pity that the gutter is so dirty, and turn in another direction. In short, Mr. Crane’s art is to us very depressing. Of course, there is always the crushing reply that one who does not love art for the sake of art is a poor devil, not worth writing for. But we do not; we do not even love literature for its own sake. It is only fair to say that what we have called animalism others pronounce wonderful realism. We use the word animalism for the sake of clearness, to denote a species of realism which deals with man considered as an animal, capable of hunger, thirst, lust, cruelty, vanity, fear, sloth, predacity, greed, and other passions

and appetites that make him kin to the brutes, but which neglects, so far as possible, any higher qualities which distinguish him from his four-footed relatives, such as humor, thought, reason, aspiration, affection, morality, and religion. Real life is full of the contrasts between these conflicting tendencies, but the object of the animalistic school seems always to make a study of the genus homo which shall recall the menagerie at feeding-time rather than human society.

Edward Bright. “A Melodrama of the Streets.” Illustrated American 20 (July 11, 1896), p. 94 A novel by Stephen Crane, entitled Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, has just been published by D. Appleton & Co. It is the last of the talented young author’s works to see the light, but it is the first in point of composition. I base this inference on the fact that it was put in type and copyrighted three years ago. Now, allowing six months for the writing, this ought to take us back to the dawn of a career still in its infancy. I have thought it best to emphasize this circumstance, because I wish to be absolutely just to the author. I have done so, furthermore, because I have found it extremely difficult to reconcile my undisguised admiration for Mr. Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage with any dissatisfaction with Maggie. The difference between these two books is so great that, were I to neglect chronology, I should have to confess that Mr. Crane’s talents are in a process of degeneration.

109

My objection might be phrased differently—and perhaps more accurately— were I to say that as between The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie, the dissimilarity is mainly noticeable in the greater conventionality of the latter. This is extraordinary, considering the wellknown character of the author’s work, and, according to my view, can be explained only on the ground that Maggie is an immature effort in a most ambitious field of literary art. In further explanation of my meaning, let the reader reflect that the slums presents itself to the imagination of most prosperous and well-bred people under one of two aspects: Either it is a locale replete with the raw material of sentiment, or it is a battle-ground of unspeakable sordidness, a loathsome pit infested by monsters in human form, who pass their lives preying on one another—a menace to respectable society, a source of dread even to the wellarmed policeman. Now, it is because, knowing somewhat of the slums of New York and having arrived at certain definite conclusions from my experience, I have for several years contended that Richard Harding Davis’s sentimental slum sketches are as false to the actual conditions as I am now reluctantly forced to own is Mr. Crane’s presentation of the life of the same locality. There is little to choose between hollow sentimentality and lurid melodrama. In the bare facts of Maggie’s career I am able to believe. Credulity is not taxed by learning that her home—or the miserable tenement which passed for a home— was sordid; neither am I surprised to be told that she drifted easily into a still more hapless life. There is something shocking but quite natural in the fact that Pete was the instrument of her ruin. Yes! Mr. Crane has used his notebook to good effect; his story bears unmis-

takable evidences of being observed, and observed on the spot. I will go so far as even to admit that there are a few scenes and passages of dialogue in Mr. Crane’s story of masterly vigor and convincing reality. I make no objection to the details—or to most of them. My quarrel with the author begins and ends with his general conception of the life of the slums. To change the form of expression, he might be likened to an artist who knows how to draw but cannot paint. He has “laid in” an admirable sketch, which raises one’s hopes high for the success of the finished picture. But the moment he begins to lay on his colors it is evident that he is a caricaturist, not an artist; and, to make matters worse, he is a caricaturist without humor. Space does not permit me to prove my indictment by quotations, but I would call the reader’s attention to the fight with which the book opens, and would ask that special attention be given to the adjectives employed in describing the affray. There are gentler modes of exercise than an EastSide fight, but I protest that even the sturdy children of the tenements are maligned by Mr. Crane’s adjectives.

“Stephen Crane’s Daughter of the Tenements.” Argonaut (July 13, 1896) “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” by Stephen Crane, is not a new book in every sense of the term, inasmuch as it was written and put in type but not published three years ago, but it is the book of the week

110

and will undoubtedly be widely read. Its author was an obscure reporter up to a few months ago, but his extraordinary little compositions, called “Lines,” drew attention to his originality, and his “Red Badge of Courage” set him among the new lights to be counted with. “Maggie” is like Mr. Crane’s other recently published story, “George’s Mother,” in being a series of pictures among the degraded poor of a great city. In the opening scene, Jimmie Johnson is shown as the infant champion of Rum Alley, waging fierce battle with the savage urchins of Devil’s Row. His father takes refuge in the corner saloon from the shrewish tongue of his drunken wife, and Maggie and Jimmie are the victims of their befuddled anger. The parents, the boy, and the girl differ from their savage prototypes of the stone age only in their superior material surroundings, and of these the most prominent feature is the ease with which they can procure intoxicants. When Jimmie’s father has died and he himself has taken his place at the head of the family, returning home drunk and fighting with his mother, he introduces to his home a friend, a flashy “bar-keep” from the Bowery, and this person fascinates Maggie, now a factory girl, and accomplishes her ruin. The mother, who has become a drink-maddened virago, and Jimmie, who is himself not guiltless of the bar-keeper’s crime, drive the girl away, and she is brought back to them a corpse. There is the story. It is told in a score of scenes, each portrayed with a graphic power that one can not help wishing had been better used. The characters are all strongly drawn and possessed of distinct individuality, and the reader will not soon forget them. But they are not the kind of beautiful pictures to hang on memory’s wall.

Amy Leslie. “Books and the Builders.” Chicago Daily News, July 22, 1896, p. 4 One New Year there reached me a slip of paper squirming under the autograph of Stephen Crane in which the author of “The Black Riders” and other beatitudes beguiled himself and me with two characteristic sentences. One is “My dear Indian, did you really like the stuff?” and the other is “A long, flaming ’96 to you!” Crane could not wish a body happy new year in the humor of any other being; it had to be long and flaming or broad and purple or wide and scarlet for Stephen. His “Maggie” is put into dashing robes by Appleton and is perhaps as vehement and realistic a sketch of l’enfant du pav´e as any presented to end-of-race literature. It is a hopeless brutalizing of truth, but it is truth, and while it is as a reeking young breath against Moore’s or Crockett’s slum masterpieces, “Maggie” is the impressionistic defiled by vivid naturalism, and that is almost a discovery. Crockett’s “Cleg Kelly” is in some respects the greatest work of melodramatic romance ever drawn from the slums. But it is a ponderous parade of horrors full of probable impossibilities and picturesque vice with tangent revolutions and the usual Crockett extravagance of fancy. In Crane’s “Maggie” and Crockett’s “Cleg Kelly” almost identical situations furnish the motives for the two stories. Crockett leads his faithful out of Sodom with a suggestion of the pillar of fire and flaming sword, but Crane skillfully lets his sinners sink and sink until the torture of their degradation is venomous and blinding. Of the two Crane’s is truer and all art pulses in its sodden

111

realism, but Crockett’s story will outlive “Maggie.”

“The Slums in Fiction.” Hartford Daily Times, July 22, 1896, p. 13 There are two opinions of the value of Mr. Crane’s work, according to the temper of the critic and the point of view from which it is judged. If we leave all question of Stephen Crane, the author, out of account and judge “Maggie” as the work of an unknown writer, it is easy to recognize its brutal frankness of description of details and its lack of any suggestion of higher life than is known to the people with whom it deals. He has attempted to photograph separate scenes in the life of a street girl of New York, and because these scenes follow chronologically and end in a tragedy we are invited to regard them as a useful study of a type. No one but a most uncompromising realist can accept the work at this valuation. The essence of character study is to recognize and reproduce salient features of the type, and ignore those which are not characteristic. There are those who may say that the writer of “Maggie” does this, but in truth what he has caught is the surface only. Maggie is a girl of the streets; if Balzac had drawn her she would have been the girl of the streets. With his wonderful insight he would have given us the one girl who embodies the class. This distinction is too plain to need elucidation for those who can understand it at all, but it has been ignored by half the reviewers of the book and probably much more than half of its readers. Nor does failure in this sense prevent the book from having

an unholy interest. It is repulsive, but it is not easy to avoid reading it through if one begins. To recur to the original illustration, it presents views of a new life which are like photographs made in a strange, squalid region where novelty and rudeness supply the attraction elsewhere found in beauty and nobility. One does not want too much of it, but for once in a way it claims attention. Besides this there is the secret inherited inclination of most of us to the frank description of brutal life which sets ordinary laws of civility, honor and decency at defiance, a feeling which furnishes the only explanation of the popularity of a good many modern stories. “Maggie” has had, and will have a great number of readers, but it is true enough that most of them might read something else to better advantage, for its art is false, and the epigrammatic, touch-and-go style and the sop it offers to curiosity about people who are more talked of than known deceive an average reader into supposing he gets much more than is really set before him.

“‘Maggie.’” Westminster Gazette (July 31, 1896) Mr. Crane displays his wonted talent in this little book, hardly a hundred and fifty pages in length, and perhaps some of his finest work. It is the story of a child of the streets, a tragedy that gives pain from the first page to the last, powerful and realistic—amazingly realistic. The author strides over our prejudices of sentimentality, refuses to handle the colour with which most writers soften the black and white of facts, even ignores dramatic sensation, yet withal we find a tender beauty,

112

a humane sensitiveness throughout the work that leaves the reader touched with more than the mere consciousness of inevitable suffering. The rage at dishonour that assails the drunken mother on hearing of her daughter’s disgrace, the love that stimulates the girl to leave her home, the passionate determination of the brother to avenge her wrong, and his constant reflection—Have other women brothers? Therefore dare we wrong any if we ourselves feel this?—all suggest human nature struggling to rise above conditions, and in a sense rising above them. We have here a penetration and conception that goes beyond Mr. Howell’s [sic] idea of “fatal necessity.” The story is a tragedy of the outcome of character, not of conditions, and because of that quality it is great.

Marco Morrow. “Stories of the Slums.” Womankind (August 1896) Slums in America—the land of freedom and plenty and all that—seem to call for an apology from some one. Perhaps the spellbinders who are to enlighten the masses in the political campaign of education that is now on, will explain their existence, and if not apologize for them, at least put the blame on the other party for their being. In the meantime, people who enjoy the depiction of scenes of depressing horror, of abject want and misery, of sin and woe and poverty, need not go on a slumming tour; the literary folks have undertaken the task of supplying every man with his own

slum; you can have it all on your library table for a small sum. And its horror loses nothing in the telling, for they are artists who write. Two new stories of the slums will be widely read: “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,” because its author, Stephen Crane, has made a reputation, and “Yekl,” because its author, Abraham Cahan, is new and treats of a people almost new to literature, in a vigorous manner. “Maggie,” which, as is generally known, is the first novel of Mr. Crane, written when he was twenty-one, is a depressing picture of the squalor— physical, mental and spiritual—of an increasing class of Americans. It is not the story of “A Girl of the Streets”—rather a record of her evolution, how she unwittingly and unwillingly became the thing she despised. Mr. Crane is a realist, but unlike so many imitators of Zola, he does not revel in dirt and filth and nastiness as if he enjoyed it; he simply puts it in his picture because he cannot draw true and leave it out; he simply calls things by their real names, and we remember what he says, while if he had called the dungheap the conventional straw-pile, he and his book would make small impression. There is much delicacy shown in many places in the book, where the would-be Zolas would have gorged themselves and their readers on filth. “Maggie” does not take hold of one as did “The Red Badge of Courage”; but in one respect it is superior to that much lauded story. When he wrote “Maggie,” Mr. Crane had not yet acquired the poster art; he had not learned the bad habit of laying gaudy chromo colors over everything he touches, else he would have called his story “The Blue Blazed Path of the Scarlet Woman.”

113

One of the most delightful features of “Maggie” is the many passages, mere touches, that teem with the richest suggestions. In a line or two—without saying anything about them, himself, at all, Mr. Crane shows the utter futility of the ordinary “mission” methods for reaching such people as Maggie and her brother; again in a line he reveals the contemptible Pharisaical spirit of certain of the clergy; and in the brutal laugh and jest that greet the successive appearances of the old drunken mother in the police court, he hints at the wickedness and folly of our present methods of dealing with such pitiable creatures. Mr. Crane is an artist; his characters and the setting are true, and while “Maggie” may add nothing to the reputation he has already made, it is a book to read and remember.

Literary World 27 (August 8, 1896), p. 253 Something really must be done with regard to Mr. Stephen Crane, the author of Maggie. The Red Badge of Courage bore within itself its own excuse for being. Breathless with the storm and movement of the narrative, the reader easily forgave the pyrotechnics of the style. But when it comes to employing the same pyrotechnics with even a stronger odor of stale lamp oil and gunpowder in a tale of unrelieved misery and brutality, a tale of the New York slums, where every character down to the youngest children converses in a mixture of curses and argot, where fights and drunken broils are the occupation of life, and slander and seduction its recreations, and where the only relief to

the sickening sequence is when now and then the policeman appears and clubs the dramatis personæ into temporary oblivion, it is a different thing and harder to bear. The story bristles with sentences like these: “The three frothing creatures on the floor buried themselves in a frenzy of blood. The rage of fear shone in all their eyes, and their blood-colored fists whirled.” “In the yells of the whirling mob of Devil’s Row children there were notes of joy like songs of triumphant savagery. The little boys seemed to leer tauntingly at the blood upon the other child’s face.” We are at a loss to see the raison d’ˆetre of this repulsive tale. It seems equally inconducive to both morals and manners; it teaches no lesson, it instills no hope. As a study of social conditions it has in it nothing either original or helpful, and as literature it is worse than repulsive.

“Stephen Crane’s ‘Maggie.’” San Francisco Chronicle, August 9, 1896, p. 4 In “Maggie” Stephen Crane has made a far stronger study of tenement-house life than in “George’s Mother.” It is the story of a girl with drunken mother and father and with a hoodlum brother. She develops the beauty that is often seen in the gutter, and this proves her undoing. Her tippling mother refuses to receive her back; her brother assumes an air of virtue and turns away his face, so in her despair, abandoned by the man who led her astray, she ends life in the river. This sketch of the

114

tenements is brutal in its frankness. There is no attempt, as in Ned Townsend’s latest story, to idealize the characters. The coarseness, the sordidness of life in these overcrowded buildings of New York is something which affects one like the reek of the Mulberry Bend gutters on a hot August night. The genius of the writer is revealed in the simplicity of his means of producing powerful effects. He shows the savagery of the instincts of the tenement child; the hatred of the police officer as the embodiment of the law that is detested; the evil influence of the saloon which casts its light into the darkest alleys and converts frowsy homes into hells of cruelty and misery. The dialect of the tenements is imitated to perfection, but it becomes very monotonous except to a student of this barbaric slang. What Mr. Crane has done by means of his intuition and his strong dramatic faculty is to show the slums of New York as they actually exist and to make one realize how much easier it is for the children of the tenements to fall into evil courses than to live good lives. The girl, Maggie, excites one’s compassion, for she has in her the elements of good womanhood, but all the influences of her wretched home are against virtue and industry. The story is a powerful sermon on the need of missionary work among the heathen in the tenements of our big cities, and it cannot fail to open the eyes of many who have only taken a sentimental interest in a class that seems to be no nearer to them than the natives of the Congo.

Life (August 22, 1896) The chief fault of Mr. Stephen Crane’s style grows out of his attempt to give a

lurid color, a strong emphasis, to every trait and every action of his characters and to every incident that he describes. The result of this method is to make it seem as if he were, as he really is, “writing at the top of his voice” all the time. His lavish use of epithets gives an air of exaggeration, almost of grotesqueness, to all of his pictures—makes them seem uncouth and formless. But it is a method that has the merit of making things vivid and of arresting the attention. And it would be silly to deny that this young writer has both imagination and force. These are rare and valuable qualities. I have been more impressed by their presence in his story of the tenement-house girl, “Maggie” (Appleton) than I was by his war pictures in “The Red Badge of Courage.” Some of his figures, too, are amazingly effective: “Over on the island,” he says, in painting the outlook from the tenement-house window, “a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of a gray ominous building and crawled slowly along the river’s bank.” The most encouraging thing, however, in the book is the evidence which it affords that this young author has acquired the art of character painting, and is a student, and a careful student, who is not without a sense of humor, of human nature. The people who surround this girl of the tenements are of the lowest sort, but they all, father, brother, lover, neighbor, and mother, are drawn to the life. By all odds the best thing in the book is the conception of Maggie’s mother, a drunken wretch who spends half her time on the Island, bewailing the disgrace which the wayward daughter brings upon the family. And equally admirable is the touch by which the old woman, when the news of Maggie’s death is brought, goes out and gets the worsted boots which the baby girl used to wear and mourns over them. It is

115

the Irish nature that is revealed in the language, and the act which gives the scene its value.

“Book Notices.” Bachelor of Arts 3 (October 1896), pp. 580–582 This is the book which it is said Mr. Crane took to a dozen publishers in New York when he was ignotus, and finally was obliged to print himself. This was half a dozen years ago. Now, how different! In the first place we are not shocked by the hideous drunken old beast, the mother, nor disgusted by the bloody pictures of Maggie’s home life, nor overcome by Maggie’s own downfall. In the second, publishers are glad to print the book in an elegant volume, and a powerful study in criminology it is. Incidentally, we find in its pages the original of “Chimmie Fadden.” We must credit Crane with the priority of the Fadden lingo, and even with “What t’ ’ell?” “Hully gee!” and “Dat’s what he said, see?” At all events, if the first “Maggie” printed in 1893 is the same as the second Maggie, Chimmie Fadden is simply a more kindly and less vicious “Jimmie” Johnson. The resemblance is marked. The book is intense, strong, and true. In parts it is revolting in its tough life. The other day Mr. Stephen Crane stated to the reporters that he was making acquaintances among the degraded women of the tenderloin for further pictures of the brutal, dirty, New York tough life. He is in the line of what he believes his artist duty—he must photograph life, and life that interests him is intense life, battles,

armies, slums, street walkers, and bloody fights—the daily newspaper idea of life. There is a grim humor in the book; for example, the description of Jimmie’s truck-driving and his contempt of horsecars, “those strings of street-cars that followed him like intent bugs.” Maggie herself is too lightly sketched because the author is so far not quite “up” to girls and love. He fails to obtain the reader’s solicitude for Maggie. She herself is not well imagined, as is Pete, the tough bartender, or the horrible drunken mother. Yekl follows in the same style; and Cahan and Crane are in the same new school of realism. Heaven pity us! Have we yet to have all the phases of the hideous East Side of this dirty and grimy city, its crimes, its loathsomeness, brought out in enormous editions? The daily press is bad enough. Does this extraordinary familiarity with crime breed a contempt for it? We cannot believe that these books have anything but a healthful effect—just as any report on criminology or study in hereditary crime is good science—but we do not recommend them to children. As literary art they are not of so high an order as, let us say, that of Daudet or James or of our great English novelists. The most emphatic things of life are the most easy to describe: murder, suicide, a bloody fight, a drunken orgie—a fire—we submit any good reporter can “do” these; but the perfect ratiocination, the thoughtful study of the higher grades of life, the mental play of refined characters—Crane is not yet quite “up” to it. Hence he paints only “strong” situations or terrific characters; it is the fault of youth. He has genius, and he will grow to be something really American and great. His eye for truth is fine, and perhaps the falsity of our “rich today, poor to-morrow” aristocracy drives him into real life, real struggles, real tragedies of the poor.

116

Jonathan Penn. “A Little Study of Stephen Crane.” Lotus 2 (October 1896), pp. 208–211 If it were the office of literary criticism to give absolutely candid and cynically practical advice to aspirants seeking literary glory in our day, I should say, “Cultivate the bizarre.” We are compelled, however, by the traditions of the Trade, to blink at the realisms of contemporary writers, and we pretend to discuss their psychology and their art when we all know very well that the bulk of this current, popular firework fiction is not literature at all, but like the latest whirlwind dance of another sensation, that has been cleverly “boomed.” The art of getting up a “boom” is the great art of contemporary literature, as of all other arts which aim to please at any cost of decency, dignity, and sanity. If one really wants “points” on how to succeed in literature, we should throw all the misleading classic examples of steadfast genius into the kitchen fire and consult an expert on advertising. As this is obviously beyond the means of sane worthy writers, I deviate from the strict tradition of criticism to put before the reader a concrete example of a cleverly nursed little “boom” that a bright and deserving young man has recently pulled off. I hope he has made enough out of it to secure his old age in a good life insurance policy annuity, for it is the irony of our bustling day, so eager for the new, that a “boom” seldom comes to any man more than once in a lifetime. The Stephen Crane “boom” is being insidiously undermined by the efforts of Stephen Crane, and it can now be consid-

ered in the lurid red light, as Crane would say, of bitter and inexorable fact. Here is a young man who owes his amazing success in literature to his keen power of introspection and intuition. As a youth at school, he had the impatience of dull routine so characteristic of genius, and he completed his course of studies with a distinctly individual conception of the significance of the English language, though one that can only wreak injury to the genius of literature if such latitude is widely imitated. An apprenticeship on a certain New York newspaper, which has made a profound study of revising and reorganizing the body of the language so as to bring it within the comprehension of the largest circulation on earth, completed Mr. Crane’s preparation for his momentous career in “poster” literature. A period of effort and introspection revealed to him a certain strain of vague illogic in his mental constitution, which he realized at once could either ruin or make him. Too many strive to overcome such a defect, when they have enough power of self-criticism to detect it. When they succeed, they are reduced to the common crowd of writers who respect the language and are careful and painstaking, but unremarkable. It is the mark of genius to recognize in one’s mental constitution a strong vein of illogic. If it is given full swing, it results in the most startling presentations of all the ideas and observations within one’s ken. This perception, with perfect satisfaction in it as originality of mind, releases the imagination, so that it plays the very deuce with language, and easily commands attention. It is to literature what the spectacular is to the mechanic-made drama. A rhetorical exuberance, with certain knotty predilections, is an ordinary accompaniment of an uncertain acquaintance with one’s mother tongue. Mr. Crane has lost no time in his short life—for he is still very young in

117

years. He realized at an extremely early age, in that tender budding time of innocence and influences which most unsophisticated aspirants devote to the study of good examples, the immense sensational value of the bizarre in this epoch of literary cocktails. He recognized the power of the ludicrous and irrelevant in immediately arresting attention. The recipe for the successful mixing of the new mysticism is a furious scepticism of all the old orthodoxies, with an unlimited credulity for all the bogies of the nursery. This puts one upon a familiar footing with the Almighty, and Mr. Crane’s first success was achieved in this foggy region, where the soul of man encounters God in the palpable diminution of a Shape, and spits scorn upon the mechanical horrors of the universe. “The Black Riders, and Other Lines” deals almost exclusively with great moral questions. It is lunacy revealing the irony of sanity, and its goblin atmosphere admirably suits the literary epicure who has enough catholicity to thoroughly enjoy the surprises of folly. It is a book of horrors for the tea-table; and for all who love the meaningless and mysterious rhapsodies of an intellectual booze it is an inspired book. It is filled with the ludicrous sobriety of a sincere lunatic or a “wanton cynic,” and so deserves its decided success as a genuine curiosity of literature, with those who have a greater craving for what is curious than for what is really literature. On the other hand, criticism declares: Here is originality of design and expression without significance or merit; audacity of conception without real and sincere thought—in a word, a mere farce of literary chicane. “A new Boozy Prophet,” I thought—but he has turned out better. I spent one wild night of hilarity with “The Black Riders, and Other Lines,” and the profound sagacity of this literary delirium at once convinced me that the author was a genius in his unerring perception

of his own gift of illogic and confusion, and of the public’s susceptibility to any startling bait of lunacy. A writer without any sense of humor is relieved of all fatal hesitancy, and he is sure of a public, for the sense of humor is very rare. This is one of Mr. Crane’s strong qualities. He writes completely incomprehensible jangles of words with the rapt sobriety of Saint John. With such a talent he cannot fail of achieving pre-eminence and the sympathy of a large audience. I bartered my copy of “The Black Riders” for a tin of the Arcadian smoking mixture, so I cannot quote any of the lines. But, for the benefit of readers who have not seen the originals, I print a verse of my own, written at the time, which is very fairly representative of Mr. Crane’s style and the whole body of his thought: I heard a man mumbling in the horrid silence of the night. He was chattering aloud with the good God; But God in the darkness vouchsafed no sign. And I asked him, scoffing, what he desired of the Omnipotent. “I am rich, I am Plutos,” answered he, angrily, “And I am bargaining for the moon.” “And why do you want it?” asked I, in amaze. “Because I am tired of all my other toys.” “And the price?” asked I, scoffing, for I bore the badge of Lazarus. “Untold millions, heaped up to Heaven’s gate.” “Fool!” I cried in bitter derision, “Offer the good God your corrupt soul.” This is one phase of Mr. Crane. If it were the only one, he would scarcely have engaged so much attention as he has done in literary circles. In an entirely different

118

mood, he achieved his one real success in literature—“The Red Badge of Courage.” This is a sort of prose epic of war, from the consciousness of the private soldier in the thick of action. It is a strong and fascinating conception, worked out with unfailing power and unity, to complete illusion. It is good work of an unusual kind, and it is all the more interesting and valuable as a psychological study when it is remembered that it is written by a young man who never saw a battle nor served in the army. It seems at first incongruous that the author of “The Black Riders” should have written this story, but a second and careful reading reveals some of the same characteristics of sacrificing clearness of style and language to effectiveness, and despotically using words out of their proper relevance and significance. If every writer did this for the mere sake of appearing original, we should soon forfeit our heritage of a clear comprehension of the best thoughts of the best minds in our language. This is a wanton mischief in literature to which many contemporary writers seem prone, and it cannot be too severely condemned. Even true originality of conception cannot atone for such a trespass upon what is not simply the treasure-trove of any one writer, but the common property of our race to be handed from one generation to another in its integrity. Therefore every writer owes it to his readers and critics to attempt to master the niceties of the language. Mr. Crane has openly set them at defiance in order to turn the language to impressionistic uses of his own devising. This book shows Crane in his highest mood of insight and imagination. It is doubtful if he will ever reach the same high plane again, for he shows a decided weakness in his tendency to persist in mannerisms that become familiar upon a second acquaintance, and so lose their effectiveness. The extraordinary success of “The Red Badge of Courage” in

England, where every American writer since Hawthorne has been dismissed with contempt, has awakened a general belief that Crane is to be America’s young hopeful in letters. But, unfortunately, Crane, like many other young hopefuls, does not apparently realize the truth of Lowell’s saying, that a naive thing repeated is naive no longer. The fondness Mr. Crane shows for chromatic effects—a sort of “poster” commentary—cannot be such a consistent passion with all his readers. We cannot accept the rather grotesque characters and descriptions of East Side life in “Maggie” and “George’s Mother” as equally veritable and valuable pictures of the human consciousness as the convincing psychological pictures of the war. These are written in the unmistakable staccato style of the “star” reporter on a newspaper of “the largest circulation in the cosmos.” The stories as simple fiction are unsatisfactory, and as studies of real life they seem a little fatuous. They are both concerned mainly with a series of minutely described drinking feats, ending in certain little unpleasantnesses. The story of “George’s Mother” consists entirely of the history of a protracted “jag.” But it is to be doubted whether the guzzling bouts of the canaille can really occupy an unequivocal place in literature. Considering their insignificant claims, on esthetic grounds, to the consideration of intelligent people, it is becoming a matter of serious moment whether the inarticulate lower classes do not occupy altogether too much prominence in fiction. This is especially to be deplored since our sentimental epoch has relegated all literature but the novel to ignominy and oblivion. A careful and impartial, though not at all unappreciative, reading of all of Mr. Crane’s published work leads the writer to the conclusion that here is another clever writer who will take his place among the other popular and prolific entertainers of

119

current literature. But to claim for him, as has been done by English and American critics, an assured pre-eminence as a writer of genius, is an extravagance of the cordiality that lacks judgment. Of course this is all a matter of individual judgment, and this opinion is offered as quite tentative, with all proper diffidence—though the diffidence happens to come last, like a kiss in a love-letter.

Bookseller 467 (October 9, 1896), p. 916 One must be acquainted with the argot of the New York slum fully to understand, if not appreciate, Mr. Crane’s new story; and it is quite possible for the uninitiated to be in doubt whether the chief characters are white or black, from the clipped nigger-lingo that they talk. Maggie is an unhappy study enough, albeit true to life. Reared in the lowest depths of blackguardism, with filthy drunken parents, the girl has, in an extraordinary way, preserved a virtuous ideal: but this does not save her from becoming the victim of a vulgar ruffian of her own class, or from the suicide with which she ends her pitiable life. Mr. Howells, it should be added, contributes to the story an “Appreciation.”

“The Passing Whim.” Truth 15 (October 10, 1896), p. 12 This week it is my whim to analyze “The Red Boom of Crane.” It is flickering out

in the sad gray dawns of the slums, where his keen faculty for the dissection of crimson psychology has got diluted and lost in the enumeration of the endless swilling of golden swill. In the blare of war, with our senses apulsing with the flare and frenzy of the battle field, we touched the spiritual selves and the mystery of life and death, of these rough and raw recruits standing in the ranks for their first ordeal of fire. It was a fine piece of imaginative psychology, and the swing of the whole picture of two days and nights in the field carries one along with an intense sense of reality. The prevailing redness of the young recruit’s vision and thoughts as he marches upon and engages in the conflict of the blood-swollen sod of war, seems to be the supreme touch of symbolic revelation in “The Red Badge of Courage.” There are crimson roars, red cheers, red wings of battle, red suns, and the hero feels the red sickness of battle and pictured red letters of curious revenge, besides other chromatic effects. But these were all right in this convincing picture of war, with its keen penetration of the mind of a soldier who can think and analyze his feelings and thoughts and impressions. “The Red Badge of Courage” gave Stephen Crane a place in contemporary literature, and it is somewhat depressing to have one’s strong illusion of its intense reality weakened and vitiated by the exploits of such tedious vulgarians as Jimmie Johnson and Pete, the bartender of “Maggie.” We are told the latter is a cynic and man of the world. A search for his baptismal name is in vain, but if the reader meets him on the Bowery he can be recognized at a glance in any company by one characteristic, which the author fastens upon him in his early youth and constantly recalls in the exact phrase throughout the story. This peculiarity seems a

120

little top heavy for Pete’s moral character. It is a chronic sneer which stamps him. He is introduced, “boastfully sauntering,” ∗∗∗ “a lad of sixteen years, although the chronic sneer of an ideal manhood already sat upon his lips.” Somehow this chronic sneer, turning up all the time on the face of this complacent young vulgarian, born in and reeking with perfect contentment with all that is coarse and ugly in his environment, seems a little superfluous and farcical, instead of convincing. It turns one’s thought to the ludicrous aspect of East Side benightedness and squalor, and Pete makes the impression of a music hall artist and not of a real type of an East Side tough. Jimmie is vague; and Maggie herself is one of those unaccountable wraith heroines, to whose wiles all novelists are in peril of succumbing, out of the sheer innocence of heart which characterizes all novelists who hope for a wide circulation. “Under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover”—this is a true touch; but the extraordinary guilelessness and unsophistication of the girl strains belief when her parents and her whole environment are painted in such grim, uncompromising, sordid bestiality. But it is one of the favorite conceits of fiction, this of a pure and unsullied spirit springing up in the midst of the basest abandonment to the appetites. Of course such a simpleton comes to a tragic end. In real life the real smart girl, who has a variety of flames and is none too transparent, winds up by marrying a truckman, or some other useful member of society, and settles down to live happy ever after, as most people do in real life, in a little tenement overhanging the edge of the East River. “George’s Mother” is also a story of the East Side. The pathetic figure that turns

around our heart strings gets a black eye— in a word, it is another! It is a pity to see a young man of Mr. Crane’s years who has shown so much promise, settle down to become a mere author of syndicate “lies.”

“Mr. Crane’s New Story.” Pall Mall Gazette 63 (October 22, 1896), p. 4 London having discovered Mr. Stephen Crane as a writer of considerable analytical powers and of vivid insight, a gentleman of Boston proceeds to introduce him to the American public—that is to say, of course, to the literary world. So far as we are aware, Mr. Crane languished unknown until Mr. Heinemann issued “The Red Badge of Courage” a year or so since. But having picked him up somehow, this gentleman makes amends for his lateness by his wholeheartedness. What strikes him about “Maggie,” as he informs us in his preface of appreciation, is “that quality of fatal necessity which dominates Greek tragedy.” Che sara sara; and what we feel particularly about the gentleman’s appreciation is that quality of fatal necessity which, &c. We could have almost penned the preface for him, not, of course, in such elegant language, but point for point in sentiment. What strikes us—poor, humble islanders as we are— about Mr. Crane’s latest work is the essential flimsiness of its structure in combination with the self-same remarkable gifts of analysis which were noticeable in his previous books. Mr. Crane, to be brief, has, like so many of his compatriots, either not

121

the slightest notion how to tell a story, or a supreme contempt for the art of storytelling. In either case he deserves a kindly lesson, which he might obtain from any one of the great masters of fiction, in English or other tongues. While he has his Boston admirer to pat him on the back it is possible that he may not pay much attention to this well-meant but humble criticism. But it is true, for all that, that “Maggie,” with all its fine qualities of observation, and psychology, and reserve, would have been a tenfold better story if it had been a story. It is nothing, in fact, but a series of pictures of Bowery life in New York, very much what Mr. Arthur Morrison’s “Tales of Mean Streets” was to our own miserable East-end life. Of the two writers, Mr. Crane has a much deeper imagination and a little finer sense of detail. On the other hand, Mr. Morrison is incomparably the better artist. Mr. Crane, in truth, bears no evidence of having given a thought to the ways and means of his tale. If he has, his appearances belie him, and we can only conclude that he has wobbled astray after the false deities of his friendly introducer. As regards the graphic nature of his delineation of New York low life there can be no question. “Maggie” is a vivid picture of the sordid. To English readers the most lasting impression is likely to be the strange character which the English, or American, language assumes on the lips of the inhabitants of Rum-alley. Our own Cockney dialect is odd and grotesque, and base enough; but the Bowery lingo is infinitely more so. It is a most degraded form of language. People greet each other casually with “What d’ H—ll,” as Mr. Crane spells it euphemistically. They say facetiously, “Ah, git off d’ eart’,” and offer to “stamp yer face tru d’ floor.” Apparently in the Bowery what remains of the English language has been amalgamated with coarse detritus from nigger

dialects and Irish slang. The result is that for English readers the conversations, if so they may be termed, are almost unintelligible. This unintelligibility and squalor are well represented by Mr. Crane. He has shown us before that he is a very skilful analyst of certain strong moods, and drunkenness, rage, and jealousy are here set forth in all their unredeemed nakedness. It is by no means a pleasant story, but it is a strong one and a true one, and impresses one still more with the talents which Mr. Crane possesses at present in a somewhat crude condition.

“Novels.” Manchester Guardian, October 29, 1896, p. 4 We have not the means of pronouncing whether the dialect of the lower circles in the New York inferno is truly copied in the conversations that Mr. Stephen Crane scatters through Maggie, A Child of the Streets. But there is no question that he is much at fault in the mode by which he would fain, in his own narrative, convey lively impressions of the brutal. That mode is to import brutality into his style. “Their lips curled back and stretched tightly over the gums in ghoul-like grins. Through their white, gripped teeth struggled hoarse whisperings of oaths. Their eyes glittered with murderous fire . . . The rage of fear shone in all their eyes, and their bloodcoloured fists whirled.” The whole work is made up of these sentences that strain and shriek at us, and in their multitude and monotony is drowned a certain gift of pictorial or satiric statement, which is exampled in the contortionist who grimaced (p. 55) “until he looked like a devil on a Japanese kite,” and the truck-driver who

122

would move aside for no other vehicle, but “achieved a respect for a fire-engine” (p. 32). Mr. W. D. Howells is unintelligible when, in his singular “Appreciation” prefixed to the volume, he refers to “the simple terms the author uses to produce” his effect. It will be impossible to judge what Mr. Stephen Crane’s talent substantially is until he comes further to deserve a praise of simplicity. Mr. Howells does not stint language that would not be too much for Victor Hugo’s story of Fantine or Zola’s of Th´er`ese Raquin. The “quality of fatal necessity which dominates Greek tragedy”; “an ideal of artistic beauty,” present here as strongly “as in any classic fable”—for no attributes less than these are we called upon to honour Mr. Crane. But Mr. Howells, a gentle writer who tries to be strong has been simply carried off his feet by a vehement writer who manages to be brutal. It asks much charity to find in Mr. Crane great possibility of effectual power. His subject is a girl bred in horrid squalor, and drawn out to her destruction by what seems a ray of light leading to escape. This is a good subject. The seducer, a “dandy and rowdy” barman, as Mr. Howells puts it is also quite well conceived. But so far from any one of the characters being “a wonderful figure in a group which betrays no faltering in the artist’s hand,” the utmost that can be said is that some truth and pertinence are just discernible under the artist’s treatment, and that these cannot be obscured even by the language of Mr. Howells. By far the justest and most promising passage is that in which Maggie conceives that fancy for her bully that in the end leads to her ejection from home and her suicide. Mr. Crane may enter on the safer road if he will shut his ears to well-known writers who “their loud uplifted” (Yankee) “trumpets blow,” only to lure him into peril.

S[idney] R. K[ennedy]. “Bachelor’s Kingdom.” Yale Courant 33 (November 1896), p. 81 When I had finished reading Mr. Stephen Crane’s lurid book Maggie, I felt as though my impressions could be very well summed up in a single sentence, spoken by one of his characters. It is this: Great heavens! What have ’a struck? For the story is far too good to be classed with the potboilers that newly famous authors are wont to reel off; and yet, what Mr. Crane has meant to impress on us in this dialectic frenzy I do not know. If anything serious, he has failed. The narrative is far too amusing. The popping of corks, the crashing of splintered furniture, the drunken howls, and the oaths both loud-lunged and “quavering,” make together such a heavy noise that any soberness which Mr. Crane may have wished us to hear is utterly swallowed up in the babel. For all that, the book is more than cullam and very readable. The characters are sharply drawn and the dialect is skillfully handled. But, after the Red Badge of Courage, I feel inclined to say to its author: Ah, go ahn, Steve, dis is some big jolly yer givin’ us. What d’ H—l! Yehs makes me tired.

“Notes.” Saturday Review 82 (November 28, 1896), p. 557 We have been beguiled by puffs and by the memory of his first book, “The Red

123

Badge of Courage,” into reading “Maggie,” the latest production of Mr. Stephen Crane. Mr. W. D. Howells, in a preface, compares “Maggie” to Thomas Hardy’s “Jude,” and declares that what strikes him most in the book “is that quality of fatal necessity which dominates Greek tragedy.” This piece of auctioneer’s eulogy should have warned us; for it is only bad wine that needs so enormous and outlandish a bush; but it did not, and we are angry in proportion to our deception. “Maggie” is a sordid little story; a piece of Irish mud, fetid in summer and icehard in winter, as Irish mud is apt to become in the Bowery on Manhattan Island; and that is all we can say for it. Against it there is everything to be said; no pity nor fear here, Mr. Howells, but disgust merely and contempt, and Aristotle never ascribed a purifying influence to loathing. These puppets are not human; they are merely embodiments of vice and vileness; Yahoos—their only relation to mankind is in name and need. From the artist’s point of view, the book is as badly done as one of Landseer’s human dogs.

H. G. W[ells]. “Another View of ‘Maggie.’” Saturday Review 82 (December 19, 1896), p. 655 The literature of the slum multiplies apace; and just as the mud of the Port of London has proved amenable to Mr. Whistler, so the mud of the New York estuary has furnished material for artistic treatment to Mr. Crane. Mr. Crane, in “Maggie,” shows himself the New York equivalent of Mr. Morrison, with perhaps a finer

sense of form and beauty and a slenderer physique. He is the light weight of the two. He is far more alert for what the industrious playwright calls the effective “line,” and every chapter cocks its tail with a point to it. He sketches, for instance, the career of Maggie’s brother James, and tells of his lusts and brutality. “Nevertheless,” ends the chapter, “he had on a certain starlit evening said wonderingly and quite reverently,‘Dah moon looks like h—l, don’t it?’” And with that the chapter, rather selfconsciously, pauses for your admiration. Of Mr. Morrison’s “Dick Perrott” it is not recorded that he ever saw the beauty of moonlight or the stars. But one may doubt, even after the chromatic tumult of the “Red Badge of Courage,” whether Mr. Crane is anywhere equal to Mr. Morrison’s fight between Perrott and Leary. To read that and to turn to Mr. Crane’s fight between Maggie’s brother and her seducer is to turn from power to hysterics. The former is too strong and quiet to quote—it must be read; but of the latter:— “The arms of the combatants whirled in the air like flails. The faces of the men, at first flushed to flame-coloured anger, now began to fade to the pallor of warriors in the blood and heat of a battle. Their lips curled back, stretched tightly over the gums in ghoul-like grins. Through their white, gripped teeth struggled hoarse whisperings of oaths. Their eyes glittered with murderous fire . . . Blows left crimson blotches upon the pale skin . . . The rage of fear shone in all their eyes, and their blood-coloured fists whirled . . . The pyramids of shimmering glasses, that had never been disturbed, changed to cascades as heavy bottles were flung into them. Mirrors splintered to nothing. The three frothing creatures on the floor buried themselves in a frenzy for blood . . . The quiet stranger had sprawled very pyrotechnically out on the sidewalk.”

124

Which is very fine, no doubt, but much more suggestive of a palette dipped in vodki than of two men fighting. Yet, on the other hand, the emotional power of that concluding chapter of “Maggie” seems a little out of Mr. Morrison’s reach—the old woman, drink sodden and obese, stricken with the news of her daughter’s death and recalling her one vivid moment of maternal pride. “Jimmy, boy, go get yer sister! Go get yer sister an’ we’ll put dah boots on her feet!” The relative merits of the “Red Badge of Courage” and “Maggie” are open to question. To the present reviewer it seems that in “Maggie” we come nearer to Mr. Crane’s individuality. Perhaps where we might expect strength we get merely stress, but one may doubt whether we have not been hasty in assuming Mr. Crane to be a strong man in fiction. Strength and gaudy colour rarely go together; tragic and sombre are well nigh inseparable. One gets an impression from the “Red Badge” that at the end Mr. Crane could scarcely have had a gasp left in him—that he must have been mentally hoarse for weeks after it. But here he works chiefly for pretty effects, for gleams of sunlight on the stagnant puddles he paints. He gets them, a little consciously perhaps, but, to the present reviewer’s sense, far more effectively than he gets anger and fear. And he has done his work, one feels, to please himself. His book is a work of art, even if it is not a very great or successful work of art— it ranks above the novel of commerce, if only on that account.

H. D. Traill. “The New Realism.” Fortnightly Review 61 (January 1897), pp. 63–66 In a day when the spurious is everywhere supposed to be successfully disguised and sufficiently recommended to the public by merely being described as new, it need not surprise us to find our attention solicited by a New Realism, of which the two most obvious things to be said are that it is unreal with the falsity of the half truth, and as old as the habit of exaggeration. One of the latest professors of this doubtful form of art, is the very young American writer Mr. Stephen Crane, who first attracted notice in this country by a novel entitled The Red Badge of Courage. Whether that work was or was not described by its admirers as an achievement in realism, I am not aware. As a matter of fact, and as the antecedents, and indeed the age, of the writer showed, it was not a record of actual observation. Mr. Crane had evidently been an industrious investigator and collator of the emotional experiences of soldiers, and had evolved from them a picture of the mental state of a recruit going into action. It was artistically done and obtained a not undeserved success; but no method, of course, could be less realistic, in the sense on which the professors of the New Realism insist, than the process which resulted in this elaborate study of the emotions of the battlefield from the pen of a young man who has never himself smelt powder. Since then, however, Mr. Crane has given us two small volumes, which are presumably realistic or nothing. If circumstances have prevented the author from

125

writing about soldiers in action “with his eye on the object,” there are no such obstacles to his studying the Bowery and “Bowery boys” from the life; we may take it, therefore, that Maggie and George’s Mother are the products of such study. According to Mr. Howell’s [sic] effusive “Appreciation,” which prefaces it, Maggie is a remarkable story having “that quality of fatal necessity which dominates Greek tragedy.” Let us see then what this Sophoclean work is like. The story of Maggie opens with a fight between the boys of Rum Alley and those of Devil’s Row. Jimmie, the heroine’s brother, is a boy of Rum Alley, aged nine, and when the curtain draws up he is the centre of a circle of urchins who are pelting him with stones. “Howls of wrath went up from them. On their small convulsed faces shone the grins of true assassins. As they charged they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus . . . Jimmie’s coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was gone. He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was dripping from a cut in his head. His wan features looked like those of a tiny insane demon . . . The little boys run to and fro hurling stones and swearing in barbarie trebles . . . A stone had smashed in Jimmie’s mouth. Blood was bubbling over his chin and down upon his ragged shirt. Tears made furrows on his dirt-stained cheeks. His thin legs had begun to tremble and turn weak, causing his small body to reel. His roaring curses of the first part of the fight had changed to a blasphemous chatter. In the yells of the whirling mob of Devil’s Row children there were notes of joy like songs of triumphant savagery. The little boys seemed to leer gloatingly at the blood on the other child’s face.” A lad of sixteen, afterwards destined to play an important part in the story, then approaches. He smites one of the Devil’s Row children on the back of the head, and

the little boy falls to the ground and gives a tremendous howl. A reinforcement of the Rum Alley children then arrives, and there is a momentary pause in the fight, during which Jimmie becomes involved in a quarrel with Blue Billie, one of his own side. They struck at each other, clinched, and rolled over on the cobblestones. “Smash ’im, Jimmie, kick d’ face off ’im,” yelled Pete, in tones of delight. The small combatants pounded and kicked, scratched and tore. They began to weep, and their curses struggled in their throats with sobs. The other little boys clasped their hands and wriggled their legs in excitement. They formed a bobbing circle round the pair. At this juncture Jimmie’s father arrives on the scene and endeavours to separate the combatants with a view of “belting” his son. To this end he begins to kick into the chaotic mass on the ground. “The boy Billie felt a heavy boot strike his head. He made a furious effort and disentangled himself from Jimmie. He tottered away. Jimmie arose painfully from the ground and confronting his father began to curse him.” His parent kicked him. “Come home now,” he cried, “an’ stop yer jawin’ or I’ll lam the everlasting head off yer.” Upon this they go home, the boy swearing “luridly,” for he “felt that it was a degradation for one who aimed to be some vague kind of a soldier or a man of blood, with a sort of sublime licence, to be taken home by a father.” That is the first chapter much condensed. In the original there are eight pages of it. Is it art? If so, is the making of mud-pies an artistic occupation, and are the neglected brats who are to be found rolling in the gutters of every great city unconscious artists?

126

In the next chapter Jimmie pummels his little sister, and his mother quarrels with and rates her husband till she drives him to the public-house, remaining at home to get drunk herself. In the third chapter, Jimmie, who has stopped out to avoid an outbreak of her intoxicated fury, steals home again late at night, listens outside the door to a fight going on within between his father and mother, and at last creeps in with his little sister to find both parents prostrate on the floor in a drunken stupor and to huddle in a corner until daybreak, cowering with terror lest they should awaken. For when you are a “realist’s” little boy, you have to be very handy and adaptable and do exactly what that realist requires of you: so that, though you may have been defying and cursing your father at one moment, like the daring little imp you have been described as being, you may at the next moment, and for the purpose of another sort of painful picture, have to behave like a cowed and broken-spirited child of a totally different type. These opening scenes take up about one-fifth of the short book, and those that follow are like unto them. There is a little less fighting, but a good deal more drinking. Jimmie becomes a truck driver, and fights constantly with other drivers, but the fights are not described at length. His father dies, probably of drink, and his mother takes to drinking harder than ever. Maggie is seduced and deserted by Pete, the youth who appeared on the scene during the opening fight and hits one of the infant fighters on the back of the head. Jimmie resents the proceedings of the Bowery Lovelace as a breach of good manners, and, going with a friend to the tavern where Pete acts as “bar-tender,” the two set upon him and there ensues a fight, in the course of which the lips of the combatants “curl back and stretch tightly over the gums in ghoul-like grins.” It lasts for four pages, and is brought to a close

by the intervention of the police, and the escape of Jimmie “with his face drenched in blood.” How this story continues, how Maggie falls lower and lower and finally dies, and how after her death her ginsodden mother is passionately entreated to forgive her, and at last graciously consents to do so—all this may be read in Mr. Crane’s pages, and shall not here be summarised from them. Is it necessary to do so? Or to give a pr´ecis of the companion volume, George’s Mother, the story of a “little old woman” actually of sober and industrious habits, and of her actually not vicious though weak son, of whose backslidings she dies? Need I give specimen extracts from it? I hope not—I think not. The extracts which have been already given are perfectly fair samples of Mr. Crane’s work. Anyone who likes to take it from the writer of this article, that to read these two little books through would be to wade through some three hundred and thirty pages of substantially the same stuff as the above extracts, will do Mr. Crane no injustice. So I will pass from him to a Realist of considerably larger calibre. For Mr. Arthur Morrison, author of Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago, undoubtedly carries heavier guns than Mr. Crane. To begin with, he can tell a story, while Mr. Crane can only string together a series of loosely cohering incidents. Many of his characters are vividly and vigorously drawn, while the American writer puts us off for the most part with sketches and shadowy outlines. Mr. Morrison’s ruffians and their ruffianism are better discriminated, and though there is plenty of fighting and drinking and general brutality in his last and strongest work— one of the faction fights in which, indeed, is related at quite inordinate length—he understands that the description of these things alone will not suffice to make a satisfactory story even about blackguards,

127

and he has outgrown that touching na¨ıvet´e displayed in the younger realist’s obvious belief in the perpetual freshness and charm of mere squalor. He perceives that merely to follow his characters, as Mr. Crane does his, from the drinking-bar to the low music-hall and thence home again, day after day, with interludes of brawling and “bashing” and other like recreations, becomes, after a hundred pages or so, a little monotonous, and that the life of the criminal in his constant struggle with the law, and in perpetual danger from its officers, possesses at least the element of “sport,” and presents features of variety and interest which that of the mere sot and tavern-brawler cannot possibly offer. Above all, Mr. Morrison wields a certain command of pathos, a power in which Mr. Crane is not only deficient, but of which he does not even appear to know the meaning; and were it not for a certain strange and, in truth, paradoxical defect, of which more hereafter, in his method of employing it, he would at times be capable of moving his readers very powerfully indeed. In a word, the English writer differs from the American by all the difference which divides the trained craftsman from the crude amateur, and deserves to that extent more serious and detailed criticism.

“Novels of American Life.” Edinburgh Review 187 (April 1898), pp. 411–414 Harmony and suavity of style such as Mr. Allen aims at are qualities alien to the genius of Mr. Stephen Crane, whom we have kept for the last place; but

Mr. Crane merits consideration precisely as a stylist. He made his mark, by universal acclamation, three or four years back, with the “Red Badge of Courage,” written when he was twenty-one. This book is an elaborate study of the psychological experiences undergone by a recruit. It has value not as a record, but as a tour de force of the imagination, for Mr. Crane had never seen war; so it is not surprising that many soldiers dissent from his theory of the emotions of combat. According to Mr. Crane, everything passes in a red haze; men advance or retreat as if in a lurid dream; they are something quite different from their everyday selves. A very clever man, who has seen no lack of fighting, Colonel Baden-Powell, comments in a record of South African war upon this theory, read by him somewhere out in the veldt. Man, upon his view, goes into action very much as he goes into a game of football; he is simply more alert, more highstrung, more completely alive, though, in consequence of the tension, subject to fits of blind fury. It must, however, be said that Mr. Crane in his story does not generalise; he takes a single type and individual emotions. Still we have the misfortune not to find credible the processes by which the recruit is coward one day and hero the next; as a psychological document his book appears to us valueless. But there is no doubt that certain impressions of war detach themselves strongly in his work; the blind actions of men, moved by masses, they know not where or why; their total ignorance of whatever lies beyond eyeshot or earshot, the uncertainty as to whether the various movements spell victory or defeat. And certain scenes—the rush across an open against a wood set thick with riflemen, or the sudden coming upon a corpse in a thicket—present themselves to the senses as vividly as in life. That is, of course, Mr. Crane’s object, to stimulate sense-perceptions by the use of

128

words. The thing done is very clever, but is it agreeable? He wants, in the first place, to get an impression of confused masses of men weltering through a forest amid a deafening noise; and words are heaped on words to render this, till one feels as if one had been beaten about the head with epithets. Every device is used to quicken the jaded faculty of image-making; words are violently flung together in fanciful collocations and outlandish metaphors; you read of red shouts and green smells, flags “shaking with ‘laughter,’ and cannon talking to each other, ‘slightly’ casual, unexcited in their challenges and warnings.” Men speak, not language, but half-articulate yelps, barely recognisable in their distorted spelling for words. One reads, one thinks how clever it is, and one puts away the book with a sense of relief, feeling as if one had been seeing a curious gymnastic contortion or feat of strength. It is so evident that here is a man straining every nerve to get a certain result, not so much trying to make his readers see as trying to force his own imagination into seeing. Here, for instance, is a picture from “The Little Regiment,” Mr. Crane’s volume of short studies of war—a better book than “The Red Badge,” to our thinking:— In one mystic changing of the fog as if the fingers of spirits were drawing aside these draperies, a small group of the grey skirmishers, silent, statuesque, were suddenly disclosed to Dan and those about him. So vivid and near were they that there was something uncanny in the revelation. There might have been a second of mutual wonder. Then each rifle in the group was at the shoulder. As Dan’s glance flashed along the barrel of his weapon, the figure of a man suddenly loomed as if the musket had been a telescope. The short black beard, the slouch hat, the pose of

the man as he sighted to shoot, made a quick picture in Dan’s mind. The same moment, it would seem, he pulled his own trigger, and the man, smitten, lurched forward, while his exploding rifle made a slanting crimson streak in the air, and the slouch hat fell before the body. The billows of the fog, governed by singular impulses, rolled in between. “You got that feller sure enough,” said a comrade to Dan. Dan looked at him absent-mindedly. If a man were in a fight, would he be thinking of shapes and colours like this? Does a man in a football match have similar impressions? Dan, be it observed, is a veteran; the recruit may have naturally such a confusion of ideas as would be in the mind of a young foreigner put into a side of Rugby football and told to play without knowing the rules. Mr. Crane’s description of war does not convince like Mr. Kipling’s, in so far as it describes the emotions; it shows entirely false beside what we should take for the touchstone in these matters—Sir Charles Napier’s account of his experiences at Corunna. In so far as it aims at rendering external impressions of sight, it seems to us radically bad art, because it tries to do with words what should be done with lines and colours. It may be confidently said that no one unacquainted with the methods of modern impressionist art on canvas will see the pictures that Mr. Crane is trying to convey; and those who are acquainted with them will see that he sees the thing not directly, but, as it were, translated into paint. Mr. Crane is too young to have written a good novel, and “The Third Violet,” his only attempt at the ordinary story of familiar life, is simply amazing in its futility. But he has written a short study of New York slums which may compare

129

with Mr. Arthur Morrison’s Jago sketches and Mr. Maugham’s “Liza of Lambeth.” “Maggie” appears with a prefatory commendation from Mr. Howells. We have no objection to stories of slum life; Mr. R. H. Davis’s “Gallegher” is a wonderful and attractive picture of the New York streetarab. But “Maggie” does not seem to us to justify its existence. Given a drunken father, a drunken mother, and their children, a pretty girl and a boy, stunted but as brave as a weasel; this is very likely how the lives will shape themselves. Tragic pathos there certainly is in the girl’s devotion to her swaggering lover, a fighting bartender, who deserts her without the shadow of compunction. But it seems as if one needed more than this to repay one for wading through such a mass of revolting details—street fights of little boys, fights of grown men in bars, scenes in dirty beer saloons, and everywhere the dialect of the Bowery, which, as Mr. Crane writes it, is the most hideous representation of human speech that we have ever met with. One may read a book like this as a tract, to keep one alive to the misery existent somewhere in the world; but we can conceive no other motive for reading it. As a work of art we disbelieve in it. Take Mr. Maugham’s “Liza,” a work equally unsparing and in some ways more revolting; here you have at least credible human beings, with natural affections. In Mr. Crane’s book Maggie’s passion for Pete is the one trace of human coherence; there is no other tie between any two of the characters. It is an impression; that is to say, a study made to emphasise certain traits; and an impression of sheer brutality. The admiration for work of this sort savours of the latest modern cant, which preaches that to see things artistically you must see them disagreeably. Mr. Crane has seen a piece of life in a hard superficial way, and rendered it in the spirit of a caricaturist. That is the true formula for producing what, in the

cant of the day, is called uncompromising realism. Mr. Crane, however, stands by himself, and we trust that with advancing maturity he may slough this crude and violent mannerism, alien to all the old traditions of delicacy and reserve whether in style or subject. He has too much talent to be wasted in a wild-goose chase after the ideal of gentlemen in France who write sonnets describing the colours of different vowels. For the present he alone among the writers we have dealt with affords us no human document; his folk in the Bowery have neither country nor class; all he offers is a distorted psychology of combat and an exaggerated theory of style. Yet it is of the essence of talent to go wrong at first and to run into mannerisms. We set Mr. Crane’s promise beside the performance of Mr. Frederic, Mr. Allen, and Miss Wilkins as the best that modern American literature has to show. And there is no want of other names: Mr. R. Harding Davis, whom we have been obliged to dismiss too summarily; Miss Alice Brown, whose “Meadow Grass” is an admirable piece of discipleship in the school of Miss Wilkins; Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, who is said by Southerners to give a truer portraiture of the South than Mr. Cable; Mr. Hamlin Garland, whose “Little Norsk” and other stories convey a wonderful sense of the isolation of human life in the wide snowswept prairies; and Mr. F. T. Clark, who in “The Mistress of the Ranch” combines an exciting plot and extremely picturesque setting with one of the best character studies we have read for a long time. Altogether, the school of American novelists actually existing is rich in widely varied excellence of manner and widely varied range of interest. It is essentially conscientious in its workmanship and serious, even scientific, in aim; upon the whole, a body of literature which is not marked out by any commanding achievement, but which,

130

by its high average of power and vitality, might do honour to any age and any country.

W[illiam] D[ean] H[owells]. “Frank Norris.” North American Review 175 (December 1902), pp. 770–771 In several times and places, it has been my rare pleasure to bear witness to the excellence of what Norris had done, and the richness of his promise. The vitality of his work was so abundant, the pulse of health was so full and strong in it, that it is incredible it should not be persistent still. The grief with which we accept such a death as his is without the consolation that we feel when we can say of some one that his life was a struggle, and that he is well out of the unequal strife, as we might say when Stephen Crane died. The physical slightness, if I may so suggest one characteristic of Crane’s vibrant achievement, reflected the delicacy of energies that could be put forth only in nervous spurts, in impulses vivid and keen, but wanting in breadth and bulk of effect. Curiously enough, on the other hand, this very lyrical spirit, whose freedom was its life, was the absolute slave of reality. It was interesting to hear him defend what he had written, in obedience to his experience of things, against any change in the interest of convention. “No,” he would contend, in behalf of the profanities of his people, “that is the way they talk. I have thought of that, and whether I ought to leave such things out, but if I do I am not giving the thing as I know it.” He felt the constraint of those semi-savage

natures, such as he depicted in “Maggie,” and “George’s Mother,” and was forced through the fealty of his own nature to report them as they spoke no less than as they looked. When it came to “The Red Badge of Courage,” where he took leave of these simple æsthetics, and lost himself in a whirl of wild guesses at the fact from the ground of insufficient witness, he made the failure which formed the break between his first and his second manner, though it was what the public counted a success, with every reason to do so from the report of the sales. The true Stephen Crane was the Stephen Crane of the earlier books, the earliest book; for “Maggie” remains the best thing he did. All he did was lyrical, but this was the aspect and accent as well as the spirit of the tragically squalid life he sang, while “The Red Badge of Courage,” and the other things that followed it, were the throes of an art failing with material to which it could not render an absolute devotion from an absolute knowledge. He sang, but his voice erred up and down the scale, with occasional flashes of brilliant melody, which could not redeem the errors. New York was essentially his inspiration, the New York of suffering and baffled and beaten life, of inarticulate or blasphemous life; and away from it he was not at home, with any theme, or any sort of character. It was the pity of his fate that he must quit New York, first as a theme, and then as a habitat; for he rested nowhere else, and wrought with nothing else as with the lurid depths which he gave proof of knowing better than any one else. Every one is limited, and perhaps no one is more limited than another; only, the direction of the limitation is different in each. Perhaps George Douglas, if he had lived, would still have done nothing greater than “The House with the Green Shutters,” and might have failed in the proportion of a larger range as Stephen Crane did. I am not

131

going to say that either of these extraordinary talents was of narrower bound than Frank Norris; such measures are not of the map. But I am still less going to say that they were of finer quality because their achievement seems more poignant, through the sort of physical concentration which it has. Just as a whole unhappy world agonizes in the little space their stories circumscribe, so what is sharpest and subtlest in that anguish finds its like in the epical breadths of Norris’s fiction.

Checklist of Additional Reviews “A Child of the Streets.” Unidentified, undated clipping, Stephen Crane Collection, Columbia University. New York Morning Advertiser, June 1, 1896, p. 4. New York Herald, June 13, 1896, p. 11. “Books of the Week.” New York Recorder, June 14, 1896, p. 36. Saturday Evening Gazette, June 20, 1896. “Some Unprofitable Fictions.” Springfield Sunday Republican, June 21, 1896, p. 13. ‘The Onlooker.’ “The Literary Show: Another East Side Story by the Young Minstrel of the Chattering Death Demon.” Town Topics (June 25, 1896). Boston Beacon, June 27, 1896. Boston Courier, June 28, 1896. “New Books and Authors.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 28, 1896, p. 32. “Literature of To-Day.” Sunday Pioneer Press, June 28, 1896, p. 11.

Ideas (July 4, 1896). Daily Inter Ocean, July 4, 1896, p. 11. Home Journal, July 8, 1896. Boston Times, July 12, 1896. “New Books.” New York Press, July 12, 1896, p. 26. “Books and Authors: Another Example of the Realism of Stephen Crane.” Boston Traveler, July 18, 1896, p. 7. Denver Republican, July 26, 1896. Richmond Times, July 26, 1896. “Stephen Crane and His Slum Stories.” Munsey’s Magazine 15 (August 1896), p. 630. “Stephen Crane’s ‘Maggie.’” Literary Digest 13 (August 8, 1896), pp. 459–460. “New books.” Indianapolis News, August 14, 1896. Nashville Banner 21 (August 15, 1896), p. 10. “Stephen Crane’s ‘Maggie.’” Argonaut (August 31, 1896). “Novel Notes.” Bookman 11 (October 1896), pp. 19–20. “Reviews.” Publishers’ Circular 65 (October 10, 1896), pp. 423–434. “The Literary Lounger.” Sketch 15 (October 14, 1896), p. 516. “Our Library Table.” Athenaeum 138 (October 24, 1896), p. 562. “Notes.” Churchman 74 (October 31, 1896), p. 554. “The World of Letters.” New York Mail and Express, November 6, 1896, p. 7. “‘Artie’ and Some Others.” Munsey’s Magazine 16 (December 1896), pp. 373–374. “The Literary Lounger.” Sketch (September 15, 1898). “The Novel of Misery.” Quarterly Review 196 (October 1902), pp. 411–412.

132

THE LITTLE REGIMENT AND OTHER EPISODES OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR New York: D. Appleton & Company 1896

may say in passing that it is not a little remarkable that Mr. Crane should write so much better of the life that he knows nothing of than of the life with which he is familiar:

Jeannette L. Gilder. “Stephen Crane’s New Book of Stories.” New York World, October 25, 1896, p. 25 Mr. Stephen Crane is reported to have said that, when he finished The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War, he would write no more war stories. I have just finished reading an advance copy of this book, by the courtesy of the publishers, D. Appleton & Co., and I am compelled to say that if Mr. Crane has turned his back upon the war story he has snubbed his best friend. The Little Regiment and other tales that go to make this book are as much superior to his “slum” tales—Maggie and George’s Mother—as it is possible to imagine. There are tricks of style that show the same hand to have written these stories and the two above mentioned, as well as The Red Badge of Courage, for Mr. Crane is fond of awkward sentences, and he often labors painfully for eccentricity of expression, but at the same time he shows in this book that he can tell a good story when he does not try too hard. Some of his descriptions are remarkably vivid, and they are often more vivid when terse than when he gives more words to them. The story that gives the book its name is of two brothers who belonged to the same regiment, and who, while at heart fond of each other, were apparently bitter enemies. The situation is not particularly new, but it is treated with originality and truth to nature. To show how much better is the workmanship of these stories than in Mr. Crane’s slum stories, I will give some quotations from the more notable passages. I

“The fog made the clothes of the men of the column in the roadway seem of a luminous quality. It imparted to the heavy infantry overcoats a new color, a kind of blue which was so pale that a regiment might have been merely a long, low shadow in the mist.” “The bullets began a low moan off towards a ridge which loomed faintly in the heavy mist. When the swift crescendo had reached its climax, the missiles zipped just overhead, as if piercing an invisible curtain.” “The crackle of musketry began to dominate the purring of the hostile bullets. Dan, in the front rank, held his rifle poised and looked into the fog keenly, coldly, with the air of a sportsman. His nerves were so steady that it was as if they had been drawn from his body, leaving him merely a muscular machine; but his numb heart was somehow beating to the pealing march of the fight.” “That fierce elation in the terrors of war, catching a man’s heart and making it burn with such ardor that he becomes capable of dying, flashed in the faces of the men like colored lights, and made them resemble leashed animals, eager, ferocious, daunting at nothing.” In “A Mystery of Heroism” I find more good things:

135

“The little line of men ran forward. A color sergeant fell flat with his flag as if he had slipped on ice. There was a hoarse cheering from this distant field.”

“Collins suddenly felt that two demon fingers were pressed into his ears. He could see nothing but flying arrows, flaming red. He lurched from the shock of this explosion, but he made a mad rush for the house, which he viewed as a man submerged to the neck in a boiling surf might view the shore.” There is necessarily something of sameness in these stories, but at the same time there is a vividness and virility about them that is refreshing, and I would advise Mr. Crane to give up looking about him for experiences and turn his attention to imaginative stories, for it is in these that his best work is found.

George Parsons Lathrop. “‘The Little Regiment.’” Daily Tatler 1 (November 9, 1896), p. 5 In speaking of The Little Regiment, by Stephen Crane, as a companion volume to The Red Badge of Courage, and as a completion of the story of the Red Badge’s hero, Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. lead us to think that the new book is a single tale, whereas it is a collection of sketches, some or all of which have previously been printed. After the first flush of disappointment, however, we enjoy reading, or perhaps it is re-reading, these sketches, for do we not know that they will send gorgeous blue thrills of red patriotism down our spine? A certain nine-year-old devotee of Cooper’s tales always reads them with a band of turkey quills tied around his curly head— “to get the spirit of it,” he explains.

And so the reader of Stephen Crane’s war stories should wear a tattered, gory, mudbespattered, blue uniform for the same laudable purpose. There are three Stephen Cranes—the one who is advertised by his loving friends; the one who is reviled by his adverse critics; and the man he really is. The last we may only know from the things he really says. Aside from and beneath his bizarre color-schemes, his profanity and bad English, and his magnificent collection of adjectives, there is a marvelous fount of originality, a great and daring imagination, and a power of forcible, graphic description. Added to these is a decided talent for exaggeration, which is perhaps the keynote of his popularity. But “nothing is reprehensible if you’re clever at it,” and clever at his exaggerations Mr. Crane certainly is. It goes without saying that these war stories cannot compare with The Red Badge in merit. Mr. Crane’s bright sayings are decidedly of the note-book order, and no note-book, however fat, could stand such repeated drafts upon it. And though in the new volume the diction is improved, and the profanity modified, yet we find the same springy turfs and rolling mists and long wavering lines of soldiers; and the human emotions are painted with the same splashes of pure color till we long for the yellow and green plaid laugh, or a black and red striped oath, and are relieved when a few mountains turn up that are even to Mr. Crane inexpressibly blue. Especially in these stories is the phrase “eyes like two points of metal” horribly overworked. The stories in The Little Regiment, read at a sitting and viewed as a whole, leave on the mind the same impression as an exhibition of Pain’s fireworks— noise, color, and fire. But, read separately and taken seriously, we find real types and typical realities, and there are well

136

worked up bits of human nature that show appreciative insight and sympathetic intuition.

“New Books.” New York Press, November 29, 1896, p. 30 Stephen Crane has been doing spiritless hack work for newspapers of late, and those who held “The Red Badge of Courage” to be one of the most original and imaginative and intuitive of American novels probably agreed, if they read any of this unofficial writing of Mr. Crane’s, in feeling that the young man had gone to the literary dogs, and that his early promise, renewed but not fulfilled by “George’s Mother,” had gone to protest. It seems, however, that Mr. Crane has not gone to the damnation bow-wows by any means, for “The Little Regiment,” which is the general title of a series of his short stories just brought together into a volume, has all the power of the best of his previous work, and additional good qualities which will, we believe, lead those who admire this extraordinary author to vote it the finest thing he has done. In writing about any public opinion of the author of “The Little Regiment,” one has always to refer to Mr. Crane’s public in contradistinction to the rest of the public, for the fact that he is extraordinary— especially that he has not bothered himself with the rules of tradition, and not always even with the rules of grammar— is a mighty affront to those who abide by tradition, and are naturally ill-disposed toward what is uncommon. It is noticeable and significant that opinion about this author has been more positive, one way or

the other, than about any other writer of the day. But, without losing originality or individuality, Mr. Crane has shown in “The Little Regiment” more regard for the laws of good taste than he has done before— more refinement, more accuracy of aim. It would seem as if only the smuggest of Philistines could be incensed by this new series of stories. With one exception, all of the tales in “The Little Regiment” are, like “The Red Badge of Courage,” stories of fighting in the War of the Rebellion. The exception is the sixth and last, “The Veteran,” in which the hero of “The Red Badge of Courage” reappears, and proves finally, and like a man, his title to the badge of courage that was found and lost and won back again in his first battle. The vivid realism of the stories carries the reader irresistibly into the thick of events, and gives him, in particular, a sense of the greatness of armies and battles, and the everyday humanity of the individuals who are a part of them. Here, for example, are two noteworthy bits that seem characteristic: Ultimately the night deepened to the tones of black velvet. The outlines of the fireless camp were like the faint drawings upon ancient tapestry. The glint of a rifle, the shine of a button, might have been of threads of silver and gold sewn upon the fabric of the night. There was little presented to the vision, but to a sense more subtle there was discernible in the atmosphere something like a pulse; a mystic beating, which would have told a stranger of the presence of a giant thing—the slumbering mass of regiments and batteries. And, again:

137

That fierce elation in the terrors of war, catching a man’s heart and making it burn with such ardor that he becomes

capable of dying, flashed in the face of the men like colored lights and made them resemble leashed animals, eager, ferocious, daunting at nothing. The line was really in its first leap before the wild, hoarse crying of the orders. Mr. Crane’s adjectives are as striking as Walt Whitman’s. Many of them are strokes of genius, and in this latest work fewer of them than formerly create a suspicion of affectation. Speaking of Walt Whitman, it seems to us that Mr. Crane resembles him rather remarkably in style, independence of tradition and general philosophy of life.

“Misdirected Effort.” Hartford Daily Times, December 3, 1896, p. 10 Mr. Crane has done it once too often. The “Red Badge of Courage” was a novelty. People hardly knew what to make of it, but to most of them it seemed to present really vivid and apparently accurate descriptions of war, as seen by an observing man with a fancy for adjectives which sometimes outran the comprehension of those who had not studied profoundly the relation of color to other qualities. Tempted by success, he has tried again in a similar field, but with less care and less success. What he attempts in each case is to make such a picture as he might have drawn had he actually seen the events he describes. He never saw them or anything like them, but he has gathered details with great patience and industry from the lips of those who have seen, and then he has set his imagination at work to fuse these disjointed scraps of second-hand information into

something which shall seem to be inspired by intimate observation and the very feeling which must have been dominant in the person described under the circumstances specified. If this description of the case is approximately correct, Mr. Crane has undertaken to do at arm’s length what has been done again and again by men who were in a position to do it easily. It is as if he said: “Of all the many thousands who fought through the war not one has told stories of war as they should be told. I have never seen war, but I have learned much about it. With my imagination I will vivify these dry narratives, and for the first time the world shall know what war is really like.” We do not mean to imply that these stories are not entertaining, that they do not give much of the real thing that is often overlooked, or that they are not worth doing, if regarded from the proper standpoint. The objection is to the implied assumption that second-hand knowledge, however painfully acquired, is as good as, or better than, personal experience. When one assumes to write as familiar with all the routine of a soldier’s life and feeling he should not speak of a “smooth-bore rifle.” One gross error like this destroys confidence in all the rest. It is the fly in the ointment. But if one can ignore the tacit assumption which underlies the whole book—a thing which might be done if the “Red Badge of Courage” had not appeared and been explained by its author—then these stories would be accepted as vivacious and reasonably accurate pictures of some strange or moving events. If the author had not told how he acquired facts and worked his brain to produce a mere imitation—for this is what it amounts to—the present volume would pass muster well enough. It is because he tries to present himself in a borrowed character, but cannot keep up the

138

illusion, that we turn from the book with impatience—impatience which is heightened by its very merits. Mr. Crane is said to be studying life for himself now. He will find it much more useful than studying it at second-hand, and he has talent enough to warrant all the study he will give, and to justify the hope of something much better than he has yet produced.

New York Tribune, December 20, 1896, part 3, p. 2 For Mr. Stephen Crane there is also a step in advance to be recorded. The trouble with “The Red Badge of Courage” was that it took a great deal of mannerism, a great deal of “art,” and spread it thin over too large a surface. Then, on the strength of the specious encouragement offered by some of the critics of that book, Mr. Crane brought his vaunted realism to bear upon urban slums, and straightway sank lower than ever in the estimation of coolheaded readers. In “The Little Regiment” he goes far to redeem his literary reputation from reproach. His descriptive taste is still a trifle florid and artificial; he still has too much confidence in the style of word painting which his friends have praised for its color and vividness. The color is forced. The vividness is doubtful. But the broad effect of the sketches gathered together in this little volume is unquestionably veracious and original. Moreover, the situations exploited are picturesque and dramatic. The gentle fun with which the tale of the “Three Miraculous Soldiers” is developed is a stroke which is emphatically creditable to Mr. Crane’s imaginative instinct and to his skill as a designer.

If he carries a sense of design in his present work, it must also be stated that the term may be used without any suggestions of hollow artifice in the man. The stories are workmanlike, but they are human, and in the particular narrative to which reference has just been made there is a certain artless verisimilitude which we had thought was quite beyond Mr. Crane. He proves in this book that with concision in his plots and a toning down of his rhetoric he may earn a position of serious import among American writers of fiction. When he gets as tired as his reader of listening to the “nervous” roar of cannon, which in the same instant are “slightly casual, unexcited,” he will grasp his material with a firmer hand and use it to more admirable effect, mingling his realism and his romance even more satisfactorily than in his latest book.

“Stories of America, By Young Americans.” Book Buyer 13 (January 1897), pp. 983–984 The six short stories which Mr. Crane has printed under the title of The Little Regiment seem to have been produced in response to the public demand, familiar enough nowadays, that a writer who has done a striking thing once should promptly proceed to do it over again. These war stories are without exception variations upon the underlying motive of “The Red Badge of Courage,” namely, a study of the human animal under the stress of unreasoning terror. The people who were troubled by the grammar of “The Red Badge” and by some of its structural

139

defects, will find less fault with these shorter sketches. They exhibit the same wayward experiments in color, sometimes extraordinarily successful, but often spoiled by effectivism and overloading of the brush. They have the same Maeterlinckian vagueness of outline and trick of imparting to every inanimate object a grotesque and sinister significance. The close of each story in “The Little Regiment,” however, is a clever attempt to redeem the fundamental cynicism of the author’s point of view, and the impression made by the volume as a whole, when compared with his earlier book about war and warriors, is distinctly less depressing. The power of Mr. Crane’s art is undeniable. His method is frankly individualistic. He ignores literary conventions and escapes the commonplace. His impressions are rendered with a vividness and nervous energy that compel attention, as is evidenced by the recognition which his work has already received. Whether his war stories have the characteristics that will enable the normally minded lover of literature to turn to them again and again, for their permanent pleasure-giving quality, is quite another matter. They are seriously handicapped by morbid psychology and by mannerisms. Interesting as is the color-notation, for instance, it is frequently obtruded upon the reader at the very moment when his attention should be engrossed with the personages or the action of the story. A sympathetic spectator of the struggle would not notice— nor wish to notice—many of the nuances of atmospheric effect to which Mr. Crane invites his scrutiny, and it is sometimes difficult to resist the conclusion that the author himself did not at bottom care so much for the essentials as for the picturesque accidents of the tale. He takes great risks, likewise, as every impressionist must, in his phraseology. When we

are told that a wounded horse is “turning its nose with a mystic and profound eloquence towards the sky,” or that another horse “with his great mystically solemn eyes looked around the corner of his shoulder at the girl,” or that “the feed-box was a mystic and terrible machine,” the entire effect depends upon one’s mood at the moment. If he is under sufficient emotional excitation, he is ready to believe that anything or everything is “mystic” when he is told so; but there is always a chance that some one may laugh or that the showman himself may wink. In either case the exhibition suffers. Again. Mr. Crane’s favorite motive, the mania of terror, precludes him from characterizing his personages. “The tall soldier” or “the other soldier” is indeed characterization enough, if abject fear or emotional insanity is a moment later to obliterate the human traits of these men. In “The Veteran,” the finest story in the volume, we are informed that at the alarm of fire the old man’s face “ceased instantly to be a face; it became a mask, a gray thing, with horror written about the mouth and eyes.” We get a striking phrase, but it dehumanizes the hero. In “A Gray Sleeve” “the troopers threw themselves upon the grove like wolves upon a great animal.” In a night skirmish between two bodies of troops, in another story, “it seemed as if two gigantic animals were engaged in a mad floundering encounter, snarling, howling, in a whirling chaos of noise and motion.” All this is singularly graphic, but the truth is that most readers approach the depiction of war with prepossessions in favor of the distinctively human traits of loyalty, faith, deliberate self-sacrifice, cool-headed heroism. Literature has doubtless done something to encourage them in this prejudice. “A soldier’s a man,” sings poor drunken Cassio; and certainly this view of the case, whether right or wrong, affords more attractive literary material than does the theory that

140

a soldier is an animal, with predisposition to phobomania.

“Mr. Stephen Crane Himself Again.” Pall Mall Gazette 64 (February 13, 1897), p. 2 In his latest volume, “The Little Regiment, and Other Episodes of the American Civil War” (Pioneer Series: Heinemann), I am delighted to find that Mr. Stephen Crane has, after his rather unsatisfactory excursion to the slums in “Madge,” returned to his true m´etier as a painter of war scenes. In his newest stories, his wonderful power of depicting men in the terrible psychological moment when they go forth to meet their death is as sure as it was in his famous “Red Badge of Courage.” With marvellous art, he portrays the human mind in that supreme hour, almost subconsciously taking refuge in any triviality to escape the thought of death. The revolt of the body is kept in check by iron discipline; the mind, to escape from thought, is receptive only of the unimportant. Henry Kingsley, it will be remembered, touched on the same chord. Before the charge of Balaclava all that occupied Charles Ravenshoe’s thoughts was an absorbing speculation whether the grease stain on the back of the man in front of him was like the map of Sweden or not. Mr. Crane strikes the same note in every variety of setting. Dan, one of “the Little Regiment,” moving up the bullet-swept glacis in front of the enemy’s fort, can only remember that just before the attack his brother had called him a fool. Fred Collins, in “a mystery of heroism, crossing the valley ploughed in furrows by shells, knows

that he is not a hero because he borrowed fifteen dollars from a friend and never repaid the loan.” “Heroes have no shame in their lives.” As he stoops over the well he curses the water, dancing in the crimson glare of an exploding shell, for trickling so slowly into the canteen. In his other stories Mr. Crane depicts the grim humour of war, but it’s a sense of humour which you half expect to be broken by the crack of a rifle. He has, too, a fine mastery over his language; every word tells.

Checklist of Additional Reviews Lady’s Pictorial (October 1, 1896). “Gossip of Books and Authors.” Hartford Daily Times, November 4, 1896, p. 2. “Arts and Letters.” Hartford Daily Courant, November 23, 1896, p. 6. “Stephen Crane’s Stories and Their Striking Word Pictures.” Chicago Tribune, November 27, 1896, p. 9. “Various New Books.” Philadelphia Times, November 29, 1896, p. 25. “More Novels.” Providence Sunday Journal, November 29, 1896, p. 3. “Authors and Books.” National Magazine 5 (December 1896), p. 300. “Stephen Crane Again.” Indianapolis News, December 10, 1896, p. 5. “Stephen Crane’s War Sketches.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 20, 1896, p. 24. “News and Notes.” Academy 51 (February 20, 1897), pp. 231–232.

141

Manchester Guardian, February 23, 1897, p. 4. O. O., “The Literary Lounger.” Sketch 17 (February 24, 1897), p. 214. “Recent Novels.” Spectator 78 (February 27, 1897), p. 310.

A[lexander] M[acalister]. “The Little Regiment.” Bookman 11 (March 1897), pp. 179–180. “Recent Novels.” London Times, March 10, 1897, p. 15. “Fiction.” Speaker 15 (March 20, 1897), p. 331.

142

THE THIRD VIOLET New York: D. Appleton & Company 1897

“Book Notices.” Bachelor of Arts 4 (May 1897), p. 511 The author of The Red Badge, The Little Regiment, and Maggie, in this summer story applies his heavy, realistic system to a light, silly love tale. His intense style, extraordinary use of English, and thundering adjectives are here out of place. The book is dull, and the flirtation a piece of idle vacuousness. The girl throws three violets, and is won at last in a hopeless sort of confusion—for the reader. “Oh, do go—go ! Please ! I want you to go !” This in Cranese is the girl’s method of gently saying, “I love you.” Hawker, the crack-brained lover, says, “What?” to this, springs to his feet, and explodes with delight. Crane is out of his element; his conceits of style do not sound so well in light, trifling comedy.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 16, 1897, p. 16 Stephen Crane’s most recent story, “The Third Violet” (D. Appleton & Co.), should convince its author that a love story cannot be told in the matter of fact manner in which he would describe the episodes of a battlefield or the life of the streets and the tenements on the east side. Yet, this is just what Mr. Crane has attempted in this new novel. Apparently his idea was that a report of the conversations between a pair of lovers, an account of their actions, the inconsequent talk that flowed from the people about them, the

things they did and what they said to other people or which other people said about them—all told just as it actually happened, would form an interesting compilation. Or it may be, that he started out in the role of a reformer—that his purpose was to show just how utterly inane love-making is except to those immediately interested, and by inference establish the unreality of the average love story. It did not need a book of over a hundred pages to show that; neither would it be possible in any number of pages to prove that, because love and love-making are universal therefore they are commonplace. From whatever point of view Mr. Crane has viewed the situations he has attempted to describe his vision is distorted. There is no plot to the book—his descriptions do not require plots—so there is no tangle of interests and cross purposes, no episodes or adventures to relieve the deadly monotony of the narrative. We have a young artist who returns to his old home on the farm for his summer vacation; the pictures of his reception there and of the people at home are accurate but utterly devoid of any character. On the homeward journey he has met with a lovely young woman on her way to spend some weeks at a summer hotel, near his own home. Through a mutual friend he makes her acquaintance, having already fallen violently in love. The ensuing episodes of picnics, games of tennis and other employments of the summer idler, the chafings of his friend, who does all he can to further the painter’s suit, his fits of jealousy concealed within his own breast, and the final departure of the young person for her city home all are truthful enough, but are utterly vapid and colorless. True, the inanities of summer hotel life are adequately portrayed, but they are devoid of interest. Then the scene shifts to the city, and there are episodes of squalid studio life among young men devoid of talent or high

145

purpose and whose sole relation to the central idea of the story seems to be their teasing of the lover, whose secret they have divined. There is a sidelight, in the person of a young woman, a model, who has apparently conceived a deep fondness for the lover because he has treated her humanely and considerately. In the mountains the artist’s adored one had given him a couple of violets and the story ends when in her city home she gives him a third flower in a way that confesses her love for him. Their lovemaking throughout is of the queerest imaginable—utterly unlike anything within the knowledge or experience of anybody. “The Third Violet” leaves a distinct impression of dissatisfaction; one feels that the author has undertaken something for which he has no vocation—and the result is weariness and distaste. The pictures of poverty stricken studio life are the best things in the book, showing, as they do, the utter nakedness of that land which some persons call Bohemia. You feel that the author’s point of view regarding the master passion of the human soul is utterly wrong. It is pessimistic, vapid; his drawing is in colors compounded of dust, no shading, no mellow tones, no tender halflights. It is a story that smells of the lamp—something written because there was a demand for a fresh book from a writer in vogue and not because he had any story to tell or any message to convey. If Mr. Crane will stop writing for a few years his next work may be more worthy of attention than is “The Third Violet.”

E. F., “More Novels.” Providence Sunday Journal, May 16, 1897, p. 15 Novels, novels everywhere, and not one fit to read. The temptation to parody Coleridge is irresistible to one who plods through work after work of fiction from the busy presses. A person like Mr. Stephen Crane, for example, offers a distressing moral lesson to the aspiring writer. There is no doubt whatever of Mr. Crane’s success. He has been on the market, so to speak, but a few years. Yet already his name is one to conjure with among publishers. How long his vogue may last may be questioned; for the present, at any rate, there is no doubt of it. Now the fact it—and we say it unmoved by any feelings of personal animosity— that Mr. Crane, so far from being a great writer, is not even a good writer. His work is crude, coarse, hastily put together. He has not even the beginnings of a decent English style. He fails to show the faintest trace of true artistic insight. Put him beside a novelist of distinction and the cheapness of the imitation is obvious. “The Red Badge of Courage,” “George’s Mother,” and even “Maggie,” have been praised, we know, by many intelligent persons. It is perhaps audacious to dispute their authority point-blank. But if we know what literature is at all then we must dispute it. If Thackeray and Trollope wrote good novels, then Mr. Crane writes bad ones. If Mr. Hardy is a great artist, then Mr. Crane is perpetuating wretched daubs. You cannot mix oil and water even in criticism. How Mr. Crane won his reputation, what led his admirers to see anything like genius in his work we do not

146

pretend to say. But we are convinced that if this latest effort of his, “The Third Violet,” had been put forth anonymously it would have attracted no more attention than any of the current serial stories in the Fireside Companion. It is a book with badness written large all over it; we do not mean moral badness but artistic badness. A painter falls in love with a rich girl, and after making an ass of himself about her, marries her. That is the plot; it will do to amuse, cleverly worked out. But Mr. Crane is not clever. His characters are too preposterous for belief. There is hardly a natural feature about them. Their actions are futile, their conversations absurd. Here is a specimen piece of dialogue: [Quotes “‘Oh, let up, Splutter . . . ’” to “‘P-l-e-a-s-e tell me.’ ‘No.’”] When the reader wearies of this sort of thing he can refresh himself with such verbal felicities as these: “A wave of astonishment whirled into his hair.” “On the sky was lemon and pink information of the sun’s setting.” “Hawker crooned dismally.” “They cackled.” “An oath spun through the smoke clouds.” “He walked on his toes and with his eyes glinting sideways.” And this is the stuff the so-called intelligent reader seems to like! Comment can add nothing to the overwhelming force of such a fact.

“Mr. Stephen Crane’s New Book.” Academy 51 (May 22, 1897), p. 541 A precipitate outpouring of lively pictures, a spontaneous dazzle of colour, a

frequent success in the quest of the right word and phrase, were among the qualities which won for The Red Badge of Courage immediate recognition as the product of genius. It was felt to be the work of one who had sought deep down in his inner consciousness for the thought and for the image, and had been rigorous in rejecting inadequate expression. These qualities, with less of their excess, are manifest in The Third Violet; and the sincere psychology, the scientific analysis, which in the earlier work lay at the root of the treatment of its subject-matter, are no less sure in the author’s portrayal of more daily emotions—of the hackneyed, yet never to be outworn, themes of a man’s love, a woman’s modesty, and the snobbery which is very near to us all. Of the hundreds who strive after this inward vision, and this power of just expression, once in a decade of years, or in a score, one attains to them; and the result is literature. The artist, Billie Hawker, the son of a poor farmer, fell in love with Grace Fanhall, a rich heiress, when she paid a visit to the village where his parents lived. It was in the “stage” that he met her. With his artist’s equipment, he was to pay a summer visit to his father’s farm; and she, with her sister-in-law and her brother’s children, was to spend some months of summer weather at the Hemlock Inn. As his eyes lighted on her, “a wave of astonishment whirled into his hair.” No sooner was he seated than his humiliation began. The driver, whose “tone to his passengers was always a yell,” identified him. “He glanced furtively down the stage. She was apparently deep in talk with the mother of the children.” When he reached home, the door of the lighted kitchen was opened, and Hawker “saw his two sisters shading their eyes and peering down the yellow stream.” “The girls clamoured sentences at him.” “‘Saw your illustrations in the May number of Perkinson’s,’” said

147

his father, “and then added, quite weakly, ‘Pretty good.’” When he opened his bedroom window, “on the black brow of the mountain, he could see two long rows of twinkling dots, which marked the position of Hemlock Inn.” At this hostelry was a writing man, Hollanden by name. “‘Say, Hawker,’ he said suddenly, ‘why don’t you marry Miss Fanhall?’” And in an experimental spirit of Puckish amity he devoted himself to inflaming and irritating the passion of his friend. Hollanden saw a dramatic situation in the distance, and with a bright smile he studied it. “Say!” he exclaimed, “suppose she should not go to the picnic tomorrow? She said this morning she did not know if she could go. Somebody was expected from New York, I think. Wouldn’t it break you up though— eh?” . . . “And rivals too! The woods must be crowded with them. A girl like that, you know! And then all that money! Say, your rivals must number enough to make a brigade of militia” . . . Hawker seemed overcome with a deep dislike of himself . . . “Confound you for a meddling, gabbling idiot!” cried Hawker suddenly. Hollanden replied: “What did you do with that violet she dropped at the side of the tenniscourt yesterday?” That was the first violet. The second was a free gift. Hawker turned to the girl: “I-I-I shall miss you dreadfully.” She turned to look at him, and smiled. “Shall you?” she said, in a low voice. “Yes,” he said.

Thereafter he stood before her awkwardly, and in silence. She scrutinised the boards of the floor. Suddenly she drew a violet from a cluster of them upon her gown, and thrust it out to him. Here is another colloquy between this quaint couple: “You are very unreasonable. If I were you—an heiress—” The girl flushed, and turned upon him angrily. “Well!” he glowered back at her. “You are, you know. You can’t deny it.” She looked at the red-stained crags. At last she said: “You seemed really contemptuous.” “Well, I assure you that I do not feel contemptuous. On the contrary, I am filled with admiration. Thank Heaven, I am a man of the world! Whenever I meet heiresses I always have the deepest admiration.” As he said this, he wore a brave hang-dog expression. This was the rock upon which he split. He followed her back to New York, hoping nothing; for, in spite of the pains the girl had taken to disabuse his mind—she had even accepted a lift in his father’s oxwaggon—he was entirely possessed with the notion that “general poverty” was a fatal disqualification. Then follows a series of episodes, representing the Latin Quarter life of New York, the organic connexion of which with the story at large is slight. But Mr. Crane has a method of his own, and his work is to be judged, by the effectiveness of his results. Also—and for this the author cannot fairly be held responsible—they unpleasantly remind one of a far too immortal work: for there is in the group of Billie

148

Hawker’s chums—besides his brother artists, Wrinkless, Grief, and Penny— an engaging model, Florinda by name (by nickname Splutter), who is extremely attached to him. These friends and this adoring damsel watch Billie’s out-goings and in-comings; and their grotesque comments and sham reticence are a novel and piquant medium of information. Even the gift of the third violet—so strongly is his prejudice against himself entrenched—he interprets into an insolent triumphing over the hopelessness of his passion. Very delicately the inarticulate crisis of mutual intelligence arrives, and “later she told him that he was perfectly ridiculous.” Mr. Crane’s dialogue, so far at least as it has sentiment for an element, depends for its charm upon the absolute assurance of its fitness for the purpose and the people. In the same way the brilliant rays he throws from moment to moment upon the insensible environment of his characters are a joy, not as bearing any mystic or symbolical relation to the narrative in which they occur; the sky is not clouded when his hero’s prospects are overcast, nor do the clouds pour out water when his heroine weeps: they are effective because inanimate nature is pictured with just such flashes of observation as the senses will still busily register while the intellect, so far as it is the servant of the will, is concentrated wholly upon a different matter. Human fates and passions thus are shown in their due proportion, in their right relation—none the less all-important to their patients because, to all appearance, nugatory in the general process. By this latest product of his genius our impression of Mr. Crane is confirmed: that for psychological insight, for dramatic intensity, and for potency of phrase he is already in the front rank of English and American writers of fiction; and that he possesses a certain separate quality

which places him apart. It is a short story and a slender; but taking it in conjunction with what he has previously given us, there remains, in our judgment, no room for doubt.

“American Fiction.” Athenaeum 24 (May 22, 1897), p. 678 As we began to read Mr. S. Crane’s novel The Third Violet we thought it was outside the list of his works of genius, and an attempt at a new departure into which less brain-power had been put. It makes little demand upon the reader, and flows almost as smoothly as the “Dolly Dialogues.” But before the middle of this American love story was reached we found reason to change our view, and to recognize a vividness of portraiture which puts “The Third Violet” on a high level—higher, we think, than Mr. Crane’s very different “Maggie,” though perhaps lower than “The Little Regiment,” which is also very different. In his present book Mr. Crane is more the rival of Mr. Henry James than of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. But he is intensely American, which can hardly be said of Mr. Henry James, and it is possible that if he continues in his present line of writing he may be the author who will introduce the United States to the ordinary English world. We have never come across a book that brought certain sections of American society so perfectly before the reader as does “The Third Violet,” which introduces us to a farming family, to the boarders at a summer hotel, and to the young artists of New York. The picture is an extremely pleasant one, and its truth appeals to the English reader, so that the effect of the book is to draw him nearer

149

to his American cousins. “The Third Violet” incidentally contains the best dog that we have come across in modern fiction. Mr. Crane’s dialogue is excellent, and it is dialogue of a type for which neither “The Red Badge of Courage” nor his later books had prepared us. For example, a reference to China, before an artist hero, produces the reflection: “There are innumerable tobacco jars in China. . . . Moreover, there is no perspective. You don’t have to walk two miles to see a friend.” Some understanding will really have to be come to between us and the Americans, and our colonists in Australia and elsewhere, as to the English language. If they are going to produce writers who are so certain to be read throughout the English world as Mr. Stephen Crane, our people will have to learn the meaning of many American phrases. There are passages in the present book which will be spoilt for many English readers by the fact that they may be unaware that, across the Atlantic, “bug” means a flying insect. “Snickered” we suppose means sniggered. “So long” of course we know to be a salutation on departure; but in England that fact is not generally understood, though it is known in parts and among certain classes. There is one phrase which, with all our admiration for Mr. Crane, we find simply horrible: “mucilaged to their seats,” for glued.

“Stephen Crane and His Slangy ‘The Third Violet.’” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1897, p. 8 The most provoking thing about Stephen Crane’s “The Third Violet” (Appleton) is

that one cannot be angry with it. There is no shadow of a doubt that it is raw and ought to be “roasted.” Its characters are underdone. Its English is a constant grief and its slang cannot fail to corrupt the vocabulary of Chimmie Fadden. Its dialogues are often vulgar, its plot is meager and commonplace, and its denouement ordinary. And yet it refuses to be utterly condemned. What saves the story is its good humor and its genuine human nature. It is a light and sketchy thing, of no great account either way in its effect upon the young author’s nascent reputation, and is typical of neither his best nor his worst work. It verges too closely upon the field of his revolting “Maggie” for its own good, and yet its spirit is totally different from the pessimistic gloom of that story of the slums. “The Third Violet” is chiefly a tale of New York bohemianism, and it must be admitted that Mr. Crane has caught the true spirit of that life. The financial irresponsibility, the camaraderie between men and women, the sulphurous but good-humored persiflage, all are here. The artist’s model, Florinda, with her unspoken love for Hawker, reminds one of Trilby in spite of her unattractiveness. The brief glimpses of this impecunious bohemian group are not bad in their way. They leave distinct impressions, and do it chiefly by means of dialogue. This is only one half of Mr. Crane’s mise-en-sc`ene. The other half is Hawker’s paternal country home and the adjoining summer resort, where he meets and is captivated by the wealthy Miss Fanhall. The method in which the author brings these two distinct worlds into semi-humorous juxtaposition, at the same time working out a slender but attractive romantic theme, shows sufficient power to convince one that Mr. Crane can learn to write a good novel in time.

150

The youthful crudities that deface this story are chiefly on the surface. There is reason to believe that Mr. Crane will in time get over the period when it seems smart and witty to interlard his pages with friendly epithets like “You colossal ass,” or “You infernal cat,” or “You old thief, you lied to me,” and a hundred others equally choice. If he lives long enough he will also learn that his new-found fame in nowise depends upon the continued use of solecisms like “receipts” instead of “recipes,” or upon such originality in grammar as is to be seen in expressions like “Two bundles of kindling was balanced,” “They dove into the cellar,” and all the rest of that ilk. On the other hand, there are elements of rare literary strength in this as in the other books by the author of the “Red Badge of Courage.” Chief among these is the power of creating objective imagery. When Hawker got his first glimpse of Miss Fanhall “a wave of astonishment whirled into his hair.” The tender passion that is introduced in such original style is bound to amount to something. In fact, we should be disappointed if Hawker’s devotion did not within a few pages develop into something “as plain as a red petticoat hung on a hedge.” And as the young lady deigns to give the artist a violet, then a second, and finally a third, we know that he is mistaken in his diagnosis of his own case when he contends that “she don’t care an old tomato can for me.” Whenever Stephen Crane learns to eliminate the vulgar note that still mars most of his work he will be seen to have a first-class literary reputation within his reach. His remarkable experience in a recent shipwreck, and his present experience as a war correspondent in Greece, ought almost to make a good novelist out of a literary hack—and Crane is by no means a hack.

“New Publications: The Violet as a Love Flower.” Baltimore Sun, May 28, 1897, p. 8 Mr. Crane made a reputation by his “Red Badge of Courage,” a graphic war narrative which seems to us overpraised; established that reputation by his sketches, “The Little Regiment.” So far he was new in descriptive power; crude, but vivid in style, and master of his subject. When he attempts the usual novel, whether of low life, as in “Maggie, a Child of the Streets,” or in this love episode of “The Third Violet,” he no longer stands alone, but comes into comparison with those who have made a long and special study of London and New York slums, or with the multitude who write love stories for the ready market they find for them. In neither case in his two later novels is Mr. Crane successful above the average; and “The Third Violet” is, in many places, so distinctly the work of an amateur as to lead us to suspect it an early work revised. There is plenty of swearing, slang and rattle-de-bang in it, but the pace is slow, and in the last interview the heroine is “insolent,” and her lover, the artist, “sneers” and then “glowers at her,” until at last she flings the third of her violets at him, which seems to clear love’s sky and bring fair sailing weather, during which they come to a complete understanding.

151

“Recent Novels.” Spectator 78 (May 29, 1897), p. 771 Inverting the procedure of Virgil, who passed from bucolic strains to the horrentia Martis arma, Mr. Stephen Crane has in The Third Violet turned aside from the battlefield into the realm of the pastoral idyll. Mr. Crane is at no pains to subdue the strenuous accents of his explosive style to the gentler tones naturally associated with such unheroic themes as lawntennis and picnics, and the incongruity between matter and manner is, in consequence, rather glaring, When his “summer folk” leave the train they “burst forth with the enthusiasm of escaping convicts.” Elsewhere we read how “a little brook, a brawling, ruffianly little brook, swaggered from side to side down the glade, swirling in white leaps over the great dark rocks, and shouting challenge to the hillsides.” This is carrying the “pathetic fallacy” to extremes; and lifelike as Mr. Crane’s pictures are, they have something of the spasmodic jerkiness of the kinetoscope. But though his story lacks restfulness and reserve, it fascinates by its fresh and vivid charm. The comedies of courtship have seldom been more unconventionally portrayed than in the conversations—short and sharp, like a cross-fire of rifles— between Billie Hawker and his lady-love. Hawker is an artist, of humble parentage but remarkable talent, who falls hopelessly in love at first sight with a beautiful New York heiress, and is driven by sheer diffidence to assume a mask of indifference and even rudeness. But his efforts are as futile as those of the ostrich to avoid concealment, and the tortures he endures at the hands of his homely sis-

ters, his artist friends, and, above all, of a good-hearted but irrepressibly humorous journalist named Hollanden, keep the reader in a constant simmer of amusement tinged with pity. Agreeable relief is lent to the rural scenes by some remarkably spirited and genial pictures of Bohemian life in what may be called the Quartier Latin of New York, and a note of genuine pathos is struck in the unrequited and unselfish devotion of Florinda O’Connor—a very pleasing variant on the Trilby type—to the unresponsive Hawker. Nor should we fail to mention the humblest, but not the least engaging, of the dramatis personæ— “Stanley,” Hawker’s dog, who is quite one of the most delightful animals we have encountered in recent fiction.

New York Mail and Express, May 29, 1897, p. 8 “The Third Violet,” the fourth or it may be the fifth or sixth story book by Mr. Stephen Crane, is one of those books which makes us wonder why and how their writers were ever considered authors, there is so little in them that is really worth consideration, and how long it will be before they will cease to be read and be as forgotten as if they had never existed. Mr. Crane made what reputation he has two or three years ago more or less by “The Red Badge of Courage” which purported to be an episode of our civil war, and which was hailed by the gentlemen and ladies who “do” critical notices in the newspapers as an extraordinary book. Which it was, though not quite in the sense that they supposed in their mistaken and ignorant enthusiasm, for it was as extravagant and as meretricious, as immature

152

and as unreal as any piece of writing that ever claimed to deal with actual events and emotions could be. It was a series of imaginative pictures of military life, painted by one who was entirely ignorant of military life, in detail or en masse, but who, having a certain untrained feeling for color, dashed it and splashed it on his canvas as lavishly as if he were a scene painter, and “The Red Badge of Courage,” a roaring melodrama. Riotous in his profusion of glaring colors and in his use of sonorous adjectives, Mr. Crane imposed upon his readers and was accepted for what he seemed to be and not what he was, for a new master of fiction and not a confident but crude pupil, who had everything to learn except fluency in the use of the pen. That he took himself to be the gifted author that his critics assured him he was is not to be wondered at, since he is a young man, and the heads of young men are apt to wobble a little, as he might say. What is to be wondered at, however, and deplored is that, instead of writing better than he did at first, he writes worse and worse in every book he has produced since, increase of practice in his case being increase of perversion, which (for the present) has reached its acme in “The Third Violet,” which, instead of being a military melodrama, is a sort of country and city farce, the actors in which are an artist, who doesn’t know how to paint, a literary man who doesn’t know how to write, a bevy of girls who play lawn tennis and flirt, and three or four bohemian artists, impecunious and slangy, who patronize each other and a female model, whom they call “Splutter.” The lovers call each other chumps and duffers and asses and tools; swear whenever the humor takes them, which is very often, and generally behave like the blackguards they are. This may be realism as Mr. Crane imagines it, but to us, and we believe to others, it is sheer, unmitigated vulgarity.

“Novel Notes.” Bookman 12 (June 1897), p. 72 This is an idyll, and it is written for the most part in slang, and in the elliptical and vituperative language in vogue to-day amongst young persons on the best of terms with one another. Yet it is an idyll, and a very pretty one. The third violet is a shyly insistent token of love from a girl, who is an heiress, to a young painter— poor, humbly born, hopeless of winning her, yet not meek enough to accept rejection gracefully. His manner of wooing, if wooing it can be called, is ferocious, though he is evidently a well-disposed young fellow. We like him, and follow the troubles of his heart, and watch the wounds to his pride with sympathy to the end; though when Miss Fanhall made such generous opportunities for him, we could shake him for his ungraciousness. But then Mr. Crane presents us to his home and his art circle, neither of them schools of fine manners exactly, though both honest and friendly, and each in their way much to our liking. By the bye, there is a Trilby in the tale—this time Florinda, with fine arms instead of feet; and there are a troop of Trilby—that is, Florinda—admirers. But we foretell no boom for “The Third Violet” on their account, though they are as living as their notorious predecessors—a good deal more so, in fact. The staging is not so well adapted to popular taste; there is no mesmeric villain in the piece; and for tragedy, Florinda only goes back to her high and lonely flat with a very sore heart. In “The Red Badge of Courage” and “Maggie” there is an intenser force; but in this slighter effort we feel the same directness, the same true reading of the

153

workings of the mind, the same contempt for conventions and clap-trap sentiment.

“Books and Bookmakers.” Louisville Courier-Journal, June 5, 1897, p. 7

tion of the ride of Hawker and the heiress on the ox-cart of the former’s father, and of the astonishment and consternation among the fashionable hotel guests when they drove up to the door.

“Books.” Time and the Hour 5 (June 12, 1897), pp. 9–10

Undoubtedly Stephen Crane has unusual powers of description, but these do not seem well adapted to the telling of a love story—and “The Third Violet,” dealing with artist life in the city and country, may be termed a love story. Billie Hawker, a struggling New York artist, goes to his home in the mountains, near a popular watering place, for the summer. He falls in love with an heiress and is teased and tormented by his friend Hollenden, a literary man. At different times during the summer the heiress gives Hawker two violets. Afterward, in New York, she gives him a third one, and so the story ends. There are various realistic pictures of artist life in New York, of the struggles and joys of the artists. Save in the hint that Splutter, the model, is not indifferent to Hawker there is almost no sentiment—in fact, this is one of the really interesting parts of the book. The book is a detailed description of situations and movements and a record of fragmentary conversation rather than a story—in short, a series of pictures. The movement is jerky, and the characters, in many places, are no better than dummies. Now and then one rises suddenly, and makes some slangy remark, and then subsides. The intimation of Splutter’s love for Hawker is, however, well done, and the sympathy of the reader is won. There is humor in it, too, as there is in the descrip-

The attitude which is perhaps the most sordid and degrading in our experience, of enforced overhearing the banal platitudes of vulgar people, when we chance to sit or walk near them in a crowd, is that in which we turn the pages of “The Third Violet.” The genre picture which used to attract such crowds of admirers has now given way to the genre book. There was a spittoon in it, a shabby table, some scattered cigar-ashes on the table and on the floor. Half-empty beer-mugs stood about, and there were rings on the wood which other beer-mugs had made. It was very lifelike and very nasty. Or there was a pinched and cadaverous wretch with glaring eyes who sat gnawing an almost bare bone, exceedingly frightful in its excellent technique. To represent sordid things sordidly seems the ambition of some writers of the day. Studiously divesting their subject of every shred of sentiment, ignoring the possibility of ideality which is latent everywhere, oblivious of Heaven and Hell and of all the heroisms with which the battle between them is fought in human hearts, they devote their powers to limning with frightful fidelity that which is alone totally unworthy to be pictured, mere vulgarity—neither nature nor art. It is this quality which marks the fallen world with the brand of its declension more, perhaps, than sin itself: incompleteness,

154

disproportion, incoherence. In the talk of Mr. Crane’s gang of snobs and simpletons there is not one word which makes for harmony or dignity. It is all low, low, low. Of course, the book has no style. That would be an artificial element which would destroy the realism of this ghastly young author. The sentences of description merely batter the ears with crude statements which fitly frame the barren dialogue of which this is a sample:— “Aw!” said Hawker, waving his arms, “it’s no good! I abominate it! I did n’t get what I wanted, I tell you. I did n’t get what I wanted. That?” he shouted, pointing thrustway at it— “that? It ’s vile! Aw! It makes me weary.” “You’re in a nice state,” said Hollanden, turning to take a critical view of the painter. “What has got into you now? I swear, you are more kinds of a chump!” Hawker crooned dismally, “I can’t paint! I can’t paint for a damn! I ’m no good. What in thunder was I invented for, anyhow, Hollie?” “You’re a fool,” said Hollanden. “I hope to die if I ever saw such a complete idiot! You give me a pain. Just because she don’t—” One pities the printers who had to set up this book, and who were obliged to spend valuable time over it word by word.

“Stephen Crane’s Last Book.” Boston Evening Transcript, June 16, 1897, p. 10 There has never been a literary period so distinctly heathen as our own except

the decadent days of Rome. We have a school which absolutely ignores supernatural motive, of whatever sort, and contents itself with pure materialism, and that of the most ignoble kind. What is a literature worth that means nothing, that is either a play upon words or the reproduction of circumstances which have no significance, stripped of the latent idealism which lies within the most vulgar mind? To elicit or suggest this, to touch a chord of sentiment or heroism, was once the view of all writers. To ignore it entirely is the fine task which many of the new men set themselves. When Mr. Stephen Crane wrote “The Red Badge of Courage” we said that herein lay a lesson of the bitter meannesses of war, and welcomed its unsavoriness (which was quite without art) as a kind of bad but useful medicine. But apparently he revels in this sort of thing with delight for its own sake. “The Third Violet” is a tale of an unspeakable snob who is ashamed of himself, his family, his old father the farmer, and his surroundings generally, because a beautiful New York girl comes to spend the summer at a neighboring inn. He is a good deal chaffed by a friend, and afterwards in New York by a group of artists among whom he lives, and a friendly model—an entourage which is imitated from “Trilby,” but such a very pale and sickly imitation! All the talk is printed phonetically. It is all perfectly colloquial after the custom presumably of the kind whom Mr. Crane describes—and in the fashion which Mr. Howells advocates. “Lordie,” “dunno,” “gimme” are recognitions of a general usage which there might be some hope of reforming, had it not thus been recently sanctioned in a way by formulating it in type. The hour spent in reading this book is a very uncomfortable one. The useless degradation of the mind is like a bad dream in which one has spent the time in the kitchen listening to the servants’ talk. If literature

155

is to be only a juggling with words, let them at least be graceful and beautiful ones. Humanity even to humanity, without beauty or purpose, has no more interest than ants running about an ant-hill— even less, because the ants are never selfconscious and vulgar like the cheap men and women. The leaders of mankind have striven since mankind began to lift human lives into some heroism, first through the terrors and pities of fate, and later of Christianity; today they are satisfied to hold them up to be admired in their naked purposelessness and futility.

Critic 27 (June 26, 1897), p. 438 The reviewer would infinitely prefer not to say that Mr. Stephen Crane is not living up to the level of his early achievement. The remark is so easy, so obvious, and has been made about young men of talent so often before, that persons of discrimination are naturally a little weary of the phrase. Unfortunately, however, “The Third Violet” leaves absolutely nothing else to be said. As everybody now knows, Mr. Crane once wrote a book which was remarkable for its penetrating psychology, its tremendously vivid descriptions, and a subtle suggestion of symbolism which made itself felt in the reader’s impression that here was not only bold description of fighting with shot and shell, but a presentment as well of those other battles which the soul fights with viewless weapons. Of these excellences Mr. Crane has divested his work with a thoroughness that seems almost intentional, and yet it is inconceivable that even for an experiment in inanity a writer should be willing to follow up a book like “The Red Badge”

with such a vacuous trifle as “The Third Violet.” The author not only shows no grasp of character, but omits to present any characters to grasp. The hero is a pallid shade called Hawker, who is understood to be an artist. Going up to his old home in the mountains one summer, he comes across another shade denominated Grace Fanhall. She has “distance in her eyes” and asks him where she will find the stage for Hemlock Inn. They meet at frequent intervals thereafter, and Hawker does not paint as much as he had expected to do. The girl drops a violet one day, and the young man picks it up. Another man comes up from New York, and Hawker resents his presence. Miss Fanhall returns to the city after freely bestowing another violet upon her admirer. He calls upon her in her home to tell her that he can never forget her nor the violets, but that he is going to leave town in order to forget himself. She promptly gives him a third violet, and he says “What?” The book contains, also, some irrelevant pages in which a number of impecunious young artists figure. We hear more of their impecuniousness than of their art. Their poverty, in fact, is so profound that it has infected their speech, which is ineffably scanty and slangy, barely sufficing to communicate the most primitive ideas. It may, of course, be a point of honor with the young artists of New York to approximate sign-language as closely as possible, but the writer who would reproduce them in literature should remember that he is bound to supply in description the details to fill out a picture which the meagre dialogue barely serves to outline. This is a fair r´esum´e of the contents of the book. It will be perceived that the author has practically left the entire novel to the reader’s imagination. Naturally the reader’s imagination goes on strike, demanding less work and more profit, and the reader asks himself what

156

Mr. Crane means by presenting to him characters which are as crude symbols of human nature as the figures savages draw with charred sticks. An artist in letters might deliberately choose to efface the individuality of his characters in a story of this kind for two reasons. He might wish to paint an idyl of first love in the colors of the spring, and to make of it such a delicate and tender thing that any strong note of individuality would disarrange his values; or he might wish to make a sketch of young passion in lines so bold and strong that all the other lines must perforce be faint by contrast. “Paul and Virginia” is the classical example of the first of these experiments, and “Summer in Arcady” a contemporary instance of the second. But Mr. Crane is not seeking either of these effects, and he leaves us wholly in the dark as to what he does wish to achieve. He has blotted out individuality without offering any legitimate artistic substitute. You can have “Hamlet” with Hamlet left out, perhaps, but you cannot omit the entire cast, the stage and the manager, and claim that you are presenting a play. Maeterlinck says that he is not sure that a “static theatre” is out of the question, and he has gone some distance toward proving its possibility. However this may be, Mr. Crane has not yet proved that a novel can exist when the author neglects all consideration of characters, action and environment, and we venture to believe that he will never do so. There are traces here and there in the book of the spectacular splendor of the author’s first style, but they are only the ragged shreds of what once promised to be a garment of glory, eccentric in cut perhaps, but richly iridescent in effect. Taking the book as a whole, the author has prepared for those who would gladly be his admirers as many kinds of disappointment as 200 pages can possibly contain.

Liverpool Post, June 29, 1897 Mr. Stephen Crane’s new novel, “The Third Violet” is not concerned, like his “Red Badge of Courage,” with military affairs, and contains nothing in the shape of blood and thunder. It is a pure comedy of manners, the scene being laid partly in a summer resort in the country and partly in the artistic Bohemia of New York. The author’s genius is essentially dramatic, and the story is told almost exclusively in dialogue of admirable directness, force, and subtlety. The characters, lacking other description, reveal themselves in their talk, and the atmosphere of innocent freedom which runs through the book contributes greatly to its unquestionable charm. It will be read with pleasure, and will enhance the author’s reputation.

Melbourne Age, July 1897 With three small volumes of fiction, published within a space of about 18 months, Mr. Stephen Crane has won a place in the front rank of American writers. His latest work, “The Third Violet,” just published, contains nothing novel in incident or specially effective in dramatic point—it is a love story in New York artist life—but in a certain power of terse and vivid character delineation, and in the presentation of typical racial traits, it shows unquestionable genius. There are passages which combine the delicate subtility of Henry James, the realistic truth of W. D. Howells, and the photographic actuality of Henry B. Fuller.

157

It is distinctly a book to be recommended to those who are interested in the manysided life of the most interesting country in the world.

“Chelifer” [Rupert Hughes]. “The Bookery.” Godey’s Magazine 135 (September 1897), p. 331

The language has Mr. Crane’s characteristic vividness. The book is just an impressionistic sketch in dabs of primary color, which the reader must reconstruct for himself into a picture.

Lady’s Pictorial (October 23, 1897)

The evolution of Mr. Crane from a genius in the rough to a highly polished genius, is going on very surely. His “Red Badge of Courage” was so individual and so meaty that flagrant crudenesses of expression did not prevail against its success. Now he has given out a book absolutely devoid of flesh and blood, and yet a remarkable piece of purely literary craft; as a study in handling and technical originality it is something unprecedented. But it is all handling. The story is of the slightest possible texture, and it is rather uncertain how it all ends. The interesting thing is, that it is an e´ tude in conversation; not the set, epigrammatic, highly finished conversation found in books, and hardly anywhere else, but the jerky, fragmentary talk of real life. Sentences are rarely finished after their import is once conveyed, and interjections play a large part. It is not flattering to ourselves to admit it, but a great portion of conversation, especially that of impatient youth, sounds very much like the jargon of Mr. Crane’s people. Other writers have lacked courage to transcribe it so faithfully. There is a constant display of a strange ability to suggest underlying subtleties of meaning and mood by careless-looking speech.

The Third Violet. By Stephen Crane, author of “The Red Badge of Courage,” “Maggie,” &c. In one volume. Another illusion has vanished. I have been under the impression that when Mr. Crane passed from battle-fields, mean streets, and sordid people, to the region of romance, and pranked out his pages with violets, that I was about to revel in a charming and idyllic tale. But, alas for my disappointment! Mr. Crane is far more at home in the camp and the slums than on the tennis-ground, in my lady’s chamber, or even in the ramshackle den inhabited by three impecunious artists, and it is absolutely necessary to know something of the slang that is spoken by American artists and their friends, before any pleasure can be found in the perusal of “The Third Violet.” The men swear at one another—in fun, of course—but, somehow, their denunciations are somewhat confusing. Such flowers of speech were not out of place in the mouth of the hero of “George’s Mother,” but surely we ought to be able to distinguish between him and the young artist who fell in love with Miss Fanhall. And what of the young lady herself? As drawn by Mr. Crane she is a lay figure without the slightest resemblance to any of the charming and brilliant young American girls whom I have met from time to time. There is only one interesting

158

creature in the book, namely “Stanley,” the dog.

[Quotes up to “‘Privately I believe they should be hanged, but publicly I glisten with admiration.’”] The book is full of glimpses as good as this—and no better. Mr. Crane is out of his own province when he enters the arena of love. We hope that “The Third Violet,” which is a hopelessly scentless one, will be the last of its kind, and that instead of violets Mr. Crane will give us war—war— war.

Queen, the Lady’s Newspaper and Court Chronicle 52 (October 23, 1897), p. 793 “The Third Violet” is a distinct blot on Mr. Crane’s reputation. It is scarcely deserving of even strong censure. If it had been a book by an unknown writer, the reader would have merely dipped into it and put it aside. But, being by the author of “A [sic] Red Badge of Courage” (that formidable little book which keeps its persistent grasp upon one’s memory, and asserts itself at odd moments as books that live invariably do), we must of necessity notice it in our columns, for the position of the author demands attention. There is scarcely any story in the book. This, of course, we may not expect from Mr. Crane, as his strong point is not plot. But we ask, what has he given us instead? Literally nothing. The characters are indefinite and the endless dialogue is to the reader like listening to a roomful of people talking at the top of their voices. Some of Mr. Crane’s Americanisms and local sayings are graphic and amusing, but even they will not bear comparison with the crystallised cuteness of Miss Gertrude Atherton’s characters in “Patience Sparhawk.” Mr. Crane has such a fortunate way of opening his chapters that the reader invariably thinks that there is a good time coming, but the hope always dies down and the story sinks back again into indefinite dialogue. The fourth chapter is, perhaps, the greatest delusion. It begins:

Checklist of Additional Reviews New York Daily Tribune, May 16, 1897, part 3, p. 2. Manchester Guardian, May 18, 1897, p. 4. “New Books.” New York Sun, May 22, 1897, p. 7. “New American Fiction.” New York Times (May 22, 1897), p. BR5. C[lement] K. S[horter]. “Literature.” Illustrated London News 110 (May 29, 1897), p. 739. “Literary Notices.” Hartford Courant, June 1, 1897, p. 7. “Stephen Crane Essays Love.” New York Press, June 6, 1897, p. 20. “Letters and Art: Stephen Crane’s New Story.” Literary Digest 15 (June 19, 1897), p. 218. Arthur Waugh. “London Letter.” Critic 30 (June 26, 1897), p. 442. New York Herald, June 26, 1897, p. 13. Gerald Stanley Lee. “Of Mr. Stephen Crane.” Book Buyer 14 (July 1897), pp. 609–610. Literary World (July 9, 1897). Leeds Mercury, August 2, 1897.

159

THE OPEN BOAT AND OTHER TALES OF ADVENTURE New York: Doubleday & McClure Co. 1898

Glasgow Evening News, April 22, 1898

“A New Book by Stephen Crane.” Criterion. (April 23, 1898), p. 25

Anyone who wants to know what a literary landsman feels like when shipwrecked can get enlightenment from Mr. Stephen Crane’s new volume of short tales, “THE OPEN BOAT,” wherein, in the title story, is to be found an account of the author’s experiences and sensations while tossed about in a small dinghey after the sinking of the steamer Commodore. This account has a perfectly lightning-like vividness and an intensity of strength that together make the reader feel that he made an invisible fifth in that open boat. All the other stories—or, more accurately, episodes and sketches—have this same glow and this same strength; the complete volume forms a kind of verbal kaleidoscope where a hundred modern scenes—Texan scenes, New York scenes, scenes from the Graeco– Turkish war—glitter forth with startling clearness and incisive force. But the effect at best is tawdry. Mr. Stephen Crane’s short stories are after all but journalism apotheosised, glorified newspaper reports. In spite of their wealth of detail, they are thin. In spite of their broad and pitiless humanness they have nothing of true human nature in them, and consequently nothing of permanence. The trail of the special reporter is over them. Yet has Mr. Crane, though he may be ungrammatical on occasion, a wonderful instinct for the right word, and, as fleeting pictures, these tales, like those that have gone before them, will fascinate and thrill.

PERHAPS one of the easiest things on earth is the ridiculing of a man of genius; the finding of large faults in his works and the rejecting in toto of his claims on respect. The hardest thing in letters is to write an effective parody on a mediocre artist. The fact that Mr. Stephen Crane is one of the most easily derided and parodied of our contemporary writers is almost a proof that he is a genius of the first order. He has been convicted of grammatical errors that compelled one to doubt the existence of a proof-reader in the manufacture of his books. He has been found guilty of waving a scarlet paint bucket around his head, and painting literature vermillion. He has been indicted for describing a war that ended several years before he began. And yet, when you come to look the field over, what man, except Crane, have we in all our ranks to oppose to that violent anti American genius, Rudyard Kipling, as a type of virility? We have any number of writers of more elegance, of more moderation, of wider experience and observation, and of more industry; but whom have we whose writings are so full of blood and bones? Geniuses do not leap into existence in full panoply as Minerva was struck from the head of Jove. Their contemporaries can watch geniuses grow; can regret their mistakes, their excesses and their lack of symmetry. The public has had this privilege in the evolution of Mr. Crane. Without losing any of his original force—that force which made “Maggie” a slum story not to be forgotten, and the “Red Badge of

163

Courage” a presentation of war that has been hailed as the masterpiece of war literature, and the “Black Riders” a distinct, though curious, contribution to poetry— without losing any of this original force, Mr. Crane has become a sure and polished writer, as his last book “The Open Boat and Other Stories” (Doubleday & McClure Co.: New York) abundantly testifies. More important than the high finish of this last work is the fact that, like Mr. Crane’s other works, it almost invariably takes some new point of view—a point of view, too, which will be found so scientifically correct, that its unusualness is almost incredible. In his “Red Badge of Courage” he pointed out the overwhelming ignorance the soldier has of the general campaign, the plan of the immediate battle, or his own whereabouts and fate. It would have seemed that such a truth could not have escaped the myriad writers of war stories. And yet all these authors have been seeing war through the unlimited gaze of the imagination and the generalizing grasp of the military historian. It remained for Mr. Crane, who had never been in a battle, to find and fix the truth that a soldier knows next to nothing of what is going on in a large conflict. Mr. Crane saw war from within. So, in his new book, “The Open Boat,” he has touched the same new–old note. Given the problem of a group of men alone in mid-sea in an open boat, it is safe to say that ninety-nine authors out of a hundred would take as their point of view some angelic station in mid-air and begin by describing the vast concave of the overarching and pitiless sky. Mr. Crane, however, describes his lone, lorn seafarers as having no idea whatever of the sky above them. They know only the color of the waves, of each wave as it swallows the horizon and threatens to engulf the boat.

They know the dawn only by the change in the colors of the water. This story is the description of an actual experience Mr. Crane had when the Cuban filibustering boat he had embarked on foundered. And yet the word “I” does not appear once in the story, and the other people in the boat are given equal prominence and interest with “the correspondent.” So searching is the psychology of the narrative, so vivid is the description of the sea, which is represented, not as Hugo pictures it, as a monster fiend, clutching at man for a prey, but as an utterly indifferent power; and so striking are the phrases which bejewel this story that it must take its place among the short prose classics of our language. It is completely American in its tone and completely individual in its treatment. There is no time left to describe the “Other Stories.” The first one is masterpiece enough to commend the book to a place in any library. The others have the virtues of plot and character to an unusual degree. They concern Greeks, Mexicans, children and cowboys.

“Fiction.” New York Tribune Illustrated Supplement, April 24, 1898, p. 17 For Mr. Crane’s new stories we have a qualified admiration. They are so good in some respects that they ought to be better in others. The initial story, for example, would have been greatly improved if the author had discarded the ambition to be psychological and brilliant which we feel lurking beneath every page. This is “a tale

164

intended to be after the fact,” and Mr. Crane apparently observed all the details of the adventure with the closest care, but instead of presenting a straightforward narrative he bores us with little reflective asides and gives the reader an uneasy suspicion that the words so glibly put together were really sought out with a terrible consciousness of their rhetorical value. It will be seen that it is not to the substance of Mr. Crane’s volume that we take exception: it is his style that jars. Aside from the impression of strain conveyed by the diction this book is distinctly amusing, and while Mr. Crane shows in “The Five White Mice” and “The Wise Men” that he has not yet outgrown a rather immature cynicism, the episodes of life in the Far West which he describes are hit off with much spirit. “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” has an odd touch of farcical humor at the end. Through all the stories there blows a more freshening air than is associated with memories of much of this author’s recent work, and altogether the book marks an advance. “Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure” is decidedly well done. But Mr. Crane must avoid the making of shallow, epigrammatic observations in his stories. They do not impress the reader.

“The Open Boat and Other Stories.” Sunday Special, April 24, 1898 Mr. Stephen Crane is undoubtedly a writer of very great talent. His “Red Badge of Courage” was received with general approval. A more surprising achievement still, in our opinion, was “Maggie,” which revealed a knowledge of life truly remarkable in so young a man. Both these works were distinguished by an extraordinary

power of description, and by the manliness that pervaded every page. Mr. Crane is master of a certain grim humour, which he employs where other authors give us maudlin sentiment. His latest volume consists of a number of sketches—they can scarcely, with perhaps a single exception, be called “stories”—in which we find all the qualities of style that we admired in his previous works. And still the collection will come as a disappointment to Mr. Crane’s friends, for the simple reason that he has this time less to say than usual. To put it briefly, the manner is greatly superior to the matter. The manner is, indeed, so good that we become, in a measure, reconciled to many of the sketches which we would unhesitatingly condemn if they were less well done. We are afraid, however, that no good qualities of form redeem from failure the detailed accounts of fighting between some Mexicans and Yankees; of the honeymoon couple that overawe a drunkard who has run amuck; of the race won by a fat old man from a slender young man (bets here playing a large part); of the dice-throwing that results in a visit to the circus (the whole accompanied by much drink); of the “duel that was not fought” between a Yankee and a Cuban, the only saving feature here being the character-sketch of the Cuban. The point of the “Auction” is also very weak, and one that was scarcely worth making. A poor couple are forced to sell all they have, including a parrot, which repeats the beginning of a song that had been taught it, much to the amusement of the assembly, and to the chagrin of the couple. They leave the building in dismay. For the auctioning of their household goods, the sale of their home—this financial calamity lost its power in the presence of the social shame contained in a crowd’s laughter. Neither does the sketch of the Graeco– Turkish war appear to us to be worthy

165

of the author of “The Red Badge of Courage.” It goes without saying that it contains a good deal of that “psychology of war” which is so very much in vogue just at present, and which accentuates the ignoble rather than the noble side of the soldier’s character. This brings us to the end of our “black list.” The remaining sketches—there are ten of them—all have some redeeming feature other than that of mere form. “The Open Boat” describes the author’s adventures on the high seas after a wreck, in company with three others. It is evident that every detail of this dangerous experience indelibly impressed itself on Mr. Crane’s memory at the time, and we are spared nothing in his recital. Though some might wish for greater brevity, no one can deny the power and dramatic intensity of the narrative. In “Horses” the break-neck speed of one of the steeds is described with a spirit that recalls “How they brought the good news.” “Flanagan’s Adventure” has a special interest at the present moment, as it deals with a filibustering expedition which is bent on supplying the insurgent Cubans with stores. The ship is eventually wrecked. Here is an example of Mr. Crane’s vivid and picturesque style. [Quotes “The Foundling was a wounded thing.” to “The terrified machinery was making gestures.”] The only real “story” in the book is at the same time the only example in which the love element is represented. The father of the girl (who owns a merry-go-round on which the young man is employed) is opposed to the match, and the description of his futile pursuit of the lovers in an old cab is excellent, with its symbolical reflections on youth and old age. New York “Bowery” life is not forgotten, one sketch being devoted to a “dossing” house, while another might serve as a text to Mr. Luke Fildes’ “Casual Ward.”

The best things in the series are four very short “impressions,” two of them being humorous and two sad. The former deal with some petty thefts innocently committed by tiny children. In one of the latter the author tells of an appeal for work made in the street by an old woman to two elegant young ladies, and in the other he depicts a scene in a court room, in which a girl is committed for trial on a charge of theft. [Quotes “The crowd in the courtroom could not hear a sentence . . .” to “his own thought.”]

W. L. Courtney. “Books of the Day: Mr. Stephen Crane.” Daily Telegraph, April 27, 1898 Whatever may be the precise meaning of “impressionism” as applied to literature, it will hardly be denied that Mr. Stephen Crane is an impressionist. He desires, for instance, to play on the emotions by the use of strong, highly-coloured, and unfamiliar adjectives, or else, when he paints a scene, he takes it from a peculiar, personal angle of vision, conveying not so much a description as a fantasy. But then, Mr. Crane is also called a realist, and the two methods of designating his character are not obviously consistent. Realism means, or ought to mean, a hard and faithful veracity of detail, while impressionism, in art, at all events, signifies the conveying of a particular effect without the use of details. As a matter of fact, when Mr. Crane writes a story like “Maggie,” in which he depicts the trials and struggles of a girl and a boy with drunken parents, he is a realist, just as much as Mr. Arthur

166

Morrison, who attempts similar studies in his “A Child of the Jago.” But his “Red Badge of Courage” and his more recent book, “The Open Boat,” are distinctly of the impressionist order, replete, it is true, with details, but throughout regarded, not from a general platform, but from an extremely special standing-ground. The point is, perhaps, worth emphasizing, because Mr. Stephen Crane has done work full of promise, and belongs to the most modern class of American writers, who, like Mr. Frederic, Miss Wilkins, Mr. Allen, and Mr. R. Harding Davis, are inspired, in their respective ways, with a high ideal of literary attainment, and show extremely conscientious workmanship. Mr. Crane is, of course, still a young man. He was only twenty-one when he wrote the “Red Badge of Courage.” He has had his failures, as, for instance, in his so-called “Poems,” and in the novel entitled “The Third Violet”; but he has been having a good deal of experience lately as a journalist and a correspondent, and his work looks as if it was capable of considerable development, both in strength and character. There is, at all events, in one point, a great interval between “The Red Badge of Courage” and the sketch entitled “The Open Boat,” an interval which seems to mark all the difference between the false and the true theory of art. The circumstances under which his earliest book was written are peculiar. It is an account of warfare as seen by a young recruit who is a coward one day and a hero the next. The style is extremely vivid, here and there lurid, always extravagant, because where the feeling fails the author tries to make up for it by violent adjectives. War as it presents itself to the recruit is a thing of sounds and scents and colours: events pass in a kind of dream, and since the hero seems to be very little conscious of what he is doing at any given moment he cannot be blamed for his cowardice

any more than he can be praised for his courage. This may or may not be a proper picture of war. Many good judges have pronounced it to be untrue but Mr. Crane had not, I believe, at the time when he wrote his book seen any actual fighting. That is perhaps no objection so long as the book is considered as a mere work of art, but it obviously emphasises the fantastic aspect of the task which Mr. Crane attempted. If one has no real experience of what one is describing—whether it be a boat-race or a prize-fight or a football match—the easiest way is undoubtedly to make the scene a phantasmagoria of effects, a misty and elusive cloud-land. Most of those who have been through some keen and passionate experience will be the last to describe their sensations as either misty or blurred. Everything, on the contrary, is excessively clear and distinct, all sorts of absurd and insignificant details stand out in extraordinary prominence, and the sense of being very much alive sharpens the perceptions instead of confusing them. Even if Mr. Crane’s picture were correct, it would yet remain artificial, a violent and paradoxical attempt to give a purely personal opinion of the unrealised and the unfelt. Because the author’s recruit is telling us of situations which he never experienced, but only imagined, he becomes himself a piece of faulty psychology. He does not impress us as real, because he is too much of a conscious artist, too rhetorical, too stagey. Things which he notes seem to be exactly those which a recruit would not appreciate; they are colours and sounds, colours of the sky or the camp smoke, sounds of distant guns or advancing troops—in other words, the points which would appeal to an artist, not to an ordinary soldier. “The Red Badge of Courage” was a very striking book, because the pigments were daubed on with a certain reckless exuberance which carried the reader away; but on a second or a

167

third perusal the work appears much more fanciful, an essay to effect by words what could only properly be done by a painter’s brush on a canvas. Most people will remember that Mr. Crane was wrecked off the coast of Florida, and that for some time considerable alarm was felt as to his safety. As a matter of fact, together with the captain, the cook, and the oiler, he succeeded in effecting his escape on shore after no little difficulty and privation. “The Open Boat,” which is the first piece in his new volume, is the story of the survivors of the sunk steamer Commodore, a story which occupies some forty pages of clear and picturesque narration. Events and scenes, be it observed, are no longer seen through a haze. The man had actually been through what he describes, and his impressions, although doubtless intensified by the conscious skill of the writer, are such as strike us with a sense of reality, and, therefore, are accepted without any demur. The opening sentences are not only vivid, but true. Tossing about in a tiny boat upon an angry sea, the captain, the oiler, the cook, and the correspondent could rarely see the horizon, or note anything but the waves which overpowered them. “None of them knew the colour of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept towards them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were a foaming white, and all of the men knew the colours of the sea.” Or let us read, a little further on, the description how, when the correspondent took his turn at the oars while the others slept, there suddently came a vision of a shark. “There was a long, loud swishing astern of the boat, and a gleaming trail” of phosphorescence like blue flame was furrowed on the black waters. It might have been made by a monstrous knife. Then there came a stillness while the correspondent breathed

with an open mouth, and looked at the sea. Suddenly there was another swish and another long flash of bluish light, and this time it was alongside the boat, and might almost have been reached with an oar. The correspondent saw an enormous fin speed like a shadow through the water, hurling the crystalline spray and leaving a long glowing trail.” That, of course, is a piece of impressionism, too; but how good it is, how it conveys the sense of loneliness and horror, and vague potentialities of death; how alive it is, how different from the dreamy impressionism of “A [sic] Red Badge of Courage.” The difference is just that between an experience and fancy, between what has been seen and shudderingly realised and that which has been cleverly and theatrically imagined. There is another note, too, in Mr. Crane’s “An Open Boat,” [sic] which, I think, is new in his pages. It is the note of pathos, the common fellowship and sympathy of suffering humanity. It would be difficult to describe, says the author, the subtle brotherhood of men that was established on the seas. No one said that it was so, no one mentioned it, but it dwelt in the boat, and “each man felt it warm him.” The four victims of a common calamity were drawn to each other in a manner which is as significant as it is touching. The captain, who was hurt, and lay in the bows; the cook, who steered; the oiler and the correspondent, who took their turns with the oars, were not only friends, but lived in and for each other. “Billie,” said the correspondent to the sleeping oiler, “Billie, will you spell me?” “Sure,” said the oiler, and then it came to be the oiler’s turn to ask to be spelled, and the correspondent was equally cheerful and willing. And listen to this passage on the same subject of the brotherhood of the seas: “It was more than a mere recognition of what was best for the common safety. There was surely in it a quality that

168

was personal and heartfelt. And after their devotion to the commander of the boat there was this comradeship that the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best experience of life.” Who had been taught to be cynical of men: Is there not in that phrase the confession or promise of a new development for Mr. Stephen Crane? Authors, artists, critics can be cynical of men, but not when they have shared a common danger. Some day Mr. Crane himself will find in humanity at large something other than the cruder emotions, the stronger passions. He will discover in them, and will therefore be able to paint for us, the sources of self-forgetfulness, of noble devotion, of ungrudging love.

“Mr. Stephen Crane’s Sketches.” Westminster Gazette (April 27, 1898) Mr. Stephen Crane has not yet given us the complete novel which some day or other we all expect of him. Meantime, however, he scatters the disjecta membra with generous profusion. We say this in no spirit of censure, but merely to express the fact that his latest volume, “The Open Boat,” is a medley of scenes, interludes, sketches, and notes, all of them vivid and interesting, but most of them left as they fell, so to speak, with no attempt to piece together or weld into a coherent whole. It is as though an artist were to throw you his sketch-book, with a foreground study on one page, a sunset sky on the next, a study of a figure on a third, and a stormy sea on a fourth. The connoisseur may find them more interesting than the finished picture, and in proportion as the

artist is a vigorous and original workman, they will have charm and vigour of spontaneity which can hardly be found on any canvas. But alone they will hardly make a permanent fame. Their value is a reflected glory from the artist’s completed works, and the world returns to them and dwells on them when the painter has compelled its attention by more ambitious works. This is an incurable tendency of the public, and though the art critic may fight it and cavil at it from his peculiar standpoint, it is likely to remain. The public declines to take the sketch quite seriously. Just so it declines to take descriptive writing for a story, though several of the younger American writers are trying their utmost to compel it. Mr. Stephen Crane makes a splendid effort. He seems studiously to avoid the plot or incident which other writers seek for the short story. He is concerned to study character at special moments of stress and emotion, to depict a scene as it flashed on his imagination, regardless of anything that came before or anything that is to follow after. The men in “The Open Boat,” who through a livelong night are in momentary terror of being swamped, all the while seeing themselves and each other with that peculiar intensity of vision which accompanies an acute crisis, could not be more poignantly described. This is descriptive narrative of the highest order. Or again, to pass to something less acute, the scenes in Mexico city, the race between Old Pop and Freddie, the kid from New York and the kid from San Francisco, with a hundred minute yet decisive touches, catching just the salient points of the crowd, and the landscape, and the blazing sun, are vividly coloured and intensely real. The details are minute, yet extraordinarily well selected. You can scarcely find a wasted stroke or a random stroke in the whole volume. Mr. Crane has learnt much of many writers; there is something of Kipling, something

169

of Bret Harte—something even of Mark Twain. Yet he has learnt still more from nature, and admirable as his manner of writing is, his gift is not merely or even chiefly literary, but a gift of original and penetrating observation, which of its kind is unique. Of Mr. Crane’s qualities in these respects we can hardly say too much. Yet it remains a pity that a descriptive talent so brilliant and insight into character so remarkable within certain limits cannot be used for the complete novel. Mr. Kipling halts at the short story, but within its compass he gives us plot and construction sufficient and complete for the purposes. In other words, he really builds. Mr. Crane, however, stops short even of the short story. His work at the best is a brilliant fragment. He is so absorbed in making a faithful and vivid impression that he cannot spare time or thought to relate it to a complete whole. He is yet very young; it may well be that this is the best method of developing his talent. But we look forward in hope to some more comprehensive effort.

“Crane’s Book of Short Stories.” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 30, 1898, p. 10 In the first of the stories Mr. Crane is informed by a personal experience, and he has used his powers of description to good effect. He succeeds wonderfully in conveying to the reader the impressions and sensations of the men who were facing death in the open boat, and in bringing a full realization of what it means to be adrift on the ocean to people who are

quite willing to abstain from an investigation of their own. Any one who has been caught out in a pleasure boat on a rough little lake will recognize the felicity of the following: “A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that, after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it, just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the swamping of boats.” The writer’s own craft “pranced, and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making for a fence outrageously high. The manner of her scrambles over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and, moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white water, the foam rushing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a new leap and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully bumping a crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a long incline, and arrive bobbing and nodding in front of the next menace.” The weariness of the rowers is another thing that is portrayed in a way that makes one enter into the feelings of the disconsolate crew almost as if the experience were one’s own. “The correspondent wondered ingenuously how in the name of all that was sane could there be people who thought it amusing to row a boat. It was not an amusement; it was a diabolical punishment, and even a genius of mental aberrations could never conclude that it was anything but a horror to the muscles and a crime to the back.” But with these genuine and felicitous descriptions there goes much that is insincere, and that is the sure indication of a straining for effect. This sentence several times repeated fails entirely of its purpose: “If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why in the name of the seven

170

mad gods who rule the sea was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?” When you have escaped this question once you resent having it thrust upon you again and again. The strain is not now of the oars, but of the impulse to do something fine at the writing desk. The same tendency is observable in the stories that follow, and it is one that cannot be checked too suddenly or too effectively. It may lead Mr. Crane to see things finally as they are not, instead of as they are. After that fresh performance known as “The Third Violet” he needs to look out for himself and his public.

George Merriam Hyde. “New Fiction.” Book Buyer 16 (May 1898), pp. 352–353 IN taking up Mr. Crane’s new volume of short stories, one should be in pink condition to enjoy the purring of bullets and hurtling of shells—when they do not blip into the sea, and to listen to the whiroo of a shark’s fin and the chug-chug-chug of the filibusters’ engines. The sky will be an arch of stolid sapphire, the white-lipped sea will change from slate to emerald streaked with amber lights and besprent with brown mats of seaweed, while the chief engineer watches with care his redpainted mysteries. Besides the Cuban and the Greek, there will be a fat, green Mexican, and a drunken gambler chanting Apache scalp-music, and amid the mesquit and the cactus we will glimpse crimson serapes, whose wearers breathe treachery and cowardice. Yes, like all Mr. Crane’s writings, The Open Boat, and Other Tales

of Adventure is nothing if not high-keyed and chromatic. So, too, are Marie Corelli and Emma Brooke, the difference being that the latter soar and flutter skyward, with not so much as a kite-string to connect them with earth. The person who can take them seriously is herself either very young or very melodramatic, I should say—or perhaps even should not. But Mr. Crane has his feet on the ground. He psychologizes no less than pictures, as in the sentence, “Richardson was too frightened himself to do anything but hate this man for his fear.” The little ironies of life which he depicts so stoically and relentlessly are a sort of inverted reality, if not the real thing, to almost every one who has “lived”! He is master of his sensations, and a symbolist in communicating them. He gives a tragic event its true setting in a world of apathy. Nature is nonchalant, and dancers dance, while filibusters drown, and only a little girl on the hotel piazza hears the voice of wind and breakers, as also it is a little girl who asks the fugitive Greek, “Are you a man?” Thus Mr. Crane’s drama is a drama of character. It would be very easy to call him to account for slovenliness of composition, for excess of luridness, for being attracted to themes inherently coarse, and to enumerate the slang which narrator and cowboys use. But for every wrong word I find a right word or phrase, for every far-fetched simile one that rivets itself in mind, and granting the author’s right to choose his own themes, few there are who can handle such as Mr. Crane has chosen, especially in the Mexican sketches, with equally good taste. “The Open Boat,” relating “the experience of four men from the sunk steamer ‘Commodore,’” should rank very high among short stories. It suggests that every one of Mr. Crane’s stories might have been as well told had he, like Maupassant, gone to school for a decade to some Flaubert before publishing.

171

There are two ways of getting the public ear—that of doing what others have done with an added freshness of touch and observation, as has Mr. Davis, and that of doing something different. Mr. Crane’s choice of the latter way is apparently an easy one. If he could profit by example, as well as follow his original bent, his development would be commensurate only with his outlook upon life. But, unhappily, the man who is determined to be himself, in America at least, is the last man to learn from others. So it is that one finds Mr. Crane persisting in puerilities and vaguenesses, and even grammatical errors, which detract from the literary value of much of his work.

Harold Frederic. “Stephen Crane’s New Book.” New York Times, May 1, 1898, p. 19 The most important literary event of these last few days has been the issue of Stephen Crane’s new book, of which the title story, “The Story of the Open Boat,” [sic] would, even if he had written nothing else, have placed him where he now undoubtedly stands. The heart of a nation of sailors goes out to him who spelled at the oar with the oiler, while even the most microscopic critic can find no wasted stroke of the pen in his pages. The genius of this young son of America is being keenly felt here, and there is a quickening touch in this volume of stories which will put a new face on British appreciation, though the average indolent reviewer has been too staggered by their form to be able to see the true inwardness of his poems, for the British critic, with all his good qualities,

is at heart a literary Tory and somewhat cramped by the iron rules of precedent. Just as it has been candidly said of the present Poet Laureate that he is too facile a maker of rhymes ever to be a poet, so it is true of Stephen Crane that he is too real a poet to be a rhymster. No living English prose writer of his years approaches his wonderful gift of original, and penetrating observation, while no writer of English is to-day prouder of being an American. Possibly this steady, unswerving loyalty to his native land has helped to make him so many friends among Englishmen, who, even when men of letters, are sportsmen enough to like that man who stands up for his own regiment. Maybe Crane little knows himself what a powerful factor he has been of late in drawing England Westward.

“Literature: Notes on New Novels.” Illustrated London News 112 (May 7, 1898), p. 662 Mr. Stephen Crane has made the psychology of peril and terror his own. “The Open Boat” is a brief analysis rather of the former than the latter, but it contains touches as true and powerful as any of his stories which deal with the rage of battle. The weariness of sea and oar is driven home with an almost jarring actuality, and although the story is of the slenderest, the author’s method holds us breathless to the end. Still, good as “The Open Boat” is, one feels that Mr. Crane is more his own man in his own subject, and his story of Peza, the Greek from an Italian university, correspondent of an Italian paper, who, in an access of patriotism, begged to have a

172

place, and work in the fighting line, and, having obtained his desire, ran away, is as admirable a picture as any he has given us of the unromantic, “knee-loosening” side of war. It is questionable, however, whether the irony intended at the close of “Death and the Child” is legitimate; for the fearlessness of ignorance is scarcely a proper foil to a terror springing from full knowledge and sensitive imagination. The other stories of the book are little more than outlines; in these Mr. Crane has allowed himself too meagre a chance, but he is always picturesque. Once or twice his symbolism comes perilously near obscurity, while “grimey” is an orthographic reproach which the printer’s reader might have saved him.

Literature 2 (May 7, 1898), pp. 535–536 For the reader’s information, we may say at once that this is a book to read, that is, if the reader does not expect too much from a writer who has been so unanimously praised as Mr. Crane. Nor do we dissent from the praise that has been bestowed upon him, although his admirers have been a little extravagant in their laudation. As far as we can judge—and Mr. Crane has not as yet written a great deal— his position in literature is in some ways peculiar. He has in a very unusual degree the power of bringing a scene, no matter what, before our eyes by a few graphic phrases. His subjects are not always interesting; it is his way of presenting them that is everything. In this respect he resembles those painters who care little for the subject but more for the method of their art, and are called, for want of a better term, Impressionists. To this extent, with

his carefully-chosen details, his insistence on the main theme, and his avoidance of irrelevance, Mr. Crane is an Impressionist, and not a mere descriptive writer. His book must not be regarded as a collection of short stories. They are incidents rather than stories, and are selected, not for their dramatic interest, which the author apparently wishes to exclude, but as a vehicle for the telling touches in which he paints aspects of nature, or analyses human emotions. When a writer works in this manner, generally, it must be admitted, with less success than Mr. Crane, his friends as a rule urge him to sustained efforts of which he is not capable, and lament that he does not write a “regular novel.” For ourselves, we see no evidence in these sketches that Mr. Crane is equal to any such undertaking. The sketches are complete in themselves, and owe their effectiveness to that fact, and by no means to their intrinsic interest; nor do they seem to contain raw material that might be further developed. This is their peculiarity, that they all have the one same merit, without which, to say the truth, they would be somewhat poor reading. Some of them are so extremely slight that one is tempted to think that almost any other ordinary incident would have served Mr. Crane’s purpose equally well. We can assure him that the value of his work, and the reader’s pleasure, would be much increased if he chose his subjects as carefully as the words in which he describes them. In “The Red Badge of Courage” he had an excellent subject, certain aspects of which are repeated in one of these sketches; the rest, however, appeal too exclusively to our appreciation of his power of vivid presentment, and that, in our opinion, is their chief defect. Having said this much, it remains for us to show by quotations wherein Mr. Crane’s strength lies. “The Open Boat” records the experiences of four men from the sunk steamer “Commodore” who

173

were endeavouring to make the nearest point of the coast of Florida. It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it was on him. They were a captain, an oiler, a cook, and a correspondent, and they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common.

Here, again, is one of many good bits of description from an account of an engagement between Greek and Turkish troops:— An officer with a double stripe of purple on his trousers paced in the rear of the battery of howitzers. He waved a little cane. Sometimes he paused in his promenade to study the field through his glasses. “A fine scene, Sir,” he cried airily, upon the approach of Peza. It was like a blow on the chest to the wide-eyed volunteer. It revealed to him a point of view. “Yes, Sir, it is a fine scene,” he answered. They spoke in French. “I am happy to be able to entertain Monsieur with a little practice,” continued the officer. “I am firing upon that mass of troops you see there a little to the right. They are probably forming for another attack.” Peza smiled: here again appeared manners, manners erect by the side of death.

Then, when they near the land, where the boat was certain to be swamped among the breakers:— As for the reflections of the men, there was a great deal of rage in them. Perchance they might be formulated thus:—If I am going to be drowned— if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the: sacred cheese of life? If is preposterous. If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men’s fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning, and save me all this trouble? The whole affair is absurd. But no, she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work. Every one in the dinghy was so tired with rowing that:— It is almost certain that if the boat had capsized he would have tumbled comfortably out upon the ocean as if he felt sure that it was a great soft mattress.

We will not say that we have chosen these passages quite at random, but there are many others like them, and they are fair instances of Mr. Crane’s style and of his power of rapid and penetrating description.

“Eight Strong Stories.” New York Times, May 7, 1898, p. 309 Four men in a boat. That is all. But the conditions? What are they? Concentrated in that frail dinghy are all human agonies. At the mercy of the waves are four men, the Captain, the cook, the oiler, and the correspondent. The boat, no longer than a bathtub, is at the mercy of the raging

174

sea, and that craft “pranced and reared and plunged like an animal,” and at each moment during the raging storm every man, Captain, cook, oiler, correspondent, thought his last moment had come. The cook bailed, the Captain gave his orders, and they all fought it out manfully during that terrible night. And now they neared the shore, and there was again the certainty of death, because of the surges. Then, finally, when at their last gasp, they were saved. That is all, but told in such a dramatic way that the reader takes his place in the dinghy and battles with death and has his heart in his mouth, and when, finally, the rescue comes he feels so sorry for his poor comrade, the oiler, who floats, dead, in the shallow water. It is a story to be simply styled “immense,” one that bites right into your soul for you will not forget it, and Mr. Stephen Crane never wrote a stronger or more impressive story. It is a bit of plain English, for be it said to his praise, the author of “The Red Badge of Courage” uses no dialect, and for that, too, we are grateful. The little touches of nature are even pathetic. The men are starving, for so suddenly had they abandoned their sinking ship that they have no morsel of food. “Billie,” said the cook, murmuring dreamfully, “what kind of pie do you like best?” “Pie!” said the oiler and the correspondent. “Don’t talk about those things, blast you!” “Well.” said the cook, “I was just thinking about ham sandwiches, but—” The story called “Flanagan” descriptive of a filibustering expedition, is opportune, if it be nothing else, but it has, too, its distinguishing merit. Flanagan took the position of Captain of that leaky old craft the Foundling simply for the “fun of it,” but nobly, heroically, did he carry out his duty, and when his poor, limp body floated ashore it was that of a man whose “calm face” was of “an Irish type.” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” has its pecu-

liarities. The groomsman, Sheriff Potter, would have been wiped out had it not been for the bride, who hung so awkwardly on her husband’s arm. That uncommon ruffian, “Scratchy” Wilson, would have killed the Sheriff on sight if not for the fact that he was loath to disturb a honeymoon. In the eight stories in this little volume there is shown an amazing amount of vigor, with that peculiarity of touch which is singular to Mr. Stephen Crane.

“Mr. Stephen Crane’s New Book.” Outlook 1 (May 7, 1898), p. 437 SOME years ago Mr. Crane wrote a little book called “The Red Badge of Courage,” which may stand as the finest delineation of modern warfare, comparable only to Tolstoi’s “Peace and War” and “Sevastopol.” But the great Russian’s point of view is that of a man disillusioned and entirely without hope in this world; stoically courageous if you will, but pessimistic always. He is a glass vessel of a sad even hue, which is continually replenished with the water of truth. But “nothing is, but thinking makes it so.” And Mr. Crane, with a vision as keen, though of narrower range, an intuition as extraordinary, and a courage as complete as his Russian forerunner, accepts the universe with a sort of sardonic cheerfulness. The Russian divines upon the veiled countenance of destiny a profound and sinister intention, an implacable austerity; and, to point another modern, typical instance, M. Marcel Schwob beholds, with a nightmare vision, the monstrous disfeatures of a leper behind a mask of gold. But the hand of destiny has spread in the sight of Mr. Crane a feast of interests so manifold and surprising that, perhaps,

175

he does not greatly concern himself with the eternal face behind the veil. “What is truth?” said jesting Pilate. We need not pause for an answer; let us rather call to mind how that the observer and the observed are spun of the same stuff at the loom of fate. Man is neither a mirror nor a phonograph; and the objective point of view, upon which the French, with the fatuous dogmatism which is a characteristic of that amiable nation, have sometimes insisted, can have no real existence. So Mr. Crane, not untinctured with the Great American Spirit, sure of himself, sure of his method, takes a piece of life in his hand, saying. “Come, listen to me, and this dusty clot of confusion shall become suddenly luminous, and shall thrill you with a certain emotion.” In “The Open Boat” Mr. Crane has given us the realism of shipwreck, as the late Charles Dickens, in the “Wreck of the Golden Mary,” gave us the romance. The author is always more interested in the manner in which a given event comes to pass than in the event itself. He is ever intensely preoccupied with the psychology of circumstance. And it is this preoccupation which both secures to him the mastery of the conte, the short story proper, and denies him success in the relation of a story whose interest lies in its appropriate culmination. For the conte is an impression pure and simple, whose existence depends upon the selection and presentation of detail. Other stories, be they long or short—it is immaterial so they be complete—depend for their interest upon the solution of a problem. Hence it is that in “The Wise Men” and the “Five White Mice,” wherein we care nothing for the problem’s solution, and wherein the presentment does not greatly interest; and in “Flanagan,” where there ought to be a problem to solve, and is not, the artist has failed of his effect. And hence it is that in “Horses,” where (for once) the prob-

lem is presented along with a wonderful piece of psychology, and in “Death and the Child,” and in all of Part II., the “Midnight Sketches,” he has achieved admirable success. In “Death and the Child” Mr. Crane touches the epic. Beginning with the picture of a headlong flight (“it was a freshet that might sear the face of the tall, quiet mountain; it might draw a livid line across the lands, this downpour of fear with a thousand homes adrift in the current”), it goes on to the presentment of battle and the invasion of overmastering fear, and ends with the wonderful vision of cowardice confronted with the child—“the primitive courage, the sovereign child, the brother of the mountains, the sky and the sea.” The measure of Mr. Crane’s achievement varies, of course, with his subject. His writing, save for a vulgarism here and there, is most subtle and vividly exact. After “Death and the Child” perhaps the minute ingenuity of his method is most plainly observable in “A Detail,” a tiny sketch, two pages long, which ends this volume of singular, unequal, and exceedingly clever work.

George Hamlin Fitch. “Authors and Their Writings.” San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 1898, p. 4 In “The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure” Stephen Crane has done some good bits of work. Most of the stories have appeared in the magazines and are reproduced here in neat form by the Doubleday & McClure Company of New York. The

176

book is for sale by Payot, Upham & Co.; price $1. “The Open Boat” is a remarkably vivid sketch of the experiences of four survivors of the filibustering steamer Commodore, which sank at sea off the Florida coast. The captain, the cook, the oiler and the correspondent, Mr. Crane, were the four who escaped in an open boat, and the story is a descriptive sketch of the experiences of the castaways on reaching land and the death of the oiler at the last moment, just when rescue seemed certain. All the incidents of this night at sea in a small boat could be put in a paragraph. Crane has filled sixty pages with a piece of descriptive work which is a classic, because it brings us within the shadow of death and makes us feel the helplessness of these men and their blind rage against the elements which they could not control. All through the night they were forced to relieve each other at the oars, for they had to labor like galley slaves to keep the wretched boat from being swamped by the huge waves that swept down upon them. Each man as he was relieved sank in a heap in the bottom of the boat and fell into a heavy sleep. The genius of Crane lies in the fact that he makes us see the agony of those men sweating and laboring at the oars, the sense of heaven that fills them when they can rest for a few moments in the wet boat, their rage when the dawn comes and they can see people on the beach who appear to give no heed to their signals, and the final struggle when a great sea swamps the boat and tosses them into the surf. It seems very simple, this study of the sweat and agony of four men, thrown together by chance, but all inspired by that courage which knows no such thing as despair; yet in its simplicity lies its great strength, and no one can read this sketch without having it graven for all time on his memory. The other stories deal with various topics, but not one is equal to the first. One

of the most striking embodies some of Mr. Crane’s experiences during the recent war of Greece against Turkey. All betray the methods of the literary impressionist, but in all may be found genuine human nature that makes them appeal to the warmblooded reader.

Manchester Guardian, May 27, 1898, p. 3 Many of the qualities that won so swift and brilliant a reputation for Mr. Stephen Crane in “The Red Badge of Courage” are equally conspicuous in his new volume, The Open Boat and other Stories. We find here the same curious felicity of phrase, the same power of fixing a scene indelibly in the imagination by a few rapid decisive strokes, and the same appreciation and subtle blending of the tragic and comic elements in a given situation that have marked his earlier books so saliently. These qualities are nowhere more in evidence than in the story which gives its name to the volume and embodies, we fancy, Mr. Crane’s experience of the shipwreck he recently suffered: its content may be indicated and is indeed almost summed up in the repeated phrase, “If I am going to be drowned–if I am going to be drowned– if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?” The two following stories, “A Man and some Others” and “The Bride comes to Yellow Sky,” are equally remarkable in their way; the situation at the end of the latter is a gem of its kind, where Scratchy Wilson, who is running amuck, suddenly meets his deadly enemy round a corner accompanied by his newly married wife, and

177

the lady’s presence so completely discomposes him that he retires helplessly from the field. “Death and the Child” embodies some of the author’s experiences in the Graeco–Turkish war, and reminds us forcibly of “The Red Badge of Courage,” the grim mixture of the terrible and the humorous being employed with particular effect in this story. Towards the end of the volume we have some studies in pure impressionism after the manner of Baudelaire’s “Petits Po`emes en Prose.” There is no pretence of incident in them: they merely embody and express a situation. This form of literature is, owing probably to its inherent difficulty and its appeal to a purely literary instinct, far more rarely met with in this country than in France. Mr. Crane’s sketches are by no means equal, but in two at least, “The Men in the Storm” and “A Detail,” he has achieved decided success. Taken as a whole, “The Open Boat” will doubtless find the numerous readers that its brilliant qualities fully deserve.

Saturday Review 85 (June 11, 1898), p. 785 The various stages in the development of Mr. Stephen Crane towards mastery of his art are of more than common interest, and not the least value of the present volume consists in the fact that it shows with unmistakable plainness how earnestly he is endeavouring to find his style, to arrive at the true formula of self-expression. No one who read “The Red Badge of Courage” for the first time could lay down the book without feeling that he had been listening to a new voice, and a voice that had something new to say. The story told was engrossing, compelling; it revealed a

section of the psychology of war which Mr. Kipling had not shown us; and it proclaimed itself the work of a man who, already master of his material, lacked only mastery of style. In the volume before us Mr. Crane is at his best and his worst— though even the worst is something to be grateful for. One story in the book—to wit, “Death and the Child”—comes as near perfection as one could wish. The description of the bumptious Greek who is prompted to fight for his country by vanity alone, and sees his egotism and cowardice laid bare at the touch of an unfrightened child, is as subtle and convincing an invention as we can recall; and the story, handled with admirable simplicity and skill, is the most artistic thing Mr. Crane has yet accomplished. “Flanagan” is only less valuable because the material is of cheaper fibre; the art with which it is woven is not a whit less praiseworthy. Immediately thereafter, in order of merit, we put “The Bride comes to Yellow Sky”—a singularly vivid and picturesque sketch of Texan life. It will perhaps surprise Mr. Crane that we prefer all these to the story he has placed in the forefront of the book. “The Open Boat” has some undeniably fine passages, and certainly reads like a transcript from actual experience; but we find in it several examples of Mr. Crane’s least pleasant mannerisms. The trick of vain repetition is the most obvious; the most serious, that of such enigmatic abruptness as serves only to bewilder the reader. It is all very well to leave something to the imagination, and, within certain limits, to set the reader wondering what happened afterwards. Mr. Crane, however, goes farther than this, and carries to extremity the old device of the writers of sensational serials. We would not wish to convey that any of these faults are very serious or likely to remain uncorrected; they are merely impedimenta which Mr. Crane will assuredly drop in his further progress.

178

We should like to persuade him, moreover, that some of his shorter sketches were hardly worth doing. There is nothing in the second half of this book which rises much above the level of clever descriptive journalism, and he may safely leave such matters to Mr. Richard Harding Davis and the other journalists of his class. From the author of “Death and the Child” we are entitled to expect work which shall deal with more passionate issues, and the best in this book is so good that Mr. Crane is hardly likely to disappoint the highest expectations.

Caroline T. Pilsbury. “Literature.” Ideas 12 (June 18, 1898), p. 6 The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure is a very expressive volume of sketches by Stephen Crane. His descriptive powers are as keenly exploited herein as in anything he has written, and without exception the stories deal with critical situations whose interest depends greatly on the skill of the author. “The Open Boat” is a tale of shipwreck results and in itself contains few facts from which to weave an ordinary sketch. But Mr. Crane has entered the souls of his characters, has sat down in converse with them in their innermost sanctuaries, and we therefore have a picture of psychic conditions that try men’s souls to the utmost. Four men in an open boat—and the author apparently one of them—on an angry sea offer food for thought to anyone, but Mr. Crane’s portrayal offers such vivid realities as are only perceived by those who find how closely involved are the ordinary and the extraordinary in everyday life. This, like the succeeding stories, possesses a vividness alone

accomplishable by actual experience on the part of their author. The deathlessness of their reality pervades their atmosphere with remarkable breadth and openness. “The Open Boat” is a tragic epic clothed in polished homespun. “A Man and Some Others” is a weirdly alluring tragedy of our Western desert lands—and of a time when the progressive Easterner had a hard time in trying to make the roaming Mexican understand that he intended to settle and that he did not acknowledge said Mexican the arbiter of his destiny. Death stalks abroad through all the tale, touching every aspect with its grim finger, but inviting by his very frankness the unflinching gaze of the sturdy spirit. The description is ineffably fervid, yet calm with that depth which faces death as an equal friend with life. “One Dash—Horses” gives us a race for life by an American traveler and his servant, their experiences flying vividly through the secrecy-drenched air. “Flanagan” relates a filibustering adventure to the coast of Cuba in an old broken-down steamer whose condition made life thereon a matter of perilous uncertainty—more properly, one of disastrous certainty. It has its own special pertinency, and its snatches of sentimental possibility are cleverly handled. “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” is made particularly touching to the human sympathies by its infinite community of heart interest with the rest of mankind; and its climax is very quietly effective. Mr. Crane is a master hand at personalizing all his elements—everything, animate or inanimate, radiates lifefulness and speaks the language of its inherences with the incomparable simplicity of truth. Mr. Crane enters their soul, stays there, domiciles himself and then invites the reader in. “The Wise Men” is the one exception we should have made when remarking that all the sketches contain tragedy. This latter

179

one does not partake of elements over serious. It is interestingly descriptive of the convivial life and amusements of two lively young Americans in Mexico. “Death and the Child” is one of the strongest pictures Mr. Crane has painted. It is masterly in the breadth and greatness of its significance. It enters the details of battle, it pictures the numerous trifling phases thereon incident, the aspects of men—the recent struggle between Greek and Turk affording the food for his contemplative analysis. And the author has written a whole ethical essay in the brevity of his concluding bit of simple eloquence. “The Five White Mice” is an active bit of Mexican experience by Americans and picturesque in much; but its most notable feature is the psychic completeness of the mental and physical attitudes of three young men confronting an equally numbered foe. It is both amusing and impressive. This little volume will be read with keen pleasure by Mr. Crane’s rapidly increasing list of readers. It is effectively bound in green and silver.

“Recent Short Stories.” Spectator 81 (July 23, 1898), pp. 120–121 Mr. Stephen Crane grows, and this is no small thing to say of a writer who sprang full-armed on the public with his first book. When it transpired that The Red Badge of Courage was the work of a mere boy, that it was the result of intuition, not experience, one felt misgivings whether the experience when it came would not blur the visions which came unsought into the crystal mirror of Mr. Crane’s imagination. His new volume, The Open Boat, based in regard to the

story which gives its name to the collection on Mr. Crane’s escape from the steamer “Commodore,” conclusively dispels this anxiety. Mr. Crane has never done anything finer than this truly wonderful picture of four men battling for their lives in a cockleshell off the coast of Florida. How finely it begins: “None of them knew the colour of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colours of the sea.” Here at once we are confronted with a device— borrowed, perhaps, from Maeterlinck— which Mr. Crane employs with great effect in this and other sketches,—the device of iteration. In the dialogue it emphasises the dreary monotony of the long agony; in the descriptive passages it is like the ritornello of a song; but in both the effect is entirely artistic. Very touching, again, is the way Mr. Crane illustrates the “subtle brotherhood” established between the four comrades by the stress of a common peril, and the drowning of the poor “oiler” when within an ace of rescue brings the recital to a harrowing conclusion. Here, again, we are tempted to quote the last words, so characteristic of Mr. Crane’s method, of this enthralling narrative: “The welcome of the land for the men from the sea was warm and generous, but a still and dripping shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land’s welcome for it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave. When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.” That drives home the point we endeavoured to make at the outset. Mr. Crane is no longer a clairvoyant, he is an interpreter as well. In “A Man, and Some Others” we have a wonderfully

180

vivid account of a night attack by Mexican “greasers” on the camp of a “sheepherder” and a chance comrade,—both Americans. Here is a “nocturne” in Mr. Crane’s most striking manner: — Long, smouldering clouds spread in the western sky, and to the east silver mists lay on the purple gloom of the wilderness. Finally, when the great moon climbed the heavens and cast its ghastly radiance on the bushes, it made a new and more brilliant crimson of the camp fire, where the flames capered merrily through its mesquit branches, filling the silence with the fire chorus, an ancient melody which surely bears a message of the inconsequence of individual tragedy,—a message that is in the boom of the sea, the sliver of the wind through the grass-blades, the silken clash of hemlock boughs. No figures moved in the rosy space of the camp, and the search of the moonbeams failed to disclose a living thing in the bushes. There was no owl-faced clock to chant the weariness of the long silence which brooded upon the plain. The dew gave the darkness under the mesquit a velvet quality that made air seem nearer to water, and no eye could have seen through it the black things that moved like monster lizards toward the camp. We have no space left to dwell in detail on the humour of the strange homecoming of the town-marshal of Yellow Sky and his newly wedded wife, on the thrilling night-escape on horse-back of an American traveller from a den of Mexican cutthroats, or on the splendid portrait of the filibustering Captain Flanagan, whose expedition, for reasons which Mr. Crane so vividly sets forth, never became historic. We hope, however, that we have said enough to induce the curious reader to make acquaintance with the most striking

and irresistible of all the younger American writers.

“The Tale End of Fiction.” Philadelphia American 29 (August 6, 1898), pp. 92–93 Books like these are peepholes that tempt us to steal a wondering look through them at the panorama beyond. It shows a flat country and a decidedly flat people, cause and effect probably, for when there are no hills to climb in our daily walk there is little chance of developing ruggedness in character. Dwellers on this table-land envy the sturdy folk who live among the hills. They long to get a taste of the larger ups and downs of life, which explains the holiday rush to the mountains for the good of the body and the craze for rocky literature as a supposed corresponding fillip for the mind. There are Himalayas, Alps and Sierras for the bolder adventurers, but for the general run of us the inverted pudding-basin order of hill is mountain enough for our modest ambitions. Hence the rise of the famous Short Story ridge which spans the continent. Some volcanic hillocks ape the terrible grandeur of lofty peaks and canyon depths in their clever miniature way but, generally speaking, tales of experience, however exaggerated, do not set our hair on end like those of the grotesque and weird. It has come to be a recognized trade, this administering of compound doses of excitement in a minimum of printed pages. The little liver pill of pharmacy has established itself in what politeness bids us still speak of as literature. Where once we used to read books we now gulp down our granule of

181

concentrated storiette or dram of morphiated fiction. As the man who made two blades of grass grow where only one grew before is a benefactor to humanity, it follows that the literary tailor should have our homage for his gift in snipping ten Tom Thumb suits out of the piece of cloth which used barely to suffice for one full grown mind. We are witnessing the dwindling of the era of great literature into that of the infinitely little, in bulk and quality. If ten poor little booklets sell where only one goodly work sold before, we may go into our private wailing place and mourn in mute despair, but out in the highway there is nothing better to do than shower congratulations on the statistical proofs that we are a people among whom literature flourishes more and more. Stephen Crane wrote a story which presented a matter of fact view of courage on the battle-field. The romantic conception is familiar; he showed how devil-daring recklessness is the natural sequence of the natural terror which first staggers the raw soldier when in action. When English papers praised the young American writer it was inevitable that his book should all at once bound into fame here. Then a mockheroic scene in a New York police court set the popular seal on his every work, and such is fame. Publishers fought for the market glory of exploiting a rising pen. There was to be a filibustering expedition to Cuba. Crane was to go as descriptive reporter. Fate favored his genius, the ship was wrecked, and the reporter was ingloriously fished up out of the waves, which are no respecters of literary persons. So happy an adventure was not to be wasted. His hurried newspaper report was mere journalism, now it has been adorned with buttons and braids, and, lo, it is book literature. “The Open Boat” (what is a shut boat?) is the first of these eight short tales of adventure. The wreck of a great ocean

liner and the drowning of five hundred people is a more appalling but not a more real tragedy than the drowning of one out of four. The laughing oarsman whose boat tips over in a rowing match may have his flashing moment of tragedy too. Common folk take their perils as in the course of things, they serve for many a moving tale over the winter fire and possible embellishments are taken with excellent grace. But your ambitious professional purveyor of print, that shall make the world forget its effete monarchs of the pen, clutches at an accidental ducking as a providential lift up the ladder of greatness. Simple people have told in simple words the dread story of their survival from shipwreck on the high seas, of their battling with sharks, of long weeks of maddening thirst, of agonies measurable by their consent to cannibalism. These are the boat stories that move the soul, which is not to be moved by all the threadbare dodgery of studied word-spinning according to rules of fancied “art.” These Crane stories may suit readers raised and nurtured on milk substitutes extracted through rubber nipples. Newspaper reporting is trying its worst to Dickensize itself, shoddy pathos, sham colloquialisms, and the overdoing of a jerky style, with funny failures in wordpainting and hifalutin description. This sort of thing finds its proper level. Mr. Crane evidently aims at a high one, from the flunky point of view, as in one of these stories he describes the bride as having a “plain under-class countenance.” Being a girl of the people, a Western girl of the best type of working folk, her honest face is here stigmatized as an “under-class” face. Mr. Crane has found London more to his upper-class taste than his native land. There he is destined to learn, soon or late, that, measured and weighed by the standards of English literature, from Chaucer to Pepys, and from Defoe to Cobbett, his lacquered newspaperese, while the reverse

182

of plain, is deplorably “under-class,” not only as to literature but as compared with the honest, plain, narrative style of a thousand reporters for American papers. The difference turns on modesty quite as much as on capacity. One of the puzzles of the time is to find out why the great multitude who crave condensed tragedy, melodrama, comedy or farce, go a-hunting it in the poorest field. These “Open Boat” and similar tales deal with conditions peculiar to our muchly-artificialized society. Romance is never at its best when seen too near at hand. Poe’s tales of mystery and creepy terror are works of art by genius. The Crane tribe are more or less smart manufacturers of humbler goods. If people must have high thrills they had better go back to the ballads of three or four centuries ago. Age improves the flavor of all grand stories of love and bravery. The petty detail of our present reporter breed of fiction retailers is small indeed alongside the broad sweep of the old balladist, whose inimitable art puts these trivialists to shame. What labored chapter in any of the bepuffed books equals the grim force of these rude rhymes of Chevy Chase: [Quotes “With that came an arrow hastily” through “And said, ‘Woe is me for thee!’”] And as for the worked-up pathos in our Short Story of the period, where is there a match for this simplest of laments, in pithiness or sublimity? [Quotes “I wish I were where Helen lies” through “Says, ‘Haste, and come to me!’”] Happily for those who cater to the watered taste of the hour, there is no danger of the old ballad superseding the formal story in popularity, so the Crane school may repose in peace. And it is but fair to recognize that, in their class, their

“under-class,” and allowing for the commercial inspiration, these eight tales are about as near an approach to originality as the audience addressed are likely to care for.

“Recent Novels.” London Times, August 12, 1898, p. 2 In THE OPEN BOAT, an assortment of brief tales and sketches, Mr. Stephen Crane displays much the same qualities as in his “Red Badge of Courage.” He describes scenes of violent action in a violently insistent style. He makes long descriptive catalogues of the emotions, say of a coward in battle, or of shipwrecked men rowing wearily for their lives in a stormy sea. He reminds us of Mr. Kipling in his occasional use of technical terms, and of strange and not always intelligible slang. Some of his studies of life in the West and in Mexico might pass undetected in a volume of Mr. Bret Harte’s, for example “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and “The Wise Men.” The first piece, “In an Open Boat,” [sic] appears to be an account of a personal adventure. Four men, two of them disabled, are struggling for their lives in a stormy sea, off an inhospitable coast. The descriptions of their pains, their weariness, their hopes and fears, are certainly of great interest; if a fault must be found, it is that the passage is too conscientiously elaborate. The reader cannot but feel that Mr. Crane is sedulously beating the bush in quest of “the potent phrase.” We see him, as it were, trying highly-coloured words on his palette and selecting the most criard. For example, the writer, feeling death near, remembers some old verse about a man

183

dying. “It was no longer merely a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet, meanwhile drinking tea, and warming his feet at the grate; it was an actuality—stern, mournful, fine.” A picture of throes is not a good expression. Another man ties on a life belt “to get even the warmth which this clumsy cork contrivance could donate.” Surely “donate” is a very odd term in this connexion. There is something quite new in the insistence on physical fatigue (as in Mr. Stevenson’s account of the Flight in “Kidnapped.”) Earlier authors never dwelt on these painful monotonies of suffering, which Mr. Crane makes very real to the reader’s mind. He is equally successful, though sympathy is less excited, in the description of the coward in battle during the war on the Greek frontier. No doubt “this is the appearance of war,” as the Maori epic says. But, as a matter of critical fact, is the method good or is it too studiously violent? “The landscape, bewildered, agonized, was suffering a rain of infamous shots, and Peza imagined a million eyes gazing at him with the gaze of startled antelopes.” Are such phrases really “potent,” or are they just the eccentricities which, in a year or two, Mr. Crane will be anxious to strike out? “Flanagan” is a vigorous sketch of a peaceful man converted into a Berserk by the excitement of filibustering in the interests of the Cuban rebels. But, even while interested, we ask whether “they emptied their revolvers into the surprised terror of the sea” is really a “potency of phrase,” or only an affectation at high pressure. It is the business, unluckily, of the critic to put these coldblooded questions, but about Mr. Crane’s great ability and power of exciting and holding our interest there can be only one opinion. He himself must decide as to whether he could not attain this end with less of linguistic contortion and convulsion, with less deliberate forcing of the note.

Edward Garnett. “Mr. Stephen Crane: An Appreciation.” Academy 55 (December 17, 1898), pp. 483–484 What Mr. Crane has got to do is very simple: he must not mix reporting with his writing. To other artists the word must often be passed: rest, work at your art, live more; but Mr. Crane has no need of cultivating his technique, no need of resting, no need of searching wide for experiences. In his art he is unique. Its certainty, its justness, its peculiar perfection of power arrived at its birth, or at least at that precise moment in its life when other artists—and great artists too— were preparing themselves for the long and difficult conquest of their art. I cannot remember a parallel case in the literary history of fiction. Maupassant, Meredith, Mr. James, Mr. Howells, Tolstoi, all were learning their expression at the age where Mr. Crane had achieved his, achieved it triumphantly. Mr. Crane has no need to learn anything. His technique is absolutely his own, and by its innate laws of being has arrived at a perfect fulness of power. What he has not got he has no power of acquiring. He has no need to acquire it. To say to Mr. Crane, “You are too much anything, or too little anything; you need concentration, or depth, subtlety, or restraint,” would be absurd; his art is always just in itself, rhythmical, self-poising as is the art of a perfect dancer. There are false steps, no excesses. And, of course, his art is strictly limited. We would define him by saying he is the perfect artist and interpreter of the surfaces of life. And that explains why he so swiftly attained

184

his peculiar power, what is the realm his art commands, and where his limitations come in. Take “George’s Mother,” for example—a tale which I believe he wrote at the ridiculous age of twenty-one. In method it is a masterpiece. It is a story dealing simply with the relations between an old woman and her son, who live together in a New York tenement block. An ordinary artist would seek to dive into the mind of the old woman, to follow its workings hidden under the deceitful appearances of things, under the pressure of her surroundings. A great artist would so recreate her life that its griefs and joys became significant of the griefs and joys of all motherhood on earth. But Mr. Crane does neither. He simply reproduces the surfaces of the individual life in so marvellous a way that the manner in which the old woman washes up the crockery, for example, gives us her. To dive into the hidden life is, of course, for the artist a great temptation and a great danger—the values of the picture speedily get wrong, and the artist, seeking to interpret life, departs from the truth of nature. The rare thing about Mr. Crane’s art is that he keeps closer to the surface than any living writer, and, like the great portrait-painters, to a great extent makes the surface betray the depths. But, of course, the written word in the hands of the greatest artist often deals directly with the depths, plunges us into the rich depths of consciousness that cannot be more than hinted at by the surface; and it is precisely here that Mr. Crane’s natural limitation must come in. At the supreme height of art the great masters so plough up the depths of life that the astonished spectator loses sight of the individual life altogether, and has the entrancing sense that all life is really one and the same thing, and is there manifesting itself before him. He feels that, for example,

when he watches Dus´e at her best, or when he stands before Da Vinci’s “La Joconda” in the Louvre and is absorbed by it. I do not think that Mr. Crane is ever great in the sense of so fusing all the riches of the consciousness into a whole, that the reader is struck dumb as by an inevitable revelation; but he is undoubtedly such an interpreter of the significant surface of things that in a few swift strokes he gives us an amazing insight into what the individual life is. And he does it all straight from the surface; a few oaths, a genius for slang, an exquisite and unique faculty of exposing an individual scene by an odd simile, a power of interpreting a face or an action, a keen realising of the primitive emotions—that is Mr. Crane’s talent. In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” for example, the art is simply immense. There is a page and a half of conversation at the end of this short story of seventeen pages which, as a dialogue revealing the whole inside of the situation, is a lesson to any artist living. And the last line of this story, by the gift peculiar to the author of using some odd simile which cunningly condenses the feeling of the situation, defies analysis altogether. Foolish people may call Mr. Crane a reporter of genius; but nothing could be more untrue. He is thrown away as a picturesque reporter: a secondary style of art, of which, let us say, Mr. G. W. Steevens is, perhaps, the ablest exponent to-day, and which is the heavy clay of Mr. Kipling’s talent. Mr. Crane’s technique is far superior to Mr. Kipling’s, but he does not experiment ambitiously in various styles and develop in new directions, as Mr. Kipling has done. I do not think that Mr. Crane will or can develop further. Again, I do not think that he has the building faculty, or that he will ever do better in constructing a perfect whole out of many parts than he has arrived at in The Red Badge of Courage. That book

185

was a series of episodic scenes, all melting naturally into one another and forming a just whole; but it was not constructed, in any sense of the word. And, further, Mr. Crane does not show any faculty of taking his characters and revealing in them deep mysterious worlds of human nature, of developing fresh riches in them acting under the pressure of circumstance. His imaginative analysis of his own nature on a battlefield is, of course, the one exception. And similarly the great artist’s arrangement of complex effects, striking contrasts, exquisite grouping of devices, is lacking in him. His art does not include the necessity for complex arrangements; his sure instinct tells him never to quit the passing moment of life, to hold fast by simple situations, to reproduce the episodic, fragmentary nature of life in such artistic sequence that it stands in place of the architectural masses and coordinated structures of the great artists. He is the chief impressionist of this age, as Sterne was the great impressionist, in a different manner, of his age. If he fails in anything he undertakes, it will be through abandoning the style he has invented. He may, perhaps, fail by and by, through using up the picturesque phases of the environment that nurtured him, as Swinburne came to a stop directly he had rung the changes a certain number of times on the fresh rhythms and phrases he created. But that time is not yet, and every artist of

a special unique faculty has that prospect before him. Mr. Crane’s talent is unique; nobody can question that. America may well be proud of him, for he has just that perfect mastery of form which artists of the Latin races often produce, but the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon races very rarely. And undoubtedly of the young school of American artists Mr. Crane is the genius—the others have their talents.

Checklist of Additional Reviews New York Press, May 1, 1898, p. 29. “American Fiction.” Athenaeum (May 7, 1898), p. 597. “Stephen Crane’s Experience.” Louisville Courier-Journal, May 7, 1898, p. 7. “Stephen Crane’s Stories.” Baltimore Sun, May 10, 1898, p. 10. “Reviews.” Academy 53 (May 14, 1898), Supplement, p. 522. Advance 35 (June 2, 1898), p. 742. Independent 50 (June 2, 1898), p. 727. “The Open Boat.” Boston Evening Transcript, June 29, 1898, p. 14. Bliss Carman. “Marginal Notes: The Higher Journalism.” New York Commercial Advertiser, July 23, 1898, p. 7.

186

PICTURES OF WAR London: William Heinemann 1898

Literature 3 (August 27, 1898), p. 178 Under this heading we may perhaps take note of a book of a different kind. Mr. Stephen Crane’s Pictures of War, a collection of seven of his military sketches, beginning with his well-known “Red Badge of Courage,” appeals perhaps to the literary artist more than to the soldier, and the interest of the former in the reprint will be much heightened by the “Appreciation” contributed by Mr. George Wyndham. Mr. Wyndham has much to say that is true, discriminating, and suggestive, though his efforts to say something original in an original way strike one as rather exhausting in this hot weather. He finds but one descriptive deficiency in Mr. Crane:— An undue subordination of the shrill cry of bullets to the sharp crashing of rifles. He omits the long chromatic whine defining its visible arc in the air and the fretful snatch a few feet from the listener’s head. This is mentioned as a fault in Mr. Crane’s “observation”—perhaps hardly a correct word to use in the case of a writer who, when he drew his first and most famous “picture of war,” is believed to have actually heard neither the whine nor the snatch. There Mr. Crane is at a disadvantage in comparison with Tolstoi, who, so Mr. Wyndham thinks, gives a less true picture of war than the young American with his imaginary battlefield. It might be argued plausibly that to describe fighting it is not necessary to have fought. Experience, which may be one-sided and disproportioned, is often less true than imagination; and what Mr. Wyndham calls “the breathless, lambent, detonating life”

of battle gives little opportunity for any self-conscious recording of sensations, or even any exact recollection of them. Still, we think he underrates the value as “documents” of the private letters and journals of soldiers, and we might remind him of the existence of the war correspondent, who more and more regards “the picturesque and emotional aspects of battle,” which the expert neglects, as his peculiar sphere. The American papers have lately done a good deal in this way, and we quoted one or two representative specimens of the style in our notes last week. Mr. Crane, however, does not try out of such materials as these to build up an “average” experience. His work is essentially the study of individual temperament under exceptional circumstances, and this fact explains the very different view taken of his writing by military men. This scheme includes two things—the sensuous, realistic portrayal of externals, and the inner development towards a real manhood of the character of “the youth.” Both the one and the other are worked out with vivid intensity, and this new volume will be welcome both to those who have made, and those who wish to make, acquaintance with Mr. Stephen Crane.

“Some Literary Gleanings.” Chicago Evening Post, September 3, 1898, p. 5 A collection of Stephen Crane’s war stories has just been published in England under the title “Pictures of War.” The volume includes “The Red Badge of Courage,” “The Little Regiment” and several shorter sketches. There is also a preliminary disquisition by George Wyndham, by way

189

of introduction, which discusses the value of war material for literary purposes. The writer makes the point that what may be called the original documents of war, namely, the letters written by the soldier on the field of battle, are not valuable at all except to the domestic circle for whose consumption they were intended. One reason for this is that the outlook of the correspondent is circumscribed within the narrow limits of his own experience. When he attempts to go beyond these limits he deals in surmises and is in no sense an authority. But even if we go into the subject more intimately and confine outselves to the purely personal relation he is still disappointing. He hardly ever writes instructively or inspiringly of the new things he has seen and heard and felt. When he testifies as an actual witness of and participator in battle he is apt to be the slave of conventional expressions. Mr. Wyndham gives an amusing instance of this tendency when he says: I can remember one letter from an English private, describing an engagement in which some eighty men were killed and wounded out of a force of 8,000; he wrote of comrades in his own battalion “falling like sheep,” and gave no clew to the country in which he served. It might have been in Siberia or the Sahara, against savages or civilized troops; you could glean nothing except that he had listened to patriotic songs in music halls at home. Nor is the servitude to hackneyed phrases manifested only in these abortive and unveracious efforts at thrilling description. The hero’s love letter is as disappointing as his account of siege and combat. Mr. Wyndham’s comment is:

than romantic literature, but further removed from it by many stages; they are feeble echoes of conventional art— not immediate reflections, but blurred impressions of used plates carelessly copied from meretricious paintings. There is a great deal of truth in this, but lest some injustice may be done the soldier it should be said that the civilian is his companion in the kind of slavery referred to. Ordinary conversation is interlarded with linguistic discoveries of the music halls and keeps sending back feeble echoes of “familiar quotations” and the “dictionary of phrase and fable” which are often sadly impaired in the transmission. People are continually using similes which have no meaning that is suggested out of their own experience. There are probably thousands here in Chicago who attempt to illustrate rapidity of destructive action by a reference to the sun and the dew, and yet give the sun such an abundance of time for an early morning drink that they cannot know whether he makes quick or slow work of it. The clarity of crystal is often invoked by persons who do not know what pure crystal is. But perhaps the most curious thing in connection with the almost universal resort to simile is the instinctive employment of the form when the speaker has not the slightest idea as to what his comparisons will be. This is of such common occurrence that it must have come within the observation of everybody. There is first a bold “Like a —,” then a feebler repetition, then perhaps an abandonment of the words and a reconstruction of the sentiment upon new lines.

On second thoughts, we remember that such love letters as have been published are for the most part not nearer to life 190

from its body—a little bottle—had swelled like the genie of the fable. The smoke was tinted rose-hue from the flames, and perhaps the unutterable midnights of the universe will have no power to daunt the colour of this soul.”

“Notes on New Books.” Illustrated London News 113 (October 29, 1898), p. 634 It is hardly to the advantage of a debutant to be introduced by his manager as the supreme genius of his age, and Mr. George Wyndham claims little less than this for Mr. Stephen Crane in his effusive introduction to “Pictures of War.” “Mr. Crane,” Mr. George Wyndham assures you, “as an artist, achieves by his singleness of purpose a truer and completer picture of war than either Tolsto¨ı or Zola.” “That is much,” he adds—and it certainly is—“but it is more that his work of art, when completed, chimes with the universal experience of mankind; that his heroes find in their extreme danger, if not confidence in their leaders and conviction in their cause, at least the conviction that most men do what they can, or at most what they must.” But we hardly needed Mr. Stephen Crane to tell us “that most men at most do what they must” in battle. For our own part, we think Mr. Crane’s singularly vivid and vigorous pictures of war are occasionally marred by the very defect which mars Mr. George Wyndham’s introduction—too high and even shrill a pitch. The fine picture, for example, with which the volume closes, of the old veteran of the war rushing into a blazing barn to save a couple of colts is not improved by such a screaming apotheosis as this: “When the roof fell in, a great funnel of smoke swarmed toward the sky, as if the old man’s mighty spirit, released

Isle of Man Examiner, November 12, 1898 The seven stories which are comprised under the title are most able descriptions of modern war, and the most wonderful thing is they are written by one who never was engaged in battle, but the imagination is splendid and vivid, and portrays the actualities of war better than any soldier could possibly do. The reader’s attention is held in the “Red badge of courage” to the final scene, when the youth so graphically described loses his identity and feels swallowed up by his overmastering fearlessness of death or anything that could possibly happen to him. The scene is laid in America, the time being the war of Secession, and Mr Crane, the talented author, has written something which will not soon be forgotten. As literature, it must take its place with Zola’s “La D´ebacle” or ˆ Tolstoi’s “La Guerre.” The book is well printed and bound, as Mr Heinemann’s productions always are, and is sold at 6s.

Additional Review London Times, November 7, 1898, p. 14.

191

WAR IS KIND New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company 1899

Thou art my love, And thou art the beard On another man’s face— Woe is me.

“New Books.” New York Sun, May 20, 1899 The century is nearly closed, and Stephen Crane may be said to be just in time with his volume of age-end poems entitled “War Is Kind.” The poet has departed from an earlier and distinguished device, and the new poems are not printed in capital letters; still the presentation of them is sufficiently peculiar and comports with the great strangeness of the poems themselves. They are printed in pale type on gray paper, with vast spaces of paper only, and Will Bradley has illustrated them in a conscientious and most becoming manner. Mr. Bradley’s picture of a horse dying in a castle moat, on page 29, is one of the most remarkable things in the line of pictorial endeavor that has ever come under our observation. With his right pair of legs the dying steed is scratching himself, while the left pair stick straight up as though calling heaven to witness that here is a horse that has made his 2:40 and never been harnessed to a milk cart. The shaft of a spear protrudes from the breast of the curiously expiring animal. The castle, enlivened by two shoots of gladiolus, towers grimly aloft and trees resembling shad roes decorate the symmetrical top of a neighboring cast iron mountain. Another of Mr. Bradley’s pictures shows a prostrate and sad creature with matted hair, whose hands have the misfortune to be feet, and another is the picture of a lady who is almost as thin as the attenuated apparition in the late Aubrey Beardsley’s picture of a rose garden, who was unmistakably the thinnest lady ever delineated. The following lines seem to be addressed to a widow:—

Thou art my love, And thou art a temple, And in this temple is an altar, And on this altar is my heart— Woe is me. Thou art my love, And thou art a wretch. Let these sacred love-lies choke thee, From I am come to where I know your lies as truth And your truth as lies— Woe is me. The elder Mr. Weller could scarcely have expressed himself more bitterly on this subject. Mr. Bradley supplies a picture which reasonably represents the widow as feeling very much injured. Her eyes droop, her mouth is set, and it is evident that she will burst into tears in another moment. Curiously enough, she has surmounted her head with a circlet of pinwheels and has had her arms grained by a competent house painter. The unusual expression, “From I am come,” may be a printer’s error, though such a thing is not at all certain. Whether the following further celebrates the widow we do not know; we give it simply as it stands. It may be proper to add that Mr. Bradley’s picture of the widow does not indicate that the size of her feet was below the normal:— Fool, not to know that thy little shoe Can make men weep! —Some men weep. I weep and I quash, And I love the little shoe, The little, little shoe. The poet who goes to war in a tropical country, and who doubts the love that

195

he left behind him in the temperate zone, may well weep and quash. It is well understood that weeping is a relief to the pentup feelings, and it seems as though quashing should be helpful. It has long been assumed that women like to give themselves to heroes, though the fact is indisputable that they frequently give themselves to others:— God give me medals, God give me loud honors, That I may strut before you, sweetheart, And be worthy of— The love I bear you.

But search those pale petals And see engraven thereon A record of my intention. But this is plain enough:— Ah, God, the way your little finger moved As you thrust a bare arm backward And made play with your hair And a comb, a silly gilt comb —Ah, God, that I should suffer Because of the way a little finger moved. Gray page 33 is devoted to the following two pale lines:—

Who shall take measure of the confidences and vehemences of the poet who is in love? Who shall smile at him, who shall reprove or correct him, who always shall quite understand him?

“My good friend,” said a learned bystander, “Your operations are mad.” Here is a poem that is unexplained, on page 42:—

Now let me crunch you With full weight of affrighted love. I doubted you —I doubted you— And in this short doubting My love grew like a genie For my further undoing.

A slant of sun on dull brown walls, A forgotten sky of bashful blue. Toward God a mighty hymn, A song of collisions and cries, Rumbling wheels, hoof-beats, bells, Welcomes, farewells, love calls, final moans, Voices of joy, idiocy, warning, despair, The unknown appeal of brutes, The chanting of flowers, The screams of cut trees, The senseless babble of hens and wise men— A cluttered incoherency that says at the stars:— “O God, save us!”

Beware of my friends, Be not in speech too civil, For in all courtesy My weak heart sees spectres, Mists of desire Arising from the lips of my chosen, Be not civil. Surely the reader will not laugh at that sentiment, or at the expression of it, even though it is printed in faint type on gray paper and there is nothing more on the page. Not everything is so obvious:— The flower I gave thee once Was incident to a stride, A detail of a gesture,

That may be a poem about life in general, or it may describe the assault on Santiago. “War Is Kind,” is the title of the first poem in the book, and a striking ironical poem it is:— [Quotes “War Is Kind” in its entirety]

196

Ashley A. Smith. “Mr. Smith’s Verdicts.” New York Times—Saturday Review, May 27, 1899, p. 339 The initial poem of Mr. Crane’s collection gives the title to the entire volume. The book is a collection of impressions, with little of rhyme or rhythm. One would say that here evidently is a disciple of Walt Whitman. Dealing as he does with much of the matter, and certainly after the manner, of that poet, Mr. Stephen Crane will certainly be called most unconventional in his thought and the expression of it. Judged by almost any poetic standard, from that of Mr. Poe, who called poetry “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” to that of Mr. Matthew Arnold, who called it “a criticism of life,” the verses of Mr. Crane have little claim to commendation. There is little, also, of those elements which Milton asserted to be the dominating ones of true poetry: “Simplicity, sensuousness, and passion.” In the entire volume of ninety pages, a single line occasionally occupying an entire page, there is nothing which reaches the dignity of the best work of the modern masters. Still, it is only fair to say that in one respect Mr. Crane’s work is remarkable, that is, in its “verbal magic,” he paints with words; a faint echo of that power which was seen to such a degree in his war story, “The Red Badge of Courage,” is also shown in his verse. This power of epithet is one of his most distinctive characteristics; he condenses sentences, pages even, into a single word. Especially noticeable and remarkable in this regard is

the poem on Page 36, (for these poems are titleless,) commencing “On the desert a silence.” It is also seen in the first poem. He does not describe so much as, by the use of a single word or phrase, he suggests the description. The imagination of the reader is always active, and under his verbal direction each reader pictures, as for instance, in the first poem, the battlefield, for himself. The opening couplet to the poem on Page 27 is one of the finest, perhaps the most poetic, in the volume: “I have heard the sunset song of the birches, A white melody in the silence.” But this is quite in contrast with the austere realism that dominates the greater part of his work. He always chooses words with “color” in them. Such a method in verse writing could be well termed—to borrow a much abused word of the painter— impressionistic. To this book of verse by Mr. Crane might be applied the couplet which Mr. A. B. Frost once applied to the work of Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith: “A little paint, a little work, And lots of empty paper.” The book is handsomely bound, and is printed on blue-gray paper. There are several drawings—some of them full-page— by Mr. Will Bradley, and these add, in no small degree, to the beauty and worth of the volume. It must be admitted frankly by those who have waited so long for the delayed publication of this volume that, while it shows some of the stronger characteristics of Mr. Crane’s earlier prose work, as a poetic production it is closely akin to a genuine disappointment.

197

Book Buyer 18 (June 1899), p. 368

“Chelifer” [Rupert Hughes]. Criterion 21 (June 3, 1899), pp. 26–27

Mr. Stephen Crane’s new book of poems, just published by the Frederick A. Stokes Co., is called “War Is Kind,” from the title of the opening poem. Mr. Will H. Bradley has made the book according to the extremity of his fantastic taste, and the result, we think, is lamentable. The paper is so dark a grey that it is difficult to read the not very small type, and the decorative drawings are for the admiration of the few. Mr. Crane’s poetry is hard enough reading—some of it—when printed most clearly; it is certainly not fair to throw mechanical difficulties in the way of deciphering it. But if one can manage to spell them out, he will find many poems of singular significance and charm. We have room for only a short quotation, but certainly this—like “War Is Kind,” “On the Desert,” “Aye, Workman,” “The Trees in the Garden,” and several others—is full of sweetness: I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night, The sweep of each sad lost wave, The dwindling boom of the steel thing’s striving. The little cry of a man to a man, A shadow falling across the greyer night, And the sinking of the small star; Then the waste, the far waste of waters, And the soft lashing of black waves For long and in loneliness. Remember, thou, O ship of love, Thou leavest a far waste of waters, And the soft lashing of black waves For long and in loneliness.

What manner of joke Stephen Crane and his illustrator, Will Bradley, had in mind when they got up their new book has not leaked out. It is in effect more Mr. Bradley’s in the matter of superfices than Mr. Crane’s, but Mr. Blank—(an inferential collaborator) has more in the book War is Kind than either. It is Mr. Crane’s purpose to tell us that war is not kind in a thirty-line Walt Whitman lyric, so why mislead us? To be ironical is all right, but why drive the iron in so far? We all know that war was brutal, that it killed lovers, husbands and sons, but we never thought of telling the sweethearts, wives and mothers that war, therefore, was kind. The burglar held the old lady on the redhot stove. Oh, he was a kind man! That is the apparent recipe. It is very original. You will remember Mr. Crane’s phrase if ever you go to war and eat canned beef, and if you have Mr. Bradley’s pictorial idea of war (when it is kind) on the retina of your memory, you will think you are dining in Delmonico’s, and the lady is the carver. Through the courtesy of Frederick A. Stokes & Co. we are enabled to copy Mr. Bradley’s figure on the cover as a clue to the enigma. It is a pity that we can give only that half of the cover, for our readers would surely have enjoyed the treat of seeing the other half with its cheery coffin-lid, weeping willow, floral piece (“Gates Ajar” probably on the portion hidden by the coffin), and its harp of seven strings all beautifully Beardsleyized. We must, however, leave something for the buyers of the book to gloat over. In the same way one refrains from quoting

198

Mr. Crane’s poem beyond a sample line or two: Mother, whose heart hung humble as a button On the bright, splendid shroud of your son, Do not weep; War is kind. Confound the fellow with his “humble as a button.” That will stick in your memory, too. You will scoff at it, of course, but it will come back at you, and you will fancy that you see her, her poor head, some gray hairs maybe in it, bending over that army coffin covered by the flag. What is that? You thought I started out to make fun of this book of decadent affectations. Well, so did I, and I had bitter thoughts about the posing of the author as well as the drearily deliberate saltimbanque of an artist, but there you are—a big tear or something splashing on the paper, and an aching thought of that mother-love and mother-heart “humble as a button on the bright splendid shroud of her son.” Crane, you see, is an artist. (I wish to explain: don’t think I am taking anything back.) He is frugal of words and has the magic of style and the wizardry of effects. Something of that in him which Alfred Lord Tennyson found in Monsieur Victor Hugo when he wrote the line:

With some apt bits of color in the rest of the slim book, there goes much of the cynicism that affects the sad eye and the world-glance, yet cannot see beyond the foothills of a sick-headache. It is the kind that grows up around the cheap table d’hote. ˆ A Man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.” Surely he and Mr. Bradley were in evil case the night that Mr. Crane wrote “Woe is Me,” and Mr. Bradley induced the former Countess of B—(everybody at Parrotini’s said she was a countess before she married Schafwurst, the dilapidated baritone, whom she beats) to sit for the lady’s portrait which . . . we faithfully reproduce. Thou art my love, And thou art a wretch. Let these sacred love-lies choke thee, For I am come to where I know your lies as truth, And your truth as lies— Woe is me. Well, looking at the wobble of it and the likeness of it we have no objection. We get the surely maudlin stage a little further on—

French of the French and Lord of human tears. Tennyson, of course, found it in Hugo’s prose, and that is where you will find it in Crane, for it is precisely in the line that is so prosy that Crane gives the supreme touch. Yes, Mr. Capenbells, it is there you touch the button, and the five anapaests on which you gallop off in diminuendo are regular as the hoofbeats of the erl-king’s black stallion when he bore off the boy to the halls of night.

Ah, God, the way your little finger moved As you thrust a bare arm backward And made play with your hair And a comb, a silly gilt comb. —Ah, God—that I should suffer Because of the way a little finger moved. Prithee, Mr. Crane, let a friend beckon you with a little finger and whisper in your ear: You have rare gifts that you squander: quit fooling. The sins of moral

199

flabbiness and flatulence that you mock us with are past endurance from a man of your calibre, and are not to be condoned by a Bradley cover, rough edges, greengray paper, even if the stuff be doled out a line to the page as The chatter of a death-demon from a tree-top. Read Whitman’s essay, “Poetry ToDay in America.”

“Siebert” [Willa Cather]. “Books and Magazines.” Pittsburgh Leader, June 3, 1899, p. 6

should not stop to quarrel about such trifles with a poet who can perpetrate the following: Thou art my love, And thou art the beard On another man’s face— Woe is me . . . Now, if you please, is the object of these verses animal, mineral or vegetable? Is the expression, “Thou art the beard on another man’s face,” intended as a figure, or was it written by a barber? Certainly, after reading this, “Simple Simon” is a ballade of perfect form, and “Jack and Jill” or “Hickity, Pickity, My Black Hen,” are exquisite lyrics. But of the following what shall be said: Now let me crunch you With full weight of affrighted love . . .

This truly remarkable book is printed on dirty gray blotting paper, on each page of which is a mere dot of print over a large I of vacancy. There are seldom more than ten lines on a page, and it would be better if most of those lines were not there at all. Either Mr. Crane is insulting the public or insulting himself, or he has developed a case of atavism and is chattering the primeval nonsense of the apes. His Black Riders, uneven as it was, was a casket of polished masterpieces when compared with War Is Kind. And it is not kind at all, Mr. Crane; when it provokes such verses as these—it is all that Sherman said it was. The only production in the volume that is at all coherent is the following, from which the book gets its title:

This is somewhat more lucid as evincing the bard’s exquisite sensitiveness: Ah, God, the way your little finger moved As you thrust a bare arm backward . . . Mr. Crane’s verselets are illustrated by some Bradley pictures, which are badly drawn, in bad taste, and come with bad grace. On page 33 of the book there are just two lines which seem to completely sum up the efforts of both poet and artist: “My good friend,” said a learned bystander, “Your operations are mad.” Yet this fellow Crane has written short stories equal to some of Maupassant’s.

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind . . . Of course, one may have objections to hearts hanging like humble buttons, or to buttons being humble at all, but one 200

John D. Barry. “New York Letter.” Literary World 30 (June 24, 1899), pp. 200–201 The well-wishers of Mr. Stephen Crane must deeply regret the publication of his latest book, War is Kind. I prefer to call it a “book,” for the word “poems” or even “verses” would hardly describe the production. In a previous volume Mr. Crane avoided a possible challenge by publishing it under the title of The Black Riders, and Other Lines. Those lines, however, seemed to me to have a very high merit. They were careless in form, they were boyish, they were sometimes merely pretentious; but, as a collection, they showed a great deal of feeling, a delicate and shrewd observation, and a strong dramatic sense. The present volume has a certain dramatic quality, as well as observation, and some of the thoughts are strikingly original and vivid; but, on the whole, it is the most gratuitously injudicious literary performance that has come under my eye in many a year. Some of the lines are utterly unintelligible, “words without ideas;” others are simply passing observations, suggestive, but too crude to be taken bodily out of a note-book. In other words, the book contains the material for poetry, rather than poetry itself. What could be more ugly and absurd than these lines? The impact of a dollar upon the heart Smiles warm red light, Sweeping from the hearth rosily upon the white table, With the hanging cool velvet shadows Moving softly upon the floor.

Of course, such a book could never have found a publisher if the author had not already secured a hold upon public interest. This is a pity, because the work makes a woful portrayal of Mr. Crane’s limitations. Some of the lines which the author offers for serious consideration are merely examples of one of the lowest forms of American humor. If submitted to the editor of a comic paper they would be rejected as poor specimens. Here is an example that illustrates my meaning: “Have you ever made a just man?” “Oh, I have made three,” answered God, “But two of them are dead, And the third— Listen! listen! And you will hear the thud of his defeat.” An even more brilliant example of this kind of writing reads in this fashion: “You are too candid,” cried the candid man, And when his stick left the head of the learned bystander It was two sticks. The best work in the book, it seems to me, is contained in the lines beginning: In the night Gray heavy clouds muffled the sky,— and extending over several pages. They have a really Biblical solemnity, but they are greatly injured by the line, addressed to God, Thou only needest eternal patience. By needest Mr. Crane may have meant requirest. As the line stands it is simply foolish. Mr. Crane has plainly brought out this volume with the impression that he is doing something very “advanced,” repeating the experience that Walt Whitman

201

had nearly half a century ago. If hearty, spontaneous Walt Whitman were alive today, and were to read this volume, how he would laugh! The book is interesting because it shows how far eccentricity in literary creation can go. If Mr. Crane were a life-long student of literature it could not possibly have been written. Whether he reads now, I have no knowledge; but I happen to know that before The Red Badge of Courage was published he had read very little. In fact, he deliberately avoided reading much, for fear of being “influenced.” On one occasion, however, while calling on a friend here in New York, he heard some poems by Emily Dickinson read aloud, and he was deeply impressed. A few weeks later he began work on the lines since published in The Black Riders, finishing a great many of them in an astonishingly short time. The genius of Emily Dickinson had touched a chord in him and called out those remarkable poems, for poems I believe them to be. Since that time I imagine that Mr. Crane has been very little influenced by Miss Dickinson. War is Kind certainly bears no resemblance to the New England poet’s fancy save in their queerness of form. While Mr. Crane was writing The Black Riders Aubrey Beardsley was astonishing the world with his drawings, and, much as Miss Dickinson influenced Mr. Crane, Aubrey Beardsley influenced the artist who has made the weird illustrations to Mr. Crane’s new book, Mr. Will Bradley. The make-up of the book is altogether in harmony with its character, and Mr. Bradley’s illustrations are a fitting accompaniment to the lines, though in their way they are far more artistic. Mr. Bradley, while following Beardsley, has put himself into his drawings, just as, in spite of Miss Dickinson, Mr. Crane’s poems are all his own. In place of the sweep of line, the abandon, and of the boyishness that occasionally made

Mr. Beardsley infuse vicious suggestions into his work, Mr. Bradley introduces a characteristic serenity and sedateness, which at times seem like the expression of deep melancholy. Mr. Crane used to be, and presumably is still, an intense admirer of the kind of art that Beardsley practiced. So it is altogether appropriate that Beardsley’s somewhat prototype in this country should have lent his aid in the preparation of this unique production. Mr. Crane himself can take pride in being an “influence.” A magazine editor told me lately that after Mr. Crane made his first success, with The Red Badge of Courage, he received scores of manuscripts in which the “color descriptions” which are inseparable from Mr. Crane’s style were imitated to a ludicrous extent. But, of course, impressionism long ago found literary expression. One of its finest examples may be found in George Meredith’s novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, in the treatment of the siren who came very near wrecking the hero’s life.

“Reviews.” Boston Evening Transcript, June 28, 1899, p. 12 When a young, aspiring author in order to emphasize his individuality persists in appearing in public minus collar, cravat or any other article of attire usually deemed essential to full propriety of costume, we are more or less prone to assume that he has not much individuality to assert, and we sometimes style him a blooming idiot for his pains. This being the case, what shall we say of the young poet who appears in print without taking the trouble to put on the singer’s robes? Indeed,

202

Mr. Stephen Crane, in his latest volume, “War Is Kind,” has not only neglected to assume them, but, as it seems to us, has omitted to clothe his imaginings with a decent flesh and blood covering, and offers instead to our astonished view merely a few dry bones. Now, if a man has a definite thing to say there is not the slightest necessity for him to utter it in the most grotesque form possible, or send it forth to the world in the most eccentric dress which his printer and illustrator can devise. He will not gain a single listener the more for so doing. And if he has nothing to say then by so much the more is his condemnation pronounced because of these frantic efforts to gain attention. Now Mr. Crane has a thing or two to say— at times—and he is by no means wanting in talent and audacity, but neither he nor anyone else has talent enough to warrant offering a deliberate insult to prospective readers. But this is exactly what he does in “War Is Kind,” which is printed throughout on rough, gray paper and adorned with drawings by Will Bradley which have all of Aubrey Beardsley’s faults without any of his redeeeming qualities. Neither in the title poem nor in any other of the verses in the volume is there the faintest suspicion of the melody of poesy. Now and again we come upon a striking thought, a poetic conception that deserves a fitter setting than Mr. Crane has given it, but far more frequently we are repelled by mere brutality of suggestion or utter grotesqueness of expression. More than one poem reads as if the author had said to himself: “Go to! I will be weird and horrible,” but the weirdness is a purely manufactured variety and the horror is not the genuine article. It is an ugly enough mask that Mr. Crane holds up, but it is a mask, nevertheless, and some day, let us hope, he will grow tired of holding it up and will show us his true face and will speak in his natural voice. Till he does this he must pardon us if we do not

take him with such seriousness as he takes himself.

“Notes About New Books.” New York Observer 77 (July 13, 1899), p. 61 Exhibit A: A volume of some ninety-six dark gray, rough pages, and a cover of the same paper. Exhibit B: A cover design, several full page and numerous incidental drawings of wondrous grotesqueness and most unpleasant appearance. Exhibit C: Printed here and there upon said pages, a collection of English and unknown words, arranged in lines to imitate verse. Some pages have only three or four and some half a dozen or so of these lines. Now and then, appearing at hap-hazard, is a title. It is the critic’s fate to comment on the above. After reading The Red Badge of Courage, no one could doubt the remarkable imaginative power and strength of style of the young man who achieved success by describing a subject about which he knew, by actual experience, absolutely nothing. Veterans who had been through the Civil War said that this book, written by a youth who had never smelt gunpowder, gave one of the most truthful accounts of war that had ever been written. This was realism and powerful realism, achieved by imagination. The present volume is the antithesis to this. The writer attempts to treat on what he is supposed, by this time, to know, by actual experience something about—life. There is no realism here, nor is there a glimmer of imagination. In place of strength there is pitiful weakness. In these lines we have neither

203

prose nor verse, neither sense nor nonsense, neither idealism, nor realism, neither beauty nor honest ugliness. “War is Kind” is the refrain of the first effusion. It begins: Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky, And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep, War is kind. It ends as follows: Mother, whose heart hung humble as a button, On the bright, splendid shroud of your son, Do not weep, War is kind. This will probably bring deep satisfaction to a certain very youthful cult, who evolve such pregnant phrases as, “The beautiful is ugly;” “evil is innocence;” “the sweet is bitter;” etc., and call this “philosophy.” Here is another specimen from this collection: The chatter of a death demon on a treetop. This occupies a page by itself, and has no title. Here is another: Thou art my love, And thou art the beard On another man’s face— Woe is me Perhaps this is deep and mighty symbolism. Perhaps there is beauty of thought

and expression here, shyly concealed, perhaps there is soaring truth and lofty concept. The critic is not unfamiliar with symbolism, with vers libre and with that monstrous affront to art represented in the pictorial branch by the Aubrey Beardsley school, but in the book before him he finds neither cleverness, nor originality of thought, nor vigor, nor beauty, nor earnestness, but only the vain attempt of a very conceited, and, at least temporarily, decadent mind, to startle and to mystify those who have a right to expect something better from him. We are glad that Mr. Crane finds that “war is kind.” We wonder if he will so find his critics.

Checklist of Additional Reviews “Book Reviews.” Public Opinion 26 (June 1, 1899), p. 697. “Crane’s ‘Padded Cell’ Poetry.” Chicago Evening Post, June 3, 1899, p. 5. “Concerning a Certain Bluish Gray Monster.” New York Press, June 18, 1899, p. 23. John Curtis Underwood. “The Bookman’s Table.” Bookman 9 (July 1899), pp. 466–467. “Literary Chat.” Munsey’s Magazine 21 (September 1899), p. 947. T[homas] W[entworth] H[igginson]. “Recent Poetry.” Nation 69 (November 16, 1899), p. 378.

204

ACTIVE SERVICE: A NOVEL New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company 1899

“World of Letters.” New York Mail and Express, October 11, 1899, p. 6 In “The Red Badge of Courage,” Mr. Stephen Crane wrote of a war that he did not see, in “Active Service” he tells us of a war that he did see, and which was not. Talk there was—Southern eloquence in comparison with which Daudet’s Tarasconnais are taciturn—and embraces, kisses of transport and patriotism, shouts and songs, but no fighting. The modern Epaminondases and Leonidases played the most pitiful farce of modern history, and with their Crownprince marched up the hill and down again. Of all this opera bouffe campaign, which he went to report for a New York paper, Mr. Crane saw but one salient feature—the only one to be seen—and that was emotion misdirected in the channel of talk. There was not even mismanagement, or bad leadership—nothing but a skyrocket that fizzled in the air, and came down a smoking stick. The romance of modern Greece has been effectively dispelled by the modern Greeks themselves. Having started out to tell a story about a war that was not war at all, Mr. Crane was forced to find its main interest elsewhere. The war, therefore, is mainly one between two women, in which the good one wins in the end, though she, like some of the other characters, occasionally behaves in such a puzzling manner as to perplex the reader. This, however, is not an unforgivable sin in this instance, for the tale is told with vim and flags not in interest. It deals with the adventures of an American university professor, his wife and daughter, and a party of students, who went to Greece before the war and were

caught between the two armies at the outset of the maneuvers, and with those of a newspaper correspondent, sent out by his paper to find them. Thus they travel over the ground of the short campaign through Arta and Larissa, amid Greek troops and fleeing peasants, who form the chorus of the play—and a very noisy one. They talk from first page to last, volubly and unintelligibly, working themselves into that state of “intoxication by their own verbosity” which left them limp and incapable of action. Mr. Crane is unquestionably an artist. His descriptions of the correspondent’s perplexities and helplessness, in a country whose tongue he does not know, are vivid; as he expresses it, “talking through an interpreter to the minds of other men was as satisfactory as looking at landscape through a stained window glass,” especially when the interpreter became frightened at the nearness of danger, and translated the information he obtained from officers as he listed, with a view to his own safety. Again, when danger really threatened, it was not in the dark of night, between the two contending armies, with bullets whistling overhead, but well to the rear, from a mob that had not gone to war, but was armed to the teeth, nevertheless. Mistaken for hated Germans, the Americans were surrounded by a surging mass of noble Greeks with rifles and things, yet not a shot was fired: the college boys laid about them after the manner of a rough football fight, in which all rules have been suspended, and the Greeks— jabbered. Mr. Crane has seen nothing in them but this, and his humor in describing it is contagious, though one cannot but feel a touch of pity for a nation that has thus degenerated from the ancestry of which it never tired of boasting. As to the story itself, it would be unfair to tell here its plot. The heroine is rather difficult to understand, but, then—

207

did man ever truly understand woman? It all comes right in the end, not withstanding the incredible behavior of the Professor’s daughter, and the machinations of the other woman, the actress who loved the correspondent and was really admirable in her unscrupulous tactics to prevent a marriage that is ultimately contracted against her wish. Thus, with the humors of the Greco– Turkish war, and the adventures of his American tourists, Mr. Crane has produced a readable book. It is not likely to repeat the sensation of his first story, but will be found well worth reading.

“Books of the Week: Stephen Crane’s Latest.” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 28, 1899, p. 10 “Active Service” is like Stephen Crane’s other stories in that it is composed chiefly of incidents and descriptions which have nothing to do with the story. The slightest action of one of his characters is likely to send him off at a tangent into some long dissertation, and often, without the slightest provocation, he strikes into space and creates the most wonderful situations. For instance, while Coleman, the Sunday editor of the Eclipse, waits for the elevator, Mr. Crane tells us all he knows about elevators and that species of the genus homo, the elevator boy. And then, perhaps, it is because this same editor is the hero of the story that he takes the reader into New England to see a baby, four days old, armless, and with one eye in the middle of its forehead—the possible subject for a Sunday article. A whole chapter is given to a college fray, presumably out of def-

erence to the heroine’s father, a college professor. The story proper begins when Coleman proposes for the hand of Marjorie, the professor’s daughter, and it ends when he is accepted. One doesn’t get a definite idea of the girl beyond the fact that she is tall; nor of Coleman except that he drinks many brandy-and-sodas, plays poker, wears London clothes, has a beastly temper, and is remarkably clever. As the story proceeds one gleans that he has neither the grace of speech nor manner that seems in keeping with London clothes, but Marjorie does not mind, and as for the reader, if he does not like it, he can leave it—a privilege which, in this case, he will be likely to appreciate. The plot at times is almost interesting, but the story is told in a bungling way. Mr. Crane has still to learn the art of construction. His characters, of whom there are more than one cares to keep in mind, are mild caricatures, and the events crowd so thick and fast, that one never knows exactly where one is. As in “The Red Badge of Courage,” Mr. Crane’s efforts at the realistic are rather ludicrous, but as this is not so ambitious a production the faults are less glaring.

“Books of the Week.” Chicago Evening Post, November 1, 1899, p. 5 In many respects Stephen Crane is the most remarkable writer in America to-day. His ignorance is so wide, so varied, that it penetrates every branch of human knowledge; his mind is a peaceful blank on subjects with which the humblest are conversant, and yet he thrives, waxes famous and

208

is blithe. Time was when Mr. Crane contented himself with being a rough writer— letting it come from the shoulder, not caring a penny for the rules of English grammar. He was rugged and independent, and when the critics raged furiously together over his audacity he waved them aside and let it be known he was a truth teller; that he dealt in realistic wares exclusively. If his verbs did not agree with their subjects, if his relative pronouns were misplaced, his defense was that mankind was guilty eternally of just such sins; and he was only a lowly reporter conscientiously repeating what he heard. But years and honors have made Mr. Crane quite hightytighty. In his latest effort, “Active Service,” in one brief but pithy paragraph we are informed that he is a purist at heart and “despiges,” as Sary Gamp would say, anything short of the best English. A slave to duty, however, his characters still cling to the vernacular of society as he finds it. His college students use the lowest form of gutter slang; his newspaper editors speak in the tongue of the hoodlum, and erudite professors fall into painful errors as well. Not caring to venture in unexplored countries, the author of “Active Service” selects a battle-scarred plot that has indeed seen active service. It is the old story of the spectacled professor, with a fat and fussy wife, astonished vastly when his beautiful daughter interrupts his studies to ask consent to her marriage with one of the father’s old students. Professor Wainwright objects to Rufus Coleman because that young gentleman, in his college days, was a wild blade given over to poker and intoxicating beverages. Marjory, the daughter, is defiant, the professor firm, and it all ends in the stern parent taking his wife and disobedient child to Greece to escape the objectionable suitor. Coleman is an ingenious wight, it appears; he is also the Sunday editor of the New York

Eclipse, and when he finds his sweetheart is to be whisked off to Greece determines to follow her. Greece at this time is in the midst of her war with Turkey, and the managing editor very obligingly sends Coleman to the scene of conflict as war correspondent, handing his subordinate a check for $1.00 just so he may have a little change to jingle in his pockets on his journey. It must not be denied, and never is, that Coleman is a drinking man. The author dwells on the fact with considerable unction, and relates with pride that his hero prefers champagne to coffee for his breakfast at times. Then we are told that in spite of his dissipations he can look “as fresh as a total abstainer coming from a bath,” and in a moment of danger it is said he was “as cool as an iced drink.” All of which shows that Coleman’s bibulous habits are a source of great inspiration to the narrator. Mr. Crane still clings to his bizarre similes and figures; he is still extravagant in his treatment of trifles and unreasonable in his estimate of the commonplace. And he has not mended of his inclination to hysteria; one marvels why he should describe a small, inoffensive snake as “wriggling wildly” and curling up in the “agonizing knot of death,” or why he should lash himself into a state of immense excitement over the peculiarities of a passenger elevator in an office building. All this he does and more in the name of realism, overlooking his obligation to portray character, to present real people to his readers, since he undertakes the task of writing a novel. But “Active Service” is not a novel; it is a ridiculously crude, uncouth and absolutely stupid hodge-podge. Marjory is a paper doll, her mother another; the professor, students and hero dummies, who, for the most part, use very offensive language and show a lamentable ignorance of the simplest rules of good behavior.

209

“New Novels.” Athenaeum (November 11, 1899), pp. 650–651 It is the Nemesis of such an extraordinary style as Mr. Crane affects that no reader dare correct his proofs. That he does not correct them for himself “Active Service” shows. It is produced by a great English printing firm and marked “not to be imported into the United States of America.” Yet such obvious errors are to be discovered as “to effect him”; “as much as I have seen . . . this quite beat it” (for “much as,” in the mouth of a great professor, head of an important college); “see” for she; “disovowal,” and many others; as well as American forms like “theater.” All this leaves us in doubt if Mr. Crane has not here printed very hasty work, standing in much need of a revision which might have made it a book to live. We make no apology for beginning with style, instead of with character and story. Mr. Crane hit the public taste, and our own taste, by his wonderful gift of picturesque expression, but he will confound his admirers if he allows vigorous roughness to degenerate into mere trick, and no beauty of romance will make up for such treatment of his readers. He has in his present book nine young Americans and two American girls. He can put into their mouths as much slang as he pleases, and he does. When he writes in his own person he might, therefore, the more easily avoid such phrases as “There was considerable of the lore of olden Greece in . . . ”; or “portraits of his lady envisioning before him.” “Then the poignant thing interpolated” is a complete sentence, from full stop to full-stop, in a descriptive passage. “Nevertheless it bore upon him” is

another. When we leave downright bad style we are, after we have had to face it, pulled up on every page by a use of words which is indefensible, but which might pass muster if it were not for the bad company in which it is found. As examples of a practice which is to be met with in every sentence, it is enough to mention a few, taken at random: “He gritted-out,” for “ground out between the teeth”; “flailing his arms,” for “using his arms like a flail”; “to swarm in to,” of one man; “dust which lifted from,” for “dust which rose”; “like a paused fat man.” “The scout” is used for the exploration of territory by a force of all arms. The sun is said to “fleck” on things when it glints on them, and produces flecks of light. The use of the participle is everywhere extraordinary—thus: “Simultaneous and interpolating orations.” Some sentences we have been wholly unable to understand; for example, that at the bottom of p. 77 and top of p. 78, which has an obvious misprint, but which the correction of the misprint in either of two different fashions fails to make clear. A good deal of the description only confuses us; thus we meet with such things as this: “Hordes of people with cable cars marching like panoplied elephants.” Had it not been for the curse of the author’s style when he is writing in his own person, “Active Service” might have been pronounced a great novel. The characters—the professor, his wife, their daughter, her suitor, and the opera-dancer who hunts him and them all the way from New York to the frontier of Epirus during the Greek war—are admirably sketched and sustained. There is tenderness, as in “The Third Violet” there is brilliancy; there is real insight into the minds and ways of women and of men. The last chapter strikes us as unnecessary, and its addition to a book suggestively complete without it seems to be inartistic. But the real blemish is the worse than mannerism of

210

the style, which must detract from the triumphs to which the author’s genius ought to lead.

“New Fiction.” New York Times, November 18, 1899, p. 772 Whatever glamour Mr. Stephen Crane can manufacture, he furnishes to Rufus Coleman, the “Sunday Editor of The Eclipse.” It is questionable whether the author of “Active Service” himself really sees anything remarkable in his newspapery hero. One is half inclined to think that all the time Mr. Stephen Crane is laughing at his principal personage, and that the book itself is a satire on current “yellow journalism.” Despite his cleverness and dash, Rufus is not a lovable person, and parents would side with Prof. Wainwright when he questions whether the “Sunday Editor of the Eclipse” would be a fitting husband for his daughter Marjorie. Rufus has plenty of pluck, but is not a well-bred man. He has a decided liking for poker and champagne, bad company, and talks slang. The Professor, wanting to save Marjorie from such a marriage, makes up his mind “to cart her off.” He takes her to Greece, and he carries off with him, in his train, his rather hard-headed wife, and some half-dozen students who have archaeological proclivities. Marjorie, who is rather an obstinate young person, loves Rufus. Now comes the chance for the “Sunday Editor of The Eclipse.” May he not join together his love and a newspaper job? It is just at the time when Greece has joined issue with the Turks. News has come to the United States that the Wainwright party has been lost. What a splen-

did sensation it would make if The Eclipse could organize a rescue party! How superb would be the scare heads! Rufus goes to Greece and undertakes the business. The editor of The Eclipse supplies the means. But why did Mr. Stephen Crane mar what might have been a really nice, proper story by interjecting into it Nora Black, the vulgar variety actress? The author carries her to Greece, where she does her “turn.” What may have been the former intimacy between Rufus and Nora is not stated, but may be imagined. Finally, by a bit of good luck, the “Sunday editor of The Eclipse” stumbles over the Wainwright party, and by his courage and push does get them out of a very uncomfortable situation. The Professor changes his mind about Rufus, and finally Marjorie, the prim Professor’s daughter, at some trysting place, bathed by the waters of the blue Aegean, combs the hair of the “Sunday Editor of The Eclipse” with her taper fingers, and then the man cries “with a kind of diffident ferocity, ‘I haven’t kissed you yet—’” Mr. Stephen Crane’s text abounds with baseball argot, and we regret to state that some of the slang does not belong to the period of the Greek and Turkish war, but is Bowery of the moment, the freshest coinage of to-day. The smartness of Mr. Stephen Crane, his epigrammatic way, need never be questioned. Perhaps, after all, “Active Service” is banter, or the arraignment of the “h´eros malgr´e lui.”

“Books of the Week.” Manchester Guardian, November 28, 1899, p. 4 The reader who turns to Active Service in the hope of finding there another of those

211

vivid battle pictures to which Mr. Stephen Crane has accustomed us will be rudely disappointed. It is true that the scene is laid in Greece during war-time, but the fighting is only a sort of obscure scuffle at the back of the stage, and the rumble of musketry is hardly audible. Indeed, Mr. Crane has tried to do an inconsistent thing. He planned a comedy of American manners whose plot demanded some situation in which the heroine may be in danger and the hero have occasion to show his daring and resource. His own reminiscences of Greece met the case, and in the effort to use them up he has spoiled a good novel. The characters have all to be transferred one by one by the most artificial devices from New York to Epirus, and when once they are there they behave pretty much as if the war were not really going on. Though two of them are war correspondents, they seem to have no other duty than the love-making that is naturally expected from the hero and the female villain of a romance. But the book, none the less, is full of good work. Coleman, the hero, the Sunday editor of a “Yellow” journal, is a rather simple and unattractive character. We grudge him his success and we dislike his manners. But he is none the less an interesting American type, and the sketch of the office where he rules is so vivid, convincing, and withal humorous, that it goes far to redeem the faults of the book. The group of American students who invade Athens with their drollery,

their slang, and their quaint Philistinism are described quite in Mr. Crane’s best manner. His women, however, are not satisfactory. Miss Wainwright is a shadow, and the brilliant Norah Black, a comic actress who is sent to Epirus to report the war for a New York journal, is hopelessly improbable. Mr. Crane’s preference for the unusual is not a trustworthy literary instinct.

Checklist of Additional Reviews New York Herald, October 14, 1899, p. 10. “New Books.” New York Sun, October 21, 1899, pp. 6–7. “New Books.” Phildelphia North American, November 10, 1899, p. 4. Spectator (November 11, 1899), p. 701. “Fiction.” Literature 5 (November 25, 1899), p. 518. “Fiction.” Speaker 21 (November 25, 1899), p. 218. Annie R. M. Logan. “Historical Fiction.” Nation 69 (November 30, 1899), p. 413. “Mr. Stephen Crane in Action.” Outlook 4 (December 16, 1899), pp. 656–657. Frederic Lees. “Some Writers on War.” Fortnightly Review 68 (September 1900), p. 478.

212

THE MONSTER AND OTHER STORIES New York and London: Harper & Brothers 1899

Chicago Evening Post, December 18, 1899, p. 5

Churchman 80 (December 23, 1899), p. 791

“The Monster,” by Stephen Crane, is one of those painful stories which should, perhaps, never have been written. Being written, it is of those which will never be forgotten by its readers. It is as horrible as Poe’s “M. Valdemar” and as real as— well, as real as “The Open Boat.” It contains nothing supernatural, nothing extravagant, nothing which might not actually come to pass in the everyday life of a country town. It is told in a series of patchy chapters, each an episode, a lifelike study elaborated to the fraction of a hair. Never was a truer bit of childlife, never a more astonishing comprehension of polite colored circles in a northern village, never a truer transcript of volunteer fire companies or conversation in a barber-shop, never a more vivid description of the magic action of chemicals. Some of these disconnected bits are too long, too full of detail, too carefully insisted on; but before the reader can grow weary the artist has put his red patch and his saffron piece and his ghastly blue blot together, and presto! the picture stands forth, startling, ineffaceable. Mr. Crane, in his own willful, unpleasant way, is an artist, and he has here created a small and odious work of art. Two other shorter tales are bound with “The Monster.” One deals with a small boy’s trials and temptations with “His New Mittens,” the other with riot and bloodshed at “The Blue Hotel,” related in the author’s vitriolic manner. One may like or one may dislike Mr. Crane’s tales, but he is certainly a man of genius, and no less certainly, like Stevenson’s Wrecker, a violent man.

A Negro is the central figure of Mr. Stephen Crane’s “The Monster,” which we place here rather because of the repute of the author and of the praise that has been accorded to the volume than for any excellence that we discern in it. Of the three stories that it contains, the last is childishly ineffective and the second incoherently so. The first and longest deals with the query whether it is worth while to save the life of your benefactor if you know that he will be an idiot and a frightful object, and implies that, as far as this world goes, it is a decided mistake to do it. Art there may possibly be in the tale, but we hardly see that there is pleasure or profit to the reader.

Julian Hawthorne. “An English Artist, an American Realist, and a Buddhist.” Philadelphia North American, December 29, 1899, p. 10 What is a man to do with a monster which exists owing to his efforts? The problem has been attacked by Mrs. Shelley in her “Frankenstein,” which everybody has heard of, but not so many of this generation have read, insomuch that many suppose that “Frankenstein” was the monster. A later writer has imagined

215

a criminal who was rescued from hanging (I think) by some rash philanthropist, and who ever haunted his unlucky re-creator. Now comes Stephen Crane, with his modern, realistic style, and tries his hand at the same proposition. The subject is susceptible, of course, of great depth of treatment; you may plunge into enigmas of the soul, and discuss the degree of responsibility ascribable to mere human creatures for one another. The old question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is to be handled in a direct, personal manner. We may conceive the deduction of a very edifying moral. It is to be borne in mind that the person concerned is a monster, of some sort; he is hostile to his environment, and there is no obvious way of reconciling him with it. Art demands a solution—a conclusion of some sort, whether in the line of tragedy or of comedy is comparatively immaterial. We require to get some enlightenment, somehow, to reward us for the pain of reading the story. The final impression must be that justice has been done, both to the monster and to his sponsor. Otherwise we are left just where we were when we set out, only worse, in so far as we are burdened with the perplexity of the author in addition to our own. Crane takes us to a town up-country, in New York, and proceeds to paint a picture of its various aspects. They are painted with the utmost truthfulness of detail, and verisimilitude. This minuteness is applied, not merely to the scenery and personages as pictorially viewed, but also to the idiosyncracies of the thought and action of the latter. The scale of examination is microscopic. The result is convincing, but it leads to nothing; it has no future. We see a typical New York town, with its typical inhabitants; some of these are brought into strong relief, and we have hopes that they will be used for something, but it was only by chance that they hap-

pened to get into focus and were portrayed so precisely. It was only intended that we should behold the scene—thoroughly realize it, and that is all. In the midst of the orthodox countrytown stupidity, the factory whistle blows, and the idle population rushes to the fire which is burning down the doctor’s house. Faster than all runs the negro hostler, who is the little boy’s friend; he dashes into the flames, rescues the boy from all but a slight scorching, but is himself caught in a painful manner under a table in the doctor’s office, and his face is burned off, all but one eye, which is left without a lid; his mind is also gone. The doctor, by his skill, animated by gratitude for the man’s having, at such expense to himself, saved his son, brings him out alive, but—a monster. People who see him are thrown into fits of terror or horror; they lose their appetite, and pine away. The doctor sends the unhappy creature to a neighboring darkey’s hut, to be kept out of the way there; but though the darkey is paid $5 a week for the accommodation, he cannot stand it; his wife and children and himself are utterly thrown off their base by the hideous affliction. While he is remonstrating, the monster escapes, and spreads devastation through the town; there is nothing for it but that the doctor should keep him on his own premises. But hereupon a new complication arises; for what patient would call in a doctor who keeps a monster in his house? The mere association of the doctor and the monster makes the doctor look like the monster to the diseased eye of the patient, and forbids the success of his most skillful treatment. Not only that, but the citizens of the town will not any longer exchange the civilities of social intercourse with the doctor; and his wife, on her reception day, is left with fifteen untouched cups and saucers and slices

216

of cake; and is found thus, in hopeless tears, by her husband. What is he to do about it? That is the question that a self-appointed committee of the solid citizens asks him; they suggest that he send the monster out of town somewhere; that he house him in a public institution; anything, only don’t keep him here. The doctor can only reply that the creature saved his son’s life, and to that owes his monstrous condition; abandoning him is therefore out of the question. And if you will believe it, Crane leaves the matter in that condition, without the faintest pretense of doing anything whatever to relieve it! I call this an outrage on art and humanity; and the splendid descriptive ability of the author, his vividness and veracity, only render it more flagrant. Something is fundamentally out of gear in a mind that can reconcile itself to such a performance. There is abundance of humor in many of the details, but it is an easy thing to be humorous about microscopic things, the essence of humor being in a kindly or amused smile at the weaknesses and absurdities of human nature; but it is one thing to be humorous when writing a history of the French Revolution, like Carlyle; and quite another to be humorous about the tiny trivialities of a New York country town. Anybody can look down on that, and see the fun of it. Crane never gets more than a few feet above the ground, and often falls below even that moderate elevation. Of constructive ability he shows not a vestige. His outfit for literary purposes consists of a microscopic eye, and a keen sense of the queer, the bizarre, the morbid. His minute analysis produces nothing. He is anything but an artist. He has everything belonging to art to learn; and he evinces no disposition or ability to learn it. We all know, nevertheless, how successful he has been; but in these days we are thankful for what we can get, if it

be genuine so far as it goes; and Crane’s work is no doubt that.

“Stephen Crane’s Stories.” Boston Evening Transcript, January 10, 1900, p. 10 This wonderful artist again gives us three sketches which palpitate with life. In the first Negro traits, childhood, a village fire and the gossip and incident of a narrow community. In the second a Nebraska scrap. In the third, the tragedy of a boy’s mittens. Stephen Crane’s words fall like the adjustments of a magnificent and complicated mechanism. Sometimes a hammer falls, sometimes a needle pierces, sometimes a pattern is woven all in an instant, sometimes a wheel revolves or a shuttle darts. His style is a miracle of precision which in all its impulsiveness and apparent ease, fulfilling no previous standard and formed on no ideal, conveys not only thought but atmosphere. This youth, who took the world by surprise in the wonderful inspiration which surpassed the practised pens of Erckmann-Chartrain and Zola in war pictures, seems to be possessed of illimitable pictorial powers. In the tale of “The Monster” he adds another vein, an episode in the manner of Poe, which is intended to stir the springs of horror and which has indeed a terrible quality. Here, however, Crane attempts to occupy a field in which he has not achieved marked distinction, the answering thrill is not quite adequate to the appeal. It is in the way of pure description, the look, the attitude, the dress, the language of characteristic types, their doings and the consequences of

217

them, what we call color and atmosphere, that Crane is almost unrivalled. It seems a trifle stupid to feel a dumb admiration for a literary work, but it would be as pertinent to criticise a camera or a Claude Lorraine glass. A reader of Stephen Crane may be seen to engage in a continuous, fatuous smile as word and phrase and epithet continue to tickle the fancy and create the successive pictures by their apt suggestiveness. If art is ideal and these are only the tools of it, Crane has at least set up a standard by which the artist will be judged henceforth if he does not meet it by the use of tools as perfect. It is true also that in the intense realism of this author there is enshrined the ideal which truth contains, and that in its faithfulness there can be read such lessons as even the most commonplace life and character can teach, as we are told if they could be turned inside out. Mr. Crane does not write with the fidgety minuteness of the French school. In his touch there is a keen sense of proportion which makes the picture’s perspective true. The brilliancy of a first success dulls the pathway sometimes, but these three stories will place Crane firmly on the top rank of word painters.

he has weakened its force by realistic byplay, or rather, by the attention to irrelevant detail that is so often mistaken for realism. His tale is not “focussed” on the main figure, as it ought to be; it covers too much ground, attempts too much. It is, in fact, to borrow Prof. Brander Matthews’s luminous distinction, a story that is short, instead of the short story it was meant to be. Of the other two tales the book contains, “His New Mittens” is by far the better one. Mr. Crane has made for himself a distinctive place among the interpreters of child life and the workings of the child mind. He succeeds in awakening dim memories in his readers, in establishing between them and him a sympathy based upon all but forgotten facts and states of mind. It is intuition and observation, not his own memory, that enable him to do this—which means that in this, at least, he is an artist. The remaining story, “The Blue Hotel,” deals with a rather shopworn subject.

Book Buyer 20 (April 1900), p. 244

“Among the New Books: Stephen Crane’s New Volume is Strong But Painful.” Chicago Tribune, December 19, 1899, p. 16. “Fiction.” New York Tribune Illustrated Supplement, December 24, 1899, p. 14. “Stories for Half-Hour Reading.” Sunday School Times 42 (April 28, 1900), p. 268.

Mr. Stephen Crane has spoiled an idea worthy of Poe in the telling. The Monster is a weird conception, haunting in its possibilities, but instead of centering his reader’s attention, and his own, upon it,

Checklist of Additional Reviews

218

BOWERY TALES London: William Heinemann 1900

“Notes on New Books.” Manchester Guardian, July 18, 1900, p. 4 The early death of Mr. Stephen Crane is a serious loss to English literature. He had produced enough work to give what seemed a fine promise of better things to come. He had the faculty of conveying in clear and definite language certain states of mind and feeling which have perhaps never before been definitely translated from terms of sense to terms of language. Mr. Crane’s description of fear in the “Red Badge of Courage” remains in the memory as a convincing portraiture of a state of mind through which all human beings are liable to pass. In this sense his work is always original; for, however ancient the subject-matter, he was always able to introduce some subtler analysis of the ways of human feeling, some closer observation, some truer perception. These features of his work, which marked him apart from the common run of writers, are almost as conspicuous in his two stories of New York slum life, The Bowery Tales, which were first produced in America in 1896 and are now republished on this side of the Atlantic. The subject here is wholly different from the strenuous and fearful rhapsody of war. It is the ordinary humdrum life of the people in the great settlements of New York. The life is painted with absolute fidelity, and in spite of the difference of dialect and race we can recognise in it the familiar landmarks of the slum life in our great English towns. It touches the sordid pathos, the grim and silent element of tragedy, and the play of human passion beneath that struggle for mere life which seems at first sight to absorb the people. These stories,

denuded of their descriptive passages, are of the simplest kind. “George’s Mother” is merely the familiar tale of a doting parent whose heart is broken by a drunken son. But nothing could be truer or more terrible than Mr. Crane’s picture of this dull, loving old soul and her clumsy appeals for affection to the son who is the apple of her eye. There is no attempt to abate the tragedy which almost always lies in wait for the lives of the poor. The son, a good, weak, weedy youth, falls among easy companions, and gradually slides down the primrose path until he loses his work and is taken into a gang of loafers. The mother cannot survive this. She dies in a fit, and there the story ends. “Maggie” is equally a tragedy. She is a poor, pretty girl, brought up in all the horror and ugliness of a drunken home. She is seduced, and her drunken mother, loudly strict on the point of virtue, refuses to take her back. She is driven on to the streets, and commits suicide. An old story, it may be said; but what originality Stephen Crane brings into it! There is no moralising—no margin allowed for glosses on the text. You are looking on at a real incident; you see destiny sweeping on to its inevitable climax, and the writer never stretches out that friendly hand, so loved of lady readers, which brings the characters safe to port and wipes off the tears by a promise of future happiness. Both stories end badly, and you rise from both with a heavy heart. This kind of literature is a serious business, for it is a mirror of life. It is the bitterest tragedy of all that the hand producing such work should have been cut off in its prime.

221

Checklist of Additional Reviews Illustrated London News 117 (July 28, 1900), Supplement, p. viii. “The Bowery and the Academy.” Outlook 6 (August 18, 1900), p. 88.

222

WHILOMVILLE STORIES Illustrated by Peter Newell New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers 1900

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 25, 1900, p. 7

Was Stephen Crane a genius? Did he do permanent work; something that will last and become a part of the lasting literature of the English language? There are critics who claim that nothing can really be termed “literature” until it has stood the test of time, and has really become more or less of a classic. It is not often that fiction attains to this distinction, and Crane was a fictionist, pure and simple. His power lay in a certain genius for minute analysis and description, and the skill to endow these with an unusual degree of interest, even when the subject was of the most trivial character. He died before he had come to the full fruition of his genius— power, skill—call it what you will—and we will never know what he might have done had his life been spared, and his mind had time to ripen and expand with increasing knowledge of men and the world of men. But does the work he left behind give any evidence that in time he might have come to a high place among those whose interpretations of human life have secured for them a deathless fame with the generations that come after them? Was it worth while to be so minute in the delineation of a trivial subject? Was it not photography instead of art? He constructed pictures that were wonderful in their fidelity to nature, in their truthfulness as portrayals of human weaknesses and emotions: but, more often than not, the weaknesses were trivial, while the emotions were anything but fundamental and soul stirring in their character. His “Red Badge of Courage” was a great book: the close analysis there given of the sensations felt by a soldier who finds himself one of some

thousands of units engaged in a desperate and deadly struggle on the battle field, has been accounted one of the most striking things in recent literature. But that was a mighty theme: the scenes he described gave opportunity for the play of the elemental passions of the human soul, and he depicted them with wondrous fidelity. He has been equally successful in later portrayals, but not often has he dealt with so entrancing a subject. The publication of the volume of “Whilomville Stories,” which have received serial publication in Harper’s Magazine during the recent months, brings up the question of Mr. Crane’s place in literature, and while the stories contained in this volume are admirable illustrations of his peculiar style, and of the wonderful power he possessed for minute analysis and close description, one is moved to make the query as to whether it was worth while. A considerable portion of the book is devoted to a description of certain episodes of boy life: how a new boy felt when he moved into a strange village and was compelled to go to a new school, and to meet a lot of strange boys and girls. There is nothing unusual in the experience related: they are as common as district school architecture, and in themselves about as interesting and as important. One’s knowledge of his fellows is not broadened by these studies. We obtain no deeper glimpses into the profundities of the human soul. Boy character is much the same everywhere, and we gain no fresh knowledge of the workings of the juvenile mind. Was it worth while to do so much for so small a result? We may marvel over the minuteness and fidelity of the picture, but it would be difficult to indicate any impression that is left in the mind save one of wonder at such minute work. Sometimes miniature painting belongs to high art, and again, it is only an evidence

225

of the possession by the artist of rare technical skill and deftness in manipulation of the brush. A photograph which shows every splinter and knothole in the boards forming the side of a barn, may be—is a triumph in skill in manipulation, but it is not a picture and does not possess a single artistic quality. So with some of the subjects upon which Mr. Crane expended his unusual powers: the result is a triumph of technical skill, but it is not literature. In several of the Whilomville stories the mirror is held up to boy nature, but while the truthfulness of the reflections will be recognized by every reader who recalls his own boyhood, he is not greatly impressed with the resemblance. Because a thing is humble and commonplace, it is not, therefore, entitled to an extended chronicle. There has grown up of recent years a sort of fad or fashion in literary construction which mistakes minuteness of description for dramatic power, and closeness of analysis for intensity of passion and expression. Those who have been caught in the current of this fashion forget that there is no such thing as genuine dramatic power or real intensity of expression unless the feeling behind it has some quality that lifts it above the commonplace. When a human heart stands in the presence of some great occasion, even though its knowledge is confined to itself, the flutter of a leaf, a single unconscious gesture, may enhance the dramatic quality of the situation, but half a page of description of how a man spits on his hands before sawing a stick of wood does not at all fulfill a like condition. So with much of Mr. Crane’s later work; while it illustrates the development of his peculiar powers as a writer, too often it was labor expended on subjects that made no more than a passing appeal to the writer’s fancy. Granting all the skill displayed in the “Whilomville Stories,” and oftentimes

it is remarkable, one cannot help the feeling that they are essentially trivial in quality, and that they represent a certain transitional period in their author’s intellectual and literary development—a development which had it not been arrested by the hand of death, might have carried him into an assured place as a literary artist. That such opportunity was not afforded him must always remain a cause for profound regret. It is fortunate that Peter Newell was chosen as the illustrator for the stories. He has caught the spirit of boy life and boy ideals in a fashion which stamps every figure in every group with an individuality that is entirely its own.

New York Tribune Illustrated Supplement, September 2, 1900, p. 11 It is said that the late Stephen Crane had a particularly soft spot in his heart for the brief “Whilomville Stories” now brought together in a volume. His partiality is easy to comprehend. These pages may well have made him feel that he was drawing nearer than ever to the goal of his ambition, to the point where his mode of writing would shake off the crudities which disfigure the bulk of his work and achieve at once truth and the effect of art. Traces of his immaturity survive. When he means to describe a small boy in the very extremity of distress and says that “he was suppedaneous of the fullest power of childish pain,” we know that he is not consulting the literary muse, but the dictionary. On the other hand, there is not enough of this straining after effect to spoil the downright merit of the stories. They are characterized to a considerable extent by the very quality most conspicuous by

226

its absence in the author’s other publications, the quality of humor, and best of all, they are written with the spontaneity and spirit for which hitherto one has looked in vain among his books. All along he sought to win success by dint of treating commonplace facts with candor. Usually he fell short of his object through the dead weight of inexperience and an undeveloped imagination. But when he wrote the “Whilomville Stories” the gods were kind. He wound himself thoroughly into his subject before he began to treat it. His touch is sure where it was wont to be tentative or flatly presumptuous and the relish with which he followed the adventures of his boys and girls is reflected happily in his work. The little minds are open to him and he reports what he finds therein without pedantry or patronage. Altogether this posthumous volume is capital. It should not be put down without a word for the illustrations. The maker of these, Mr. Peter Newell, whose art is always arousing, has entered perfectly into the spirit of his task. His droll drawings put the finishing touch to a volume which we believe will remain the best memorial to the talent of Stephen Crane.

Henry Austin Clapp. “New Books and Those Who Make Them.” Boston Daily Advertiser, September 8, 1900, p. 9 The Whilomville Stories, all, or nearly all, of which were printed in Harper’s Magazine during the last year, have been republished in a neat book of 200 pp. Mr. Peter Newell’s illustrations, also, are reproduced—those terrible pictures,

which so irritate the sensitive observer, because, offensive as they are to his taste in their rude extravagant realism, they command his respect for their dramatic force and substantial truth. The half-tone portrait of the late Stephen Crane, the author—standing as the frontispiece of the volume—adds much to the value of the book; a strong, fine, sensitive face it is, lighted by eyes of remarkable depth and beauty, in which the flame of genius might easily be believed to burn. It is plain, of course, that these tales are Stephen Crane’s reminiscences of his boyhood, of the life lived by him and his contemporary playmates in a country town. More specifically, they are studies and stories of the behavior of little rural boys of ages ranging from six to twelve, with a rare occasional glance, almost invariably disrespectful, at the little girls whom they by turns scorned, avoided, and worshipped. It is an old, old business, this recasting of the experiences of childhood; but it never grows stale, never can grow stale. Sentiment, the feeling of romance, science in a dozen branches from theology and psychology to pedagogy, must always take a peculiar interest in the observations of that strange creature, the boy, upon whom presently the fortunes of the world are to hang. All that is demanded of him who retells the thousand-times-told tale is, that he shall bring to the telling some new keenness and sensibility of eye, some new subtlety or potency of pen. That Stephen Crane meets these demands there can be no doubt. He has his own ruthless method of operation, and many of his chapters have details more repulsive spiritually than are likely to be found in any true account of most of the great battles of modern times. The boy of these sketches is, in a general way, a savage, a boor, a brute, an insensitive clod, a lover and doer of cruelty; he is vain, boastful, easily puffed up, remorseless to

227

defeated foes, slavish to victors, arrogant with the weak, cowardly with the strong. The girl is impudent, sneakish and malicious. Of the twelve chapters that treat of boys there is not one which shows them, or any of them, as fine or sweet, or magnanimous, or even as generous, except in one particular, which will be noted anon. The readers of The Advertiser will recall many of the scenes and actors: [briefly mentions plots of several stories] Fortunately we all know how to read between these grisly lines. If a philosopher who knew absolutely nothing of the genus boy were to peruse these pages he would despair of the genus homo. Such children, he would say, can be the fathers only of a race of barbarians. But everybody who has been intimate with his kind in their youth well understands the method of this artist, who, selecting only true things, selects only such true things as are effective for his purpose. Which of us is not well aware how thin is the boy’s veneer of self-conceit and how close to his vanity is his humility? how much of his bumptiousness is merely a desire to please and impress? how often his mischief-making and even his cruelty are but a mode of the spirit of activity which possesses his entire nature? When he is quarrelsome or greedy, he often seems like a grown up monster; but behold him when he first mounts to the platform “to speak a piece,” or when he is bored by the keen eye of some vigorous school-ma’am of twenty summers, and learn what a poor little youngster he really is and how he yet lacks of the strength of heart that is essential to manhood! Mr. Crane, as was said above, presents his subject as almost a savage ingrain. Almost, but not quite. By one exception from the rule of earthiness he saves his boys from utter condemnation. Their imaginative games and sports redeem them from materialism, show their sensibility to pure emotion, their capacity

for chivalry, and, even, their possible kinship with the poets. “The trial, execution and burial of Homer Phelps” are Mr. Crane’s apologia for his rough and tough little theme. Willie Dalzell’s concise eulogy over the dead-and-buried comrade, “Pards, we’ve got one more debt to pay them murderin’ red-skins. Bowie-knife Joe was a brave man an’ a good pard, but— he’s gone now,—gone,” together with the speaker’s scarcely controlled emotion, almost demonstrate that he and the rest of the gang possess immortal souls. And it is only upon the line indicated that the average immature boy shows any intellectual superiority to the corresponding girl. Making natural and appropriate allowances for Mr. Crane’s general violence of style and fondness for high color, nobody can deny the extraordinary shrewdness and veritableness of these sketches. He has remembered all the ways and manners of childhood, all its shynesses and timidities, all its tricks of boasting, all its sudden eruptions of courage and equally sudden dispensations of terror. Thousands of men who read the chapter entitled, “Making an Orator,” will be made to recall, as if it were yesterday, the soul-benumbing misery of their first essays at “declamation” from a school platform, and all the adjuncts and incidents of that scene of torture. What of its kind could be more perfect than the following:— [Quotes “Little Johnnie opened the ceremony” to “. . . calmly spoke some undeniably true words concerning destiny.”] The lingo of boys is uttered in these pages with most felicitous exactness. Mr. Crane’s pages do the work of a phonograph when the puerile dialogue is reported. He knows exactly how boys clip their syllables, swallowing a vowel here, suppressing a consonant there, telescoping

228

their words into one another; knows their gift in conciseness and their many inarticulate gutteral interjections of contempt or denial or assent—their “Naw’s,” “Yeh’s,” “Aw’s,” “Huh’s,” et cetera; knows, too, how they say the same thing over and over again, either when they wish to make an impression or when they desire to postpone a decision or transaction. Every page of the book is watered by Mr. Crane’s quaint humor, and always the narrative goes with that peculiar rush and impetus which always marked his work as a story-teller. It must be regarded as a bit melancholy that these sketches are impressed with what may be called a retrospective pessimism. The views of the men and women, as well as of the children, are dark. Jimmie Trescott’s father and the young lady who came to poor Jimmie’s rescue when he was taunted for carrying his picnic lunch in a pail seem to be the only admirable persons in the book. It is pitiful to think that Mr. Crane’s experience has been rather common, and that many authors—Harold Frederick [sic] is a late example—chiefly retain from their youth impressions of the meanness of mankind. But, once again, the boy of Whilomville is distinctly suffused with rose-color when one reads the language of Willie Dalzell, as, through the darkness of twilight, he and the rest of the pirate crew, intent upon rescue, approached the room in which their comrade Jimmie was confined for his sins by his father: [“Good cheer, my comrade” to “bid defiance to your haughty enemies.”] Jimmie Trescott’s father, it will be remembered, was so overcome by this address and by the whole scheme of rescue—of which he was, unknown to the pirates, cognizant—that Jimmie’s immediate misdeeds remained unpunished. The sympathetic reader will appreciate the gentleman’s change of mind; a member of such a pirate crew must have some virtues in him.

“Stories by Stephen Crane.” New York Times, September 8, 1900, p. 605 It seems an ungracious deed to write a word breathing any save kindly criticism of the latest work of the brilliant boy who has done so much that is worthy and who all too soon has “laid the weary pen aside.” The word becomes well-nigh impossible as one looks at the pathetic portrait prefixed to these sketches, so youthful, so full of promise, and remembers how he crowded his brief years with work and missed the maturity of his powers by too eagerly anticipating it. Eliminating as much as may be the influence of the writer’s personality, we must confess that the “Whilomville Stories” do not, upon the whole, commend themselves to our approbation. Mr. Crane’s literary touch makes itself felt, though he will occasionally indulge in the split infinitive. The stories contain many laughable situations, many bits of nature, and not a little food for reflection to the parents of “angel children”; but many of the scenes are so long drawn out as to be decidedly boring; more than once the reader is very much too vividly reminded of parallel occurrences in “Tom Sawyer”; the gibes at Sunday schools are cheap and unworthy; and as a delineation of the child nature the book is singularly inadequate. It is not a little odd that while teachers and physicians are making a cult of child study, and are frightening plain-minded parents out of their wits by fine-drawn and microscopic analyses of the complex little psychical organisms to be trained and influenced, the children of fiction are

229

becoming more and more simple, possessing more and more the elemental characteristics we have been wont to ascribe to the Bushman or the South Sea Islander. This is, of course, a reaction against the sentimental view of childhood almost universal in literature until the present generation. Let a child appear in a novel thirty years ago, and the reader knew his heart was to be torn. In the tears that have been shed over the soul-harrowing experiences of saintly children persecuted by worldly elders a whole army of Little Alices and her “creatures” might swim. Biography, too, delighted in anaemic, abnormally spiritual children who sank into an early tomb, such as “The Young Cottager,” or poor little seven-year-old Nathan Dickerman, appropriately bound in slim black volumes and supposed to be edifying “Sunday reading” for the average child. Dickens laid the hand of genius upon the accepted ideal, but did not venture to change it; and so we have Little Nell, Paul Dombey, and Tiny Tim still radiant survivors of the children of sentiment. Dear Marjorie Fleming in biography, Tom Brown and Little Women in fiction, substituted real children for the shadowy, haloed throng of impossible little saints, and the eager welcome these books received stimulated the vast host of followers who have at last pushed realism into the unreal. For, we submit, while children are not all soul and sentiment, they certainly have soul and sentiment. Manly piety is found even among schoolboys. The veriest urchin of the streets knows something of unselfish love for somebody, but we should never discover these things from the most prominent literature of the day. We should be sorry to have “Stalky & Co.” stand for the normal type of English schoolboy, or “Whilomville Stories” for the village children of our own country. Mr. Crane’s children are boasting, bully-

ing, cowardly, cruel little wretches, apparently soulless—simply a gang of selfish little roughs, devoid even of cohesive loyalty among themselves. No doubt he paints correctly one phase, and that the least attractive phase, of childlife, but he has left a whole world untouched, and so his picture must be pronounced a most unfair one. If “of such” as Mr. Crane’s declared “hoodlums” were “the kingdom of heaven,” there would be little to choose between that and the kingdom of Beelzebub! And so, although “Whilomville Stories” provoke a smile, they and all their kin arouse serious protest. “Shades of the prison-house” have closed with a vengeance “upon the growing boy” of fiction. Such a brutal young savage is he portrayed that, because of his altogether evil influence, long-suffering elders begin to lament that books about boys should be at the same time books for boys. Surely the literary pendulum must be ready to swing back again, if not to the solemn little prigs of good Mr. Da and Mrs. Barbauld, at least to the boys of Thomas Hughes. For the real boy, full of animal spirits, full of mischief, full of faults though he be, does pause sometimes to feel in his shy, dumb way the stirrings of a soul within him, and is not without worthy aspirations.

G[ilbert] H. Montague. “The Genius of Stephen Crane.” Harvard Monthly 31 (November 1900), pp. 76–83 Something more than mere posthumous interest attaches to these two latest books by Stephen Crane. Together, they

230

represent what probably is the enduring element in Mr. Crane’s writing. The realism that dared grapple, in The Red Badge of Courage, with the grisliest facts of war, is again dominating in Wounds in the Rain; and the same realism, redeemed from its harshness by a droll sympathy with its subject, controls the studies of small-boy life that make up Whilomville Stories. Until lately, it has been usual to limit Mr. Crane’s art to extraordinary calamities—war, famine, and sudden death. And indeed, his unfortunate ventures into ordinary incident seemed to justify this notion: lack of sympathy made The Third Violet a disappointing lovestory; and the shrieking sensations of Maggie quite distorted the intended interpretation of slum life. In Whilomville Stories he escaped these faults by denying seriousness to his method. His appropriate gravity as chronicler, his solemn analysis of childish motive, his very search for sensation in the child’s world, are delightful exaggeration. His sober recital, in realistic terms, of the loves, hates, intrigues, rivalries, and dissipations of youngsters scarce out of long clothes is delicious parody on his own self. A pathetic interest must always attach to Whilomville Stories: after all Crane’s victories of war and repulses in common experience, it came as his first real victory of peace; it opened for a moment a vista of potential humor which his untimely death has closed. At the same time, if one observe carefully, Whilomville Stories revealed in striking fashion the limitations of Crane’s genius. The Red Badge of Courage, The Little Regiment, and Active Service proved his skill in describing war; George’s Mother, Maggie and The Third Violet showed the misfit of his talent when applied to ordinary life; and Whilomville Stories, by its quiet badinage of realism, relegates to drollery the formulæ with which Crane once had thought to rewrite

all serious experience. In the short space of five years Crane laid down his theory of realism; by its aid achieved signal success in the writing of war stories; misguided by it, undertook impossible tasks in everyday narrative; and finally, better informed of its capabilities, applied it in earnest only in his war stories, and in his studies of child-life only in jest. Authentic limits have thus been set to the art of Stephen Crane; and within these limits the nature of his genius is set forth with no less distinctness. When it first presented itself in The Red Badge of Courage it was singularly deliberate and self-contained in its challenge. Wildly eccentric though his style seemed, there was plainly a method in its madness. From the very first a calculated firmness and positiveness marked it as complete. It was as consistent as Whitman’s. So with his art,—it was laboriously and coherently wrought; and though we quarrelled with the design we had to respect the firm consistency of the texture. If it were wrong it was not because of blundering craftsmanship or slovenliness of detail. The fault lay deep, in the very woof of the fabric. Observing that search for sensations is the controlling motive in Stephen Crane’s writings, the reviewers have fallen into the habit of comparing him with Edgar Allan Poe. Indeed, the comparison, with the contrast it reveals, has important value. Both men dealt in disease and death, fashioning the details of incident on background painfully distinct with color and vividness. And to realise better their effects, both men refined their senses to extreme delicacy of perception. But here begins the contrast. In Poe the purpose of this quickened sensibility was to set the nerves a-tingle, to suspend for a time the reason, and thus to convince the reader of a world beneath whose very burnished concreteness lurked mystery and horror. No such subtle purpose is part of Crane’s

231

intention. Simply and veraciously he strives to set forth certain horrid facts of human experience. It is the literal impression of the fact, not its symbolic meaning, that he tries to convey; and all his straining after images, his outlandish metaphors, his “red shouts” and “green smells” and “flags shaking with laughter” are an attempt to realise in vivid mimicry a sensation of actual experience. Only the surface of things concerns him. If that be dull and unimportant, he cannot, like Poe, allure the reader into the region of morbid and visionary insight. He must by some shift contrive always to have before him a scene of tremendous excitement. He must allow no pause in the melodrama. In the interval between sensations he can rely on no power of ominous suggestion, no excellence of divination, which shall whet the reader’s curiosity, and keep his nerves nicely a-tingle. The result of this defect has been to make the writing of a long story almost hopeless: even in The Red Badge of Courage, which is essentially a succession of scenic horrors, there are disillusioning lapses. The device of suspense, by which Poe racked the imagination, was forbidden Crane by his realism. Crane knew not the forces of Satan’s invisible world which Poe manipulated so cleverly: the world of sense and substance, of battles and wounds and shouts and struggles, was the only one that concerned him. By the nature of the case he chose the aspect that smote upon his senses; and henceforth his task was to express as best he might just what he felt and saw. He could not call to his aid a preconceived mood, as Poe professed to do. He could not attach to bits of incident emotional values of his own gratuitous contriving. He could only record, with such exactness as a rarely refined sensorium allowed him, whatever passed under his observation. This profound reverence for the physical fact explains the noteworthy

traits of Crane’s peculiar impressionism. The impressionism of Flaubert and the Goncourts was not content to give the mere outward aspect of things: it suffused the imagination with a rich connotation of significance; it cherished with intimate appeal emotions infinitely finer than the senses. The impressionism of Stephen Crane addresses itself to the eye and the ear: it pretends to afford no insight; it merely tries with a few swift strokes to show the significant surface of things. The traditional impressionism had an intangible greeting for the reader’s sympathy; Crane’s impressionism bids the reader stand aloof and admire the burnish and glare of life. If the aim of impressionism be to express in words— as the saying has come to run—what a picture does in color and light and shade, then the traditional impressionism is an artist’s study in moods, and Crane’s a photographer’s effect in high lights. The superficial vividness and the metallic quality of Crane’s descriptions are salient characteristics in all his writings. The captain in The Red Badge of Courage “lay stretched out in the position of a tired man resting: but upon his face there was an astonished and sorrowful look, as if he thought some friend had done him an ill turn.” The position and the expression are described with startling vividness; but the poignant horror of the scene is missing. Again, “It seemed as if the dead men must have fallen from some height to get into such positions. They looked to be dumped out upon the ground from the sky.” This description might do very well for a stage direction; but in this context it loses by audacity of simile whatever dread significance it was intended to convey. Mention has already been made of Crane’s helplessness when the action was in suspense: a psychical state during which there was no physical manifestation of the suppressed

232

emotion always baffled him. In The Open Boat he frequently faced the problem, and twice he disposed of it in this wise: “If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life?” This soliloquy shows to what extremities Crane’s materialism often forced him. By refusing to use emotional appeal he was driven far afield for literal figures. The wonder is that in the stress for expression he did not resort to metaphors more grotesque; and that, with the unconnotative medium at his disposal, he was able to produce the effects which he did. For it must not be forgotten that in the strict region of sense and fact, Crane’s power of description was wonderfully effective. The Open Boat begins with a wonderful sea-scape:

ably gazed eastward over the broken sea. The oiler steering with one of the two oars in the boat sometimes raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the stern. It was a thin oar and it seemed often ready to snap. The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and wondered why he was there. It would be difficult to describe better a scene of utter dreariness. Crane did it easily and without defying rhetorical good use, because it was merely a physical fact assailing the eye. Had it been a bit of intellectualised aspect, or had it been inseparable from complex emotion, he very likely would not have succeeded. How near he sometimes came, however, to expressing complex emotion another quotation will serve to show. The correspondent has rowed until he is utterly fatigued, and overcome with despair:

None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops which were foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks. ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ The cook squatted in the bottom of the boat and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said: “Gawd! That was a narrow clip.” As he remarked it, he invari233

To chime the notes of his emotion a verse mysteriously entered the correspondent’s head. He had forgotten that he had forgotten this verse, but it suddenly was in his mind. A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers; There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was dearth of woman’s tears; But a comrade stood beside him and he took that comrade’s hand, And he said, “I never more shall see my own, my native land.” In his childhood the correspondent had been made acquainted with the fact that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, but he had never regarded it as important. Myriads of his school-

fellows had informed him of the soldier’s plight, but the dinning had naturally ended by making him perfectly indifferent. He had never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it appeared to him as a matter for sorrow. It was less to him than breaking a pencil’s point. Now, however, it quaintly came to him as a human living thing. It was no longer merely a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet, meanwhile drinking tea and warming his feet at the grate; it was an actuality—stern, mournful, and fine. The correspondent plainly saw the soldier. He lay on the sand with his feet out straight and still. While his pale left hand was upon his chest in an attempt to thwart the going of his life, the blood came between his fingers. In the far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms was set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues. The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers. With all his uncouthness of phrase and flat literalness Crane here attains almost to a “personal note.” For a moment he interposes his sympathy between the reader and the white light of verifiable fact. The refraction in this case is barely apparent; in Whilomville Stories, as has already been said, it is much more marked. Whether Crane would have continued to introduce the personal element into his writings, and, in time, have interpreted by its aid all complex and emotional experience, one cannot tell. In Wounds in the Rain he returned to sense-impressions and crude passion.

Skeptical realism, then, was the fundamental fault of Stephen Crane. Before each bit of observed experience he asked himself: May this be explained by physical law—by causes which I can see and feel and handle? or is it due to some animal instinct, whose action is quite as inevitable as physical law—to fear, anger or pugnacity? No other explanations occurred to him; up till the very last he tried to reduce all human motive to terms of senseimpressions and the lower instincts. He was as skeptical of the finer sentiments and as blasphemous in his denial of the spirit as David Hume. The effect of this denial has already been seen in his literalness of description and gasping after strictly denotative figures. But the corrosion struck far beneath the style into the very genius of the man. Blind reverence for sensation and instinct as the springs of human action caused him to lose notably in rationality. So long as his conviction possessed him, his very potency of expression and vividness of characterisation helped on the hideous error; by license of his irrationality he could shout more shrilly, indulge himself in more sensations, and heap up more miscellaneous figures than belonged to reasonable experience. Since he felt no call to subordinate his vehemence to clear thought, he played recklessly with dumb passions and chaotic images. Admirers hailed his startling characterisation as a new discernment penetrating to far distances. Where he held the torch they saw, with unnatural vividness, startling episodes and bright bits of incident. By the flicker and flare of his illumination they could descry dim traits of human character. But character itself they never saw: they had only distorting glimpses,—no total vision, no sense of the whole reality. Crane’s conception of life was essentially never steady and sane. His achievement, on the other hand,

234

certainly was genuine. By concentrating his attention on the bare postulates of existence he gained striking clearness of vision into forces latent in all experience. His was a comprehension veracious within its limits but failing of any finality: and none but a truncated genius would have been satisfied with it.

“Whilomville Stories and Others.” Literature 8 (March 2, 1901), p. 165 The late Mr. Stephen Crane’s talents and literary adaptability were so great that it is no wonder that the magic and, from a writer’s point of view, dangerous world of child-life should have attracted his attention. In some of the stories contained in The Monster and in the collection entitled Whilomville Stories Mr. Crane appears to us to essay a picture of childlife that, among many, Mr. Kenneth Grahame alone has fully succeeded in giving us. Of course any book by the writer of “Maggie” is full of acute insight. But the children of Whilomville refuse to live for us; their pranks and sorrows and passions leave us cold. The world of “The Golden Age” is open to the few, and Mr. Crane with all his gifts had not the key for its unlocking. There is humour in the doings of “The Angel-Child”; there is amusement in “Lynx Hunting”; there is keen insight and some pretty analysis in “Shame,” but the spirit of youth, the grace of life’s beginning, the exquisite pathos of, say, “The Roman Road,” or the joyousness and mystery of Stevenson’s “Lantern Bearers,” these things are lacking. Mr. Swinburne once said that “the art of writing adequately and acceptably about chil-

dren is among the rarest and most precious of all arts,” and Mr. Stephen Crane could not command the gift at will. Yet there is much that calls for praise. His sketches of American parents, his portraits of coloured servants, his cunning in weaving the little stories are all remarkable. The illustrator of the “Whilomville Stories,” Mr. Peter Newell, gives admirable drawings of just the children the author seems to have intended. The book as a whole is worthy of a place among the most successful of the failures to depict the world of child-life. In “The Monster and Other Stories” Mr. Crane carries his attempts in Whilomville studies a little further. The eponymous personage of the first story is not a child but a coloured servant who, out of love for his master’s little boy, tries to save him from a fire and is terribly burnt in the attempt. He is preserved in life, but without brain or features, by the boy’s father, a doctor of great skill; but his preservation leads to tragic issues. The story is told with the graphic touches which were Mr. Crane’s great gift; but it is painful in the extreme, and all the more so on account of its vivid detail. It is written in the American language; for example, when some one tells a barber to cease talking and go on with his work Mr. Crane writes, “Instead, Reifsnyder paused shaving entirely, and turned to front the speaker.” But these things are on the surface; beneath, there are heart and strength and tragedy and a remarkable gift of observation. Some other stories in this volume deal with the histories of children, but so weird a piece of work as “The Blue Hotel” and so queer a one as “An Illusion in Red and White” are far more representative of the power and genius of the author of “The Red Badge of Courage” than, say, “His New Mittens” or the main portion of the “Whilomville Stories.” These two books can hardly be said to add to the fame of Mr. Crane, but

235

they contain work of interest and are worthy of his renown.

“Talk About New Books.” Catholic World 73 (April 1901), p. 113 Perhaps, with the exception of James Whitcomb Riley and Eugene Field, no one has ever more graphically, humorously, and withal more tenderly depicted the quaking fears, small intrigues, and miniature tragedies of childhood than Stephen Crane has done in the Whilomville stories. The volume is composed of thirteen short stories, each separate and distinct in itself, yet each dealing with the same set of characters—and desperate characters at that. Using this material the author has placed before the reader the whole panorama of childhood with a humor that is irresistible. Stephen Crane well knew when and where to throw on his scenes words that gave forth spurts of sulphurous green and blue lights, as in The Red Badge of Courage, and with equal skill he has turned upon his scenes of childlife in Whilomville the bright searchlight of humor, showing up clearly, but with a wonderful tenderness, all the little foibles and rogueries of childhood. Throughout the stories one feels that the author has seen not only the humorous side of these childish adventures, but the romantic and tragic as well; and who

shall say that any experience in later life can equal in intensity or terror either the romance or tragedy of childhood? This book, perhaps, more than any of his other works, shows the wonderful dramatic instinct of its lamented young author. The youthful actor who could enact Jimmie Trescott “showing off” before the little girl in the red hood would immortalize himself, as Jimmie is surely immortalized in literature. Peter Newell, in his illustrations accompanying the stories, has fully caught the spirit of the text, and has added greatly to the value of the book.

Checklist of Additional Reviews “Current Literature.” Boston Herald, August 25, 1900, p. 7. “Stephen Crane’s Boy Stories.” Springfield Sunday Republican, August 26, 1900, p. 15. “Stephen Crane’s Last Book.” New York Commercial Advertiser, September 8, 1900, part 2, p. 3. “Crane’s Child-Life Stories.” Chicago Evening Post, September 15, 1900, p. 5. Albert White Vorse. “The Book Review.” Criterion 1 (October 1900), p. 40. “New Novels.” Manchester Guardian, January 30, 1901, p. 3.

236

WOUNDS IN THE RAIN: WAR STORIES New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company 1900

“Stephen Crane’s Books.” Dallas Morning News, October 1, 1900, p. 10 With the war in China and the war in South Africa overshadowing our present interests, the events in our great war with Spain are sinking back into the uncertain dimness of the past. Some people have forgotten how great and exciting were the victories which thrilled us hardly two years ago. It takes a book like Stephen Crane’s “Wounds in the Rain,” published by Frederick A. Stokes & Co., (New York) to revive in us memories of imperishable deeds done by the United States naval and land forces. It seems safe to predict that the book will have a great sale, not only because of its inherent interest, but because it is the last book the public is to receive from Stephen Crane, owing to his untimely death. The present volume is made up of stories and sketches of the war in Cuba collected from the various magazines in which they appeared. Stephen Crane’s career was short but brilliant. His “Red Badge of Courage” won instant recognition from the public both in England and America and placed the young author prominently before the literary world as a writer from whom much might be expected. It was considered rather remarkable that a young man barely in his twenties should be able to write a story of the civil war in which the battle scenes were vividly realistic. He had never seen war, but the whole bent of Crane’s mind was to portray individuals, companies and even armies as they appeared in action on the line of battle. Readers of “The Red Badge of Courage” said to themselves that the book was

remarkable from any point of view, but that it was especially so as coming from a youth born and reared during the long years of peace. If he could write such a book without having seen a battle, what might he not accomplish after having been a spectator of the realities of war. During the war with Spain most of the young literary men in this country followed the army about to collect material for short stories, novels and magazine articles, and prominent in the group was Stephen Crane, who went nominally as a war correspondent, but his real mission was to interpret the war in its broader aspects to the nation. The reviewer, in common with most people, read magazine article after magazine article and some books about the campaign in Cuba and the naval operations at Santiago. The reviewer, in common with most people, thought he knew about all there was to know about San Juan hill and the Cuban phase of the war, but the stories and sketches by Crane contained in the volume under review, made it appear that there was something still to be added to the average information on the subject. The book contains ten war stories and one article covering the campaign in general entitled “War Memories,” which is perhaps the best thing in the book. The stories cover the naval operations as well as the doings of the army of invasion. The characters range from “high privates in the rear rank” to the generals in command. Crane’s views of the war are vivid and definite. He is a great admirer of Admiral Sampson, and presents the best pen sketch of him that the reviewer has seen. Crane loves strongly, and his chief love is the common soldier of the regular army. The officers of the regular army come in for their share of praise, but the volunteers receive hardly more than a side glance from the author.

239

Some things in the book one reads over and over. The description of the first advance on San Juan, the chapter on “The marines signaling under fire at Guantanamo,” and the account of the United States gunboat Machias when she ran down the correspondent’s tug at night, are among the best things in the book. The style of the book is sometimes too flippant and too careless to stand severe analysis, and yet there is much good writing in the book. Crane has plenty of humor and it flashes its illuminating rays over most of the scenes he presents. One sad story in the book, which has some keen satire in it, is “The Clan of No-name.” In this story the hero dies on a lonely skirmish with some Cuban pickets, and before his death he performs with quiet recklessness his duty as a soldier. There is no one to see him die, no one to applaud his courage and yet he acts as though the eyes of the world were upon him. The author intimates that all American soldiers fight that way and he explains his hero’s conduct in this sentence, which is unusually good: He was of a kind—that seemed to be it—and the men of his kind, on peak or plain, from the dark Northern ice-fields to the hot, wet jungles, through all wine and want, through all lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light, the men of his kind were governed by their gods, and each man knew the law and yet could not give tongue to it, but it was the law and if the spirits of the men of his kind were all sitting in critical judgment upon him, even in the sky, he could not have bettered his conduct. But from peak and plain, from dark Northern ice-fields and hot, wet jungles, through wine and want, through all lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light, he heard breathed to him the approval and benediction of his brethren.

“Fiction.” Academy 59 (October 6, 1900), p. 281 No one can escape, in reading this last of Mr. Crane’s extraordinary work, from the reflection that it ridiculously resembles his first. Almost every impression was preconceived in The Red Badge of Courage, and for verisimilitude the author might have stayed for the one as for the other in his own armchair, and never have gone at all to the wars. This might lead to either of two conclusions: that the reporter was obsessed by the author’s battles in the brain, or that the author had successfully divined truth which the reporter’s observation could but verify. Which, it were not easy to decide; especially because a large part of the observation, and that the most characteristic, is concerned altogether with the inner man. The objective operations are of secondary importance, and, as Mr. Crane tells them, are not always easy to follow; that which mainly interests him is the variation, under certain abnormal conditions, in the fundamental conceptions of time and space, the sharpening of the senses or their temporary anaesthesia, the effects of fear, the strange sources from which in emergency courage may derive; and what he is interested in, that he desires to express. “The battle broke with a snap far ahead. Presently Lige heard from the air far above a faint, low note as if somebody were blowing in the mouth of a bottle. It was a stray bullet that had wandered a mile to tell him that war was before him.” Then what? It may be observation, but the author of The Red Badge would easily have divined it: “he nearly broke his neck in looking upward.” Forthwith the Spanish guns become as it were articulate. “Ss-sa-swow-ow-owow-pum”—that is how they talk; also

240

“flut-flut, flut, fluttery-flut-fillluttery-flut,” they say. Bullets sing, sping, spang, snap, snatch, shiver, sneer. The war correspondent in the derelict steel boiler meanwhile “dreams frantically of some anthracite hiding-place, some profound dungeon of peace, where blind mules chew placidly the far-gathered hay.” With nerves (to use his own phrase) standing on end like so many bristles, he writes like a man hag-rid by a terror of common things:

Most of the soldiers were sprawled out on the grass, bored and weary in the sunshine. However, they aroused at the old circus-parade, torch-light procession cry, “Here they come.” Then the men of the regular army did a thing. They rose en masse and came to “Attention.” Then the men of the regular army did another thing. They slowly lifted every weather-beaten hat and dropped it until it touched the knee. Then there was a magnificent silence, broken only by the measured hoof-beats of the company’s horses as they rode through the gap . . .

Lying near one of the enemy’s trenches was a redheaded Spanish corpse. I wonder how many hundreds were cognisant of this red-headed Spanish corpse? It rose to the dignity of a landmark. There were many corpses, but only one with a red head. This redhead. He was always there. Each time I approached this part of the field I prayed that I might find that he had been buried. But he was always there— red-headed. Mr. Crane preserved to the last his Japanese-like sensitiveness to the paradox of perspective. Over and over again he points to it with a worried grin. There was a man in a Panama hat, walking with a stick! That was the strangest sight of my life—that symbol, that quaint figure of Mars. The battle, the thunderous row, was his possession. He was master. He mystified us all with his infernal Panama hat and his wretched walking-stick. From near his feet came volleys and from near his side came roaring shells, but he stood there alone, visible, the one tangible thing. He was a Colossus, and he was half as high as a pin, this being. His description of the return of Hobson, of Merrimac fame, to the army, is a piece of saner observation:

Then suddenly the whole seene went to rubbish. Before he reached the bottom of the hill, Hobson was bowing right and left like another Boulanger, and above the thunder of the massed bands one could hear the venerable outbreak, “Mr. Hobson, I’d like to shake the hand of the man who—.” To our mind the finest work in the volume is the last story, “The Second Generation.” It is of wider scope than the rest, treating with serious purpose and in less unmeasured language of the consequences of inherited wealth and position. On the whole, however, this posthumous volume is a brilliant last word from one who had discovered himself completely from the beginning.

Spectator 85 (October 6, 1900), p. 464 Some, if not all, of the sketches collected under the strange title of Wounds in the Rain had already appeared in various magazines, but admirers of the remarkable talent of the late Mr. Stephen Crane will

241

welcome their appearance in book form. It was the singular fortune of Mr. Crane to begin his literary career by a display of retrospective clairvoyance, and when subsequently opportunity was afforded him of testing the accuracy of his intuition in the light of actual experience, to find it verified by what he saw and heard. The sketches in the present volume are all concerned with the Spanish–American War in Cuba, and though in the quick-moving rush of recent events that campaign has already receded far into the background, so vivid is the author’s presentation of the emotions and sensations of the man in the fighting line, so intimate his appreciation of the essential traits of the citizen soldier, that they cannot fail to appeal with peculiar freshness to British readers at the present juncture. No one can judge of the truth of Mr. Crane’s psychology who has not himself been under fire, but as to the picturesqueness and power of his delineation there can be no doubt. His narrative is a perpetual stimulus to the visualising faculty. Often these pictures are grim and gruesome, as in that terrible sentence describing the scene in one of the fever tents: “The languid movement of a hand was surrounded with spectral mystery, and the occasional painful twisting of a body under a blanket was terrifying, as if dead men were moving in their graves under the sod.” But of the amenities, the charities, and the humours of warfare there is no lack in these vivid chapters. Mr. Crane had an eye for everything, and he will win the hearts of all lovers of animals by his touching reference to the battery horses, who, turning at the sound of trampling feet, “surveyed the men with eyes as deep as wells, serene, mournful, generous eyes, lit heart-breakingly, with something that was akin to a philosophy, a religion of self-sacrifice,—oh, gallant, gallant horses!” With one more brief but most characteristic quotation we must

take leave of this fascinating volume:— “The firing-line now sounded like a great machine set to running frantically in the open air, the bright sunshine of a green field. To the prut of the magazine rifles was added the under-chorus of the clicking mechanism, steady and swift, as if the hand of the operator was controlling it all. It reminds one always of a loom, a great, grand steel loom, clinking, clanking, plunking, plinking, to weave a woof of thin red threads, the cloth of death.”

“Literature.” New York Mail and Express, October 11, 1900, p. 7 The late Stephen Crane’s posthumous book of war sketches, “Wounds in the Rain” has already passed into a third edition. It deserves to pass through several more, because as a document in the study of war it possesses real value. “The Red Badge of Courage” was a work of intuition—a semi-realized expression of sub-conscious imagination; “Wounds in the Rain” is the result of that same strong sub-conscious gift of interpretation guided by stern experience. This is war as seen by a remarkable and somewhat puzzling mind, war described by a man of sporadic and untrained genius; and the result is striking and likely to be remembered. These sketches are of equal quality— a high one. Their author’s peculiarities of style and reporting are seen here and there, but, on the whole, Stephen Crane had learned to write better when he penned these tales than he did at the beginning of his unhappily short career. “The Clan of No-Name” is one of the most striking— we won’t say the best—in a volume of

242

stories of such equal merit. Eliminating the introductory two pages, and the closing three, we have as fine a short story, as convincing a picture of Cuban guerilla warfare as we are likely ever to see; taking the sketch as a whole, we find, in addition, a painful tragedy of human life in peace or war. “The Second Generation” is a study of degeneration, told with uncommon skill and insight, and “The Sergeant’s Private Madhouse,” the tale of a sentry gone mad with fear in the approaching darkness and loneliness of a tropical night, is another excellent piece of work; and there are in the long chapter of “War Memories” vivid sketches of many things, such, for instance, as the narrow escape of a dispatchboat from being rammed by the Machias. And, of course, as is usual, the best thing in the book is the first, “The Price of the Harness,” a narrative of a long day of battle at San Juan, with the tragedies of war brought home to individual soldiers, in a manner reminiscent of “The Red Badge of Courage.” But Stephen Crane discovered that a battle is action, not the realization of one’s emotions; and that warfare is made up of deprivations, “a plague of the lack of small things.” It is sublime, in the sense that it is “majestic commonplace”; it is pageantry, but “the pageantry of the accomplishment of naked duty.” Crane saw the professional soldier, and interprets him for us—grim, unemotional, setting about the day’s business in a strictly businesslike way, and draws his officers, men imbued with the simple, proud traditions of the oldest caste in the world, feeling the full force of the “noblesse oblige,” the obligation each of them has toward his profession, the world over. This glimpse of the officer’s ethics is probably one of the best things in the book. The author himself seems to have despaired of doing his subject justice in objective studies. “But to get the real things,” he makes one of his war

correspondents exclaim, “it seems impossible; It is because war is neither magnificent nor squalid; it is simply life, and an expression of life can always evade us. We can never tell life, one to another; although sometimes we think we can.” Yet Stephen Crane came much nearer to just this, in his endeavor to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, than he himself seems to have realized.

“Crane’s Cuban War Sketches.” Chicago Evening Post, October 29, 1900, p. 5 One requisite of a masterpiece is that it shall be convincing. Without calling Stephen Crane’s “Wounds in the Rain” a masterpiece in all respects, it has at least this quality; it is profoundly convincing. One need not, in his own phrase, distinguish between a five-inch, quick-firing gun and a nickel-plated ice pick to be instantly certain that just so must men behave under fire; thus and not otherwise must the long gloomy procession of the wounded move to the rear, through mud and wire fences and bewilderment, uncomplaining, grimly facetious; precisely as described must many take their death blow, falling over like men of wet felt, with a quiet, sad surprise, “very courteously tacitly absolving the rest of us from any care in the world.” The book is a collection of experiences and imaginings concerning the Cuban war. They are not chronological or definite accounts; often the author leaves you guessing as to what particular slope is charged, what especial regiment is making its way into action through a

243

bullet-beaten jungle. Thus specific cases take on a large general truth; they are flashlights on human instincts in danger, suffering and death. Sometimes Crane is too indefinite. To trust to his readers’ understanding sans explanation is an excellent quality, but it should be justified by a clear if concise presentment of facts. In “The Clan of No Name” one nearly reaches the end without being sure that the combatants are entirely insurgents and Spaniards, while the episode of the woman and the photograph remains obscure instead of being full of meaning. Evidently construction was the weak spot in Mr. Crane’s strong talent, one that time and experience would have strengthened. Those sketches which are not put forth as rounded stories—those which are jottings from life, impressions, sardonic, pathetic, cruel—how vivid, how grasping they are. The long rambling article called “War Memories” is full of gems. Our fickle admirations long ago experienced a revulsion from Hobson; they never turned to General Shafter, and they were perhaps excited against Admiral Sampson, yet Crane’s brief mention of them brings a new thrill for the daring young lieutenant, for the vast bulk which yet inclosed a soldierly spirit for the cold, consummate, taciturn seaman. The book is charged with emotion boiling under the surface stoicism, but only occasionally forcing an outlet. That is a true touch where the soldier looks upon his comrades in the charge as dazzlingly courageous, and where the gallant young officer commanding “developed a fervid and amazed appreciation of the men, his

men, men he knew very well, but strange men.” Crane’s genuine, absorbing admiration of courage, fortitude, loyalty, infects the reader, so that part at least of Tolstoy’s dictum on a work of art is fulfilled. If at times he prattles aimlessly about his toothbrush, his whisky bottle, in the broken short sentences of an exhausted man, you understand that he is so overwhelmed with great things that he can only trust himself to speak of trifles. As he puts it: [Quotes “It may seem to you that I am trying to make everything a squalor” to “Thus they moved at San Juan— the soldiers of the United States regular army.”] “Wounds in the Rain” is so alive, so keen of perception, so poignant in expression that it is hard to think of him who wrote it as seeing and feeling no more. One last posthumous work from that earlyquenched genius is promised—a long story called “The O‘Ruddy,” and then—the rest is silence.

Checklist of Additional Reviews “War Stories.” Literature 7 (October 6, 1900), p. 260. “The Soft Side and . . . the Hard Side.” New York Herald, October 20, 1900, p. 12. “Crane’s War Genius.” Louisville Courier-Journal, November 10, 1900, p. 5.

244

THE MONSTER AND OTHER STORIES London and New York: Harper & Brothers 1901

consideration for his family and friends, is brought out with peculiar poignancy. If Mr. Crane had never written anything else he would have earned the right of remembrance by this story alone. It is full of pity and terror, and leaves an indelible impression on the reader.

“Novels of the Week.” Spectator 86 (February 16, 1901), p. 244 It is a case of “‘Eclipse’ first, and the rest nowhere” this week, so incontestably superior is Mr. Stephen Crane’s work to that of the seven other writers to be noticed below. Two at least of the stories have already seen the light in magazine form, “His New Mittens”—a touching story of a little boy who, yielding to the force of public opinion, disobeyed his mother’s instructions, was punished on his return, ran away from home in a fit of resentment, and was brought back by a kindly tradesman—and the very striking and rather ghastly story which gives its name to the collection. This narrates how a good-natured, childishly vain coloured groom saved the life of his master’s little boy from a fire caused by his own carelessness, but sustained such terrible injuries as to affect his reason, and disfigure his appearance to the extent of monstrosity. The boy’s father, a skilful doctor, saves the poor fellow’s life, and pensions him off, but the horror which “the Monster” inspires is so great that his guardians refuse to keep him, he breaks out and creates a panic in the town, and finally, when the doctor has taken the monster back to his own house, he is repaid for his humanity by being boycotted by his neighbours. He loses his practice, his wife’s parties are deserted, and a deputation waits upon him to beg that he will consent to the removal of the unhappy negro. Throughout this strange narrative Mr. Crane is at his best. The description of the fire and the rescue is astonishingly vivid, and the conflict in the doctor’s mind between gratitude and repulsion, his duty to his son’s rescuer and

“New Novels.” Manchester Guardian, March 6, 1901, p. 3 Stephen Crane’s latest posthumous volume is worthy of a fine reputation. THE MONSTER AND OTHER STORIES consists of seven stories or sketches, of which the first occupies about half the book. It is a very remarkable piece of work, and in the stupendous cruelty of the events which it narrates it approaches the limits of our endurance of physical horror, but it is redeemed by the fine art of the handling. Harry [sic] Johnson, a doctor’s negro servant, a figure presented with delightful humour, after his day’s work proceeds to call upon his sweetheart. He arrays himself in his best, which includes a straw hat with a bright silk band and a pair of lavender trousers. He returns to find the house in flames and, heroically, he rescues his master’s child. By an unhappy chance he is horribly but not fatally injured, and the doctor, impelled by gratitude and with infinite solicitude, nurses back to life an idiotic creature whose face has lost the semblance of humanity. To the hints of a friend who suggests another solution of the terrible problem he can only reply, “He saved my boy’s life.” The negro recovers his physical health but not his reason, and the doctor, fearing ill-treatment or neglect, will not permit his removal to an institution. His humanity is applauded, but

247

there is a moral horror in the story more overpowering than the physical repulsion. From an attitude of sympathy and admiration the people of the place turn gradually to loathing and persecution. The steps by which the effect is obtained are perfectly calculated. The humour of the narrative heightens and relieves this effect. The old nigger who lodged and boarded the monster struck for another dollar a week— it was impossible to endure for five dollars, but it might be done for six; and the grim comedy of the monster’s visit to his old sweetheart, when he adopts, in all simplicity, the elaborate graces of the old times, is worthy of a masterpiece. The other stories are all good. “The Blue Hotel,” vigorous in movement and psychologically most interesting, is a strong, curious, and original piece. “Manacled” creates a remarkable effect of impotent terror in the course of half a dozen pages; “Twelve O’clock” and one or two of the others have some superficial resemblance to the work of Mr. Bret Harte, but they are both brilliant and individual; and “His New Mittens” is a slight but delightfully humorous story of a little boy. Everything that we read of Stephen Crane increases our respect for him as an artist and deepens the regret at his untimely death. He was a writer of great and original power, splendidly equipped for a famous career.

Academy 60 (March 16, 1901), p. 230 If Mr. Crane had written nothing else, this book would have wrested from the world an acknowledgment of his curious, searching gifts, and would have made him a reputation. Not that he is wholly represented here. The Crane of The Open

Boat, of Maggie, of Death and the Child, of The Red Badge of Courage, is absent, or only fugitively present; but the quick, nervous, prehensile mind that in an instant could select the vital characteristics of any scene or group, is notably here; and here also in superabundance is the man’s grim fatalism, his saturnine pleasure in exhibiting (with bitter, laughing mercilessness) the frustrations of human efforts, the absurd trifles which decide human destiny. There is one story, for example, “Twelve O’Clock,” which tells how a young cowboy’s excitement on hearing a cuckoo-clock for the first time led indirectly to murder—all done with perfect credibility. Nothing but a kind of savage impatience with the accidentalism of the scheme of things could have caused a man to set down this particular story; but it is finely done—a triumph of narrative art. “The Blue Hotel” is another excellent piece of work—the history of a quarrelsome night and its fatal issue—a nocturne in blood and whisky, with a curious thread of grotesque running through it, and a very peculiar knowledge of human nature in every line. The question, “Is it worth while?” had better, perhaps, not be asked. To our mind the art justifies it. “The Monster” itself, the title-story, has been praised in America with that warmth of praise for which the country is famous; but it is not better than “The Blue Hotel.” It is, however, an amazing story, with deeper interest, and the question, “Is it worth while?” is far less likely to be put. “Manacled” is an exercise in the horrible that does not quite succeed. “His New Mittens” belongs rightly to Whilomville Stories. The last story of all, “An Illusion in Red and White,” is a very delicate piece of gruesomeness. Altogether, the book is intensely alive and intelligent, and not by any means the kind of thing for nervous folk or for the “art-for-anythingelse’s-sake-but-art” school.

248

“Short Stories.” Athenaeum (March 16, 1901), p. 334 This book seems somewhat disappointing. Each of the stories in it is well told, and in a degree they are interesting; but nearly every one of them leaves the reader untouched. What chiefly strikes us about these stories is that they appear to be studies in narrative rather than narratives told for the sake of the stories themselves: thus there is something a little artificial about them. “The Monster,” for example, a fine and pathetic tale in some ways, does not seem as if it had ever really occurred; it reads rather like a study in abstract emotions. So too with “The Blue Hotel”; it is a brilliant fulguration, but still a bolt from the blue. The best stories, the most natu-

ral and the most real, appear to us to be the last two, “Manacled” and “An Illusion in Red and White.” The last especially is very good; perhaps the reason of this is that the incident is adduced rather as an oddity in psychology, so that the cold and impersonal way in which the tragedy is treated becomes comparatively unimportant, while the scientific aspect absorbs all the interest.

Checklist of Additional Reviews Publishers’ Circular 74 (February 23, 1901), p. 191. “The Literary Work.” Academy 60 (March 2, 1901), p. 177. “Novel Notes.” Bookman 20 (April 1901), p. 26.

249

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company 1901

“By the Late Stephen Crane.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 10, 1900, p. 13 Stephen Crane’s “Great Battles of the World” was among the very last work which came from his pen. The book is made up of eight sketches, each devoted to a historical conflict of arms. The author’s purpose was to give a vigorous and vivid story of a number of the great battles in the world’s history, whose consequences were far reaching and epoch-making. The list begins with Bunker Hill, then comes the battle of Vittoria in Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign of 1812, then the siege of Plevna and next the storming of Burkersdorf Heights, one of the notable battles fought by Frederick the Great against the Austrians in 1762. The other conflicts described are Leipsic and Lutzen in Gustavus Adolphus’ campaign in Germany, the storming of Badajos, the battle of New Orleans and the battle of Solferino. It is probable that had Crane’s life been prolonged he would have extended the list still further. We are so accustomed to regarding Stephen Crane as an almost matchless describer of battle scenes that it seems novel to encounter him in a work that is essentially historical in its character. And it will become apparent as the reader peruses these sketches that when his imaginative genius is limited by the necessity of confining himself to the facts of the history, that his spontaneity and the brilliancy of his descriptive style suffers. While these descriptive sketches are vigorously written and while their author did not fail when opportunity offered to take

advantage of picturesque situations, the reader will find them different in several ways from “The Red Badge of Courage.” The author is obliged to devote so much space to the historical setting of the battle he is describing that he loses a little of that imaginative quality which enabled him to give so forceful a description of an actual fight. While these sketches are better than many other descriptions of the same fights, it can hardly be said that they have added greatly to Mr. Crane’s reputation as a writer of what may be called battle pieces. A good many authors have described battles on land and sea. It should be borne in mind that Mr. Crane’s reputation in this direction was achieved not in the description of any actual conflict in its entirety from the standpoint of the historian, but from his imaginative picture of the individual experiences and emotions of a single unit in the conflict. His “Red Badge of Courage” is not an account of any one battle. It is a wonderfully vivid and brilliant psychological study of how one private soldier and constructively any one or a dozen, or a hundred or a thousand of his comrades feel under like conditions in the throes of a conflict under fire. Similarly his volume of sketches of the Cuban campaign, recently published, in which he gives chapters of personal experiences in the fighting before Santiago are pictures from the individual point of view rather than accounts of the battle. He tells in those sketches what he saw and felt. In the new book he takes up the role of the historian. They are good historical sketches but it is not a great book. They are good bird’s-eye views of the battles named, but they will not take rank in literature with “The Red Badge of Courage.”

253

Academy 61 (July 20, 1901), p. 53 The late Stephen Crane’s surprising analysis of the passion of war, in his Red Badge of Courage, and other stories, led an American editor to commission him to write the descriptions of certain historic contests. This book is the result. It is not Mr. Crane at his best; indeed, it is hardly Mr. Crane at all. The writing has spirit, and a very fair general impression of the character of each battle is imparted, because Mr. Crane was a good journalist who could execute orders; but his peculiar quality, his psychological intensity, is lacking; nor, in fact, could it well be present, in accordance with the historical scheme of the work.

Army and Navy Gazette (July 22, 1901) This is another addition to twice-told, nay twenty-times-told military tales, and admirers of the late Mr. Stephen Crane’s literary work will regret that he was turned on to mere book-making. Having a keen eye for dramatic effect and a fluent, graphic pen, the pictures he has drawn are effective enough, better than many, but not nearly so good as the originals to which he has gone. Vittoria and Badajoz have been put before us in masterly style already by Napier; Solferino and Plevna have hardly as yet passed beyond the scope of the war correspondent. We welcome, however, the revival of Leipsic and Lutzen, the battles fought by Gustavus Adolphus, of which no very recent or clear account

is available; and the same may be said of Frederick the Great’s action on the Burkersdorf Heights. If the strategic and tactical aspects of the fighting are not always considered very scientifically, the personal qualities of the leaders are finely drawn, and both Frederick and Gustavus Adolphus stand out with great clearness and individuality.

Spectator 87 (August 3, 1901), pp. 158–159 The kindest thing to say of this, the last effort of Stephen Crane’s talent, is that it is unworthy its author. It has solid merits of its own, but its merits are not the merits of Stephen Crane. The narrative is deftly handled, though it hangs too closely upon the words of others; the circumstances of each battle are accurately set forth; and whatever of picturesqueness there may be in the situation is vividly remembered. But the result is the merest prose, which might have been attained by many another hand, and we always looked to Stephen Crane for something better than the merest prose, for lucidity of insight and poetry of expression, which have no place in these pictures of battles. Yet Stephen Crane’s failure does but emphasise his real talent. He was not of those who write best with their eye on the object. He had a gift of intuitive generalisation which is only too rare in these days of triumphant reporting. Whatever there was to say and to think of war he divined before ever he saw a shot fired in anger. And he divined it because he regarded it subjectively; the panoply of war, the management of armies, the disposition of the opposing forces, were of less interest to him than was the contest of courage and

254

cowardice carried on in the heart and head of one soldier. So it is that his Red Badge of Courage is independent of time and place. Being a fragment of the universal emotion, it fits in with the tactics of all ages. It is as true to-day as it might have been true of the time when English and French met at Agincourt, and nothing that Stephen Crane has written since can influence our estimate of his rare and sensitive gift. But if these “great battles” are unworthy their author, they are not, as we have said, without merit. They are chosen on no plan that is visible; they hang together on no closer chain than unites the actions of the brave. Yet they are described with considerable knowledge, and without a touch of prejudice. Perhaps Mr. Crane overrated “the stern-lipped stupidity” of the English, who if (like the rest of the world) they are slow to adapt themselves to new conditions, have none the less profited on many a stricken field by their obstinate and self-sacrificing courage. But otherwise Mr. Crane is scrupulously just, and his political summaries are singularly impartial. Vittoria is his first battle, in which Wellington led to victory an army which he described himself a few months before as “fallen off in discipline to a greater degree than any army with which I have ever served, or of which I have ever heard.” However, he was pitted against Joseph Bonaparte, of whom his brother with infinite scorn declared that he “made war like a Satrap,” and who fought the battle of Vittoria to keep open the road to Bayonne. If only he could save his baggagewaggons and the spoils of Spain, he cared little what became of the country over which he thought he ruled. Wellington’s famous march has been described a hundred times; a hundred eloquent writers have lauded his splendid turning movement. The magnificent fury of Picton, who with his fighting villains carried the bridge and crossed the river, has been celebrated

again and again. So also has the exalted courage of Cadogan, “who would not be moved, although the dead lay thick about him, but watched the progress of his Highlanders until he could no longer see.” Nor do these episodes lose their splendour in Mr. Crane’s telling. Concerning the defeat he appositely quotes this testimony of an eyewitness:— Behind them was the plain in which the city stood, and beyond the city thousands of carriages, and animals, and non-combatants, men, women, and children, were crowding together in all the madness of terror, and as the English shot went booming overhead the vast crowd started and swerved with a convulsive movement, while a dull and horrid sound of distress arose. The battle was lost, and with it all hope of return by the road of Bayonne. The Satrap’s treasure and the Satrap’s baggage were forsaken, and the Satrap himself only escaped by jumping out of one door of his carriage as the English soldiers reached the other. Napoleon prudently suppressed the news of his defeat, and for the English only one incident marred a glorious victory. Wellington’s army of rascals no sooner won the battle than they stamped discipline underfoot. The soldiers looted a million in money, but no infamy could disturb the result; the French were driven out of Spain, and Napoleon’s power had received such a shock as it never recovered. From Vittoria Mr. Crane takes us to Plevna, the defeat which will ever remain the triumph of Osman Pasha. “An impetuous attack may be expected from the Turks,” said Moltke, quoted by Mr. Crane, “but not an obstinate and lasting defence.” And then Osman marched into Plevna, and proved that not even Moltke was infallible. He proved also that the stubborn Turk could use a spade as well as a sword, and though Osman

255

surrendered after the hardest siege of modern times, he had effectually barred the way to Constantinople, and he will always remain, in the words of Skobeleff, his valiant opponent, “Osman the Victorious.” Of Gustavus Adolphus Mr. Crane gives us a spirited account; he pictures that hero at Leipsig, and he paints his triumphant death on the field of Lutzen. The best of the other battles is, perhaps, Solferino, the solitary day of personal grandeur vouchsafed to Napoleon III, a grandeur besmirched on the morrow by the vanity which permitted the parvenu to insult his allies and to make terms with the vanquished. Indeed, wherever we turn there are pages of quick narrative and picturesque writing. Yet the book adds no laurel to the wreath of Stephen Crane. He will still be remembered as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who learned all there was to know of the impulses which move men on a battlefield from playing football. And his book

suggests the literary paradox that one of the writers who has expressed warfare in the clearest terms of literature merely dimmed his talent by the actual sight of a battle and by the study of military history.

Checklist of Additional Reviews “‘Great Battles of the World,’ by Stephen Crane.” Daily Inter Ocean. November 19, 1900, p. 9. “New Books.” Interior 31 (December 6, 1900), p. 1528. “Literature: Notes on New Books.” Illustrated London News 119 (July 13, 1901), p. 62. “Mr. Stephen Crane’s Last Book.” Literature 9 (July 20, 1901), p. 65.

256

LAST WORDS London: Digby, Long & Co. 1902

“New Novels.” Manchester Guardian, April 2, 1902, p. 3 The unusual interest that attaches to the posthumous book of a writer who died while his powers were still unfulfilled is keenly roused by Mr. Stephen Crane’s LAST WORDS. Although it would be unfair to criticise this heterogeneous collection of tales and sketches as though it were a finished performance put forward by the author himself, yet we may take it, in its very variety and unevenness, as affording clues to a singular and distinctive temperament. Here we find studies of London, New York, and Ireland; war stories of two centuries, besides sketches and tales, some humorous and some tragic. One quality, the quality of nervous force, runs through all these. The style, quick and pointed, is the same throughout. But the level of excellence reached is astonishingly different. While the humorous sketches all fall flat and the fanciful and imaginative sketches are failures, we find the impressionist studies of great cities and all the war stories and sketches most effective after their kind. It is by comparing his failure with his success that we gain an insight into Mr. Stephen Crane’s peculiar faculty. It is an absolutely modern one, the fruit of life in great cities—that of working on the nerve. The tumult of his nerves makes itself felt in describing the ordinary affairs of life, even in comedy, and the result is often jarring and unpleasant. Movements of excitement rouse them to fury. In a game of poker, says he, “the nerves may stand on end and scream to each other.” But in the supreme excitement of war his nerves rouse him to passion; while they still continue to record

startlingly vivid pictures of external events thought and eloquence are born to him; then it is that he takes his readers captive, discovering to them in those rare moments a heart and soul. The faults and brilliancies of style throughout the book are those to which we are already accustomed in Mr. Stephen Crane’s work. A true impressionist of the pen, so long as the striking effect is there he is careless as to how he comes by it. Against the serious misuse of one word we must needs enter a protest. In these sketches, if a snake crosses a path it is “in some mystic travel;” a lieutenant looks mystically over a breastwork; an omnibus is a monster on some mystic search; even the fire blazes up “according to some mystic process;” and so on ad nauseam. By such slang use a valuable word runs the risk of being lost to our intelligence. Strange that the fine offshoot of a Greek root which signifies the closing of the mouth and eyes should be so abused by the rattles of literature, who seldom do either.

“Novels.” Spectator 88 (April 12, 1902), p. 558 This collection of stories and sketches, which presumably represents the last gleanings from the work of an author who died a couple of years ago, has been made without much regard for the fame of the writer, and with no indication whatever as to whether the contents are genuinely posthumous or have already appeared in print. The nature of the book might have seemed to call for a memoir, or at least a preface, but neither is forthcoming.— It seems to be the fashion nowadays only to prefix memoirs to the works of living authors.—But making all reservations for

259

these deficiencies in selection and editing, Last Words contains enough that is characteristic and representative of Stephen Crane to interest that section of the reading public to which his peculiar genius appeals. We cannot believe it to be a large section, either here or in America. He was perhaps too crudely American to be fully appreciated in America, while his angularity, his choice of subject, and above all, his unconventional methods of expression, repelled and affronted the average English reader. For example, the average man will only be disconcerted by encountering in the middle of a story of essentially comic complexion such a sentence as the following:—“The sea became uneasy and heaved painfully, like a lost bosom, when little forgotten heart-bells try to chime with a pure sound. The voyagers cringed at magnified foam on distant wave crests. A moon came and looked at them.” This is from an account, mainly ludicrous, of the drifting out to sea of two bathers on a raft. One cannot imagine the author of Three Men in a Boat indulging in the “pathetic fallacy.” And that prompts us to note a remarkable fact about Mr. Crane; though practically a semi-literate author, singularly unencumbered with culture, guilty of constant inaccuracies of grammar, construction, and even spelling, his works are a regular mine of all the figures and tricks of speech which grammarians delight to classify and illustrate. In a word, the happy daring of ignorance prompted him to express himself in an original and highly picturesque manner. He was not crushed with reminiscence or reading, or depressed by the fear of plagiarising those qui nostra ante nos dizerunt, and so it came about that when he had anything to say he said it in his own way. With the necessary alterations his appreciation of Irish wit may be applied to his own style: “For amid his wrongs and his rights and his failures—his colos-

sal failures—the Irishman retains this delicate blade for his enemies, for his friends, for himself, the ancestral dagger of fast sharp speaking from fast sharp seeing—an inheritance which could move the world.” “Fast sharp speaking from fast sharp seeing,” that seems to us to express admirably the peculiar equipment of Stephen Crane. He had the power of vision to the extent of clairvoyance,—for his earlier war pictures were based on no personal experience in the fighting line, and to this gift of vision he added the further gift of a terse and vivid style. He never wrote a long sentence in his life, but he could compress a flood of colour into two lines,—e.g., when speaking of the saturnine dignity of fishermen he says: “Those who go with nets upon the reeling sea grow still with the mystery and solemnity of the trade.” Then Mr. Crane also had a thorough appreciation of the sovereign fact that style often depends quite as much on the ability to dispense with adjectives as on that of their appropriate employment. He can at times adopt a truly eloquent baldness. When the belated bathers are conversing by night in the cabin of their rescuer’s schooner, he describes how they were interrupted “by a pair of legs that appeared among the stars. The captain came down the ladder. He brought a coffee pot from the sky.” Again, he was never at a loss for illuminative images. His impecunious New York artists smoke tobacco of which he says that it “smelled like burning mummies.” The captain of the schooner had a “bronze face and solitary whiskers,” and Mr. Crane’s windows in a London hotel “overlooked simply a great sea of night in which were swimming little gas fishes.” The pages of this volume which will probably appeal most to English readers are those which record Mr. Crane’s London impressions. It has been said by a great modern painter of Goya that he painted human beings as though he saw

260

them for the first time, and one is sometimes reminded of this suggestive estimate of the Spanish painter’s method by the originality and freshness of Mr. Crane’s point of view. Like the Oriental Prince who visited us some years back, he was chiefly struck by the drilling of the vehicles by the policemen. For the rest he was impressed by horses who could skate, and by the “unbridled strategy” of the British advertiser. As he puts it— I went by train to see a friend in the country, and after passing through a patent mucilage, some hams, a South African Investment Company, a Parisian millinery firm, and a comic journal, I alighted at a new and original kind of corset. On my return journey the road almost continuously ran through soap. These impressions—which we commend to the attention of Mr. Richardson Evans and his excellent Society for combating the excesses of advertisement— hardly come within the province of a critic of fiction, and the same remark applies to the rather disappointing Irish Notes and sundry specimens of descriptive journalism, in which Mr. Crane is not seen at his best. The episodes in the life of sundry struggling artists in New York are vividly done, and the fancifully named

“Spitzbergen Tales”—presumably based on the author’s experience as a war correspondent in Cuba—have something of the poignancy of Mr. Crane’s earlier studies in the psychology of the fighting line. That Mr. Crane had it in him to write a historical romance is we think, sufficiently shown by the fragment of imaginary autobiography dealing with the War of Independence. Lastly, we may note a highly humorous narrative of the efforts of a little American counter-jumper, amid the frequent interruptions of his customers, to read a highly sensational French novel, and his indignation at the disappointing d´enouement. Tested by the standard of achievement attained in The Red Badge of Courage and The Open Boat, this miscellaneous collection is decidedly disappointing. But there are at least half-a-dozen things in it which emphasise the regret inspired by the premature removal of this richly endowed, if undisciplined, genius.

Checklist of Additional Reviews Bookseller (April 6, 1902), p. 309. “Novels.” Guardian (July 23, 1902), p. 1070.

261

THE O’RUDDY New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company 1903

“King of the Irelands.” New York Times, November 21, 1903, p. BR8 A romance galloping splendidly on its headlong way, and looking back now and again to smile gayly and wink at the reader and to jeer at itself, that’s “The O’Ruddy.” As a story it begins well and ends well. As a rhodomontade it goes with a whoop and a shower of sparks from the hoofs of speeding horses, high words and jests of the riders flung behind. As a sly satire upon other rhodomontades it is magnificent. You can, if you choose, however, forget the satire utterly in the pounding of horses, the clash of swords, and the resounding hubbub caused by the O’Ruddy “figuring the use of boots” by “kicking a blackguard into the inn yard adjacent,” or be swept along by the whirlwind raised by the same O’Ruddy revolving eagerly about a table in the inn while the Countess of Westport with equal eagerness revolves after him. And you can also, if you are so minded, forget the world and the “commercialism of the age” while you watch the Irish hero run the first swordsman in England harmlessly through the body, or, backed up against a friendly wall, contrive so to pink in the knuckles nine hired ruffians that their nine swords fall clattering all at once to the pavement in a shower of clanging steel, while nine bleeding right fists fly to the nine mouths of the owners. Moreover, you can warm over an old heart or fire a young one by attending to the “King of the Irelands” as he makes love. And if you have a mind for jest and laughter, inventions in injurious epithet, and other daring felicities of language, hot from the grid of a sizzling fancy, for

solemn absurdities, for weird tangles of inconsequences in the best Irish idiom of disorder—why, all these things are here. To tell the truth—and if you think we are letting our enthusiasm run away with us, remember that we are not supposing we are in the masterpiece class, only the company of jolly good stories—to tell the truth, there is hardly a dull page in the book, whole dozens that sweep you along breathless, and many where, if you are a natural man, you must stop and emit shrill notes of glee. Ha! Ha! A slashing narrative—for hero, the flower of Irishmen; for hero’s valet, a highwayman in the way of being reformed; for heroine, an Earl’s daughter, “not extremely plump, but when she walked something moved within her skirts.” And this dear lady with a mother, a tremendous old harridan, and her father advanced in years and malice. Then plenty of broken heads and slit skins, but never a man killed—mad calls for the doctor, but none for the undertaker. The late Mr. Crane and the present Mr. Barr between them have made what seems to us the gallantest story of its kind that has seen the light this long time. For wit, for dash, for many brave inventions of phrase and incident, and not the least, for steering clear of everything that could mar the happy effect of the whole. The story begins wisely, runs its race inspiringly, and ends delightfully. And it leaves no man a chance to laugh at it. Always it laughs first.

“Books of the Week.” Indianapolis Journal, January 4, 1904, p. 3 When Stephen Crane died he left his most delightful book unfinished. It was a wonderful story, bubbling over with humor,

265

crammed full of pithy philosophy and vivid phrases, sparkling with wit and every page alive with action. The manuscript was more than half completed when poor Crane died, and for a long time it lay in that condition. Then Robert Barr, Crane’s intimate friend and one of the best storytellers of the day, took up the work and finished it. And so “The O’Ruddy” is now at last given to the public. To say that the O’Ruddy is the most delightful Irishman since Barry Lyndon would not be overstating the case. And he appeals to the reader more strongly than ever Thackeray’s rollicking gamester could, for he is not a rascal, but a genuine, whole-souled fellow, whose system of ethics may be primitive, but who is ever a gentleman even while he is a roisterer. Fresh and green from an Irish village, this scion of an ancient house lands in England, and kicks the greatest swordsman in the realm downstairs ere he has been an hour ashore. Him he worsts in a duel the next morning, and then starts on a series of incredible adventures in which a highwayman plays a prominent part. He falls heels over head in love with a noble lady, whose curmudgeon of a father and virago of a mother are his bitter enemies. And so throughout the book he blarneys and ruffles and bullies his way to fortune and fame as none but an Irishman could. Barr has hardly been as successful in finishing this book as was Quiller-Couch with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “St. Ives.” The story does not lose interest, as far as strenuous adventure goes, one of the most startling of the O’Ruddy’s bold acts occurring at the end of the book. But the sparkling humor and flashing wit are missing; the earlier half of the book is much more entertaining reading. “The O’Ruddy” is a new proof of a well-known fact—that Crane was just beginning to do his best work when death put an end to all his plans. It cannot fail to add new laurels to the name of one

who seemed destined to become America’s greatest writer of fiction.

“Fiction.” Times Literary Supplement (July 29, 1904), p. 237 A certain brilliance of intuitive realism was wont to show itself in the best work of the late Mr. Stephen Crane, who, as is well known, wrote “The Red Badge of Courage” without ever having seen a battle. Mr. Robert Barr’s historical romances, again, are conspicuous for the verisimilitudes about which the breezes of his fancy play. Anticipation is therefore alert when these writers combine, as in The O’Ruddy, to imagine a gay young Irishman embarking for mid-eighteenth century England with papers relating to a somewhat vague inheritance in his mails, the last word consistently up his sleeve, and a rapier ever ready to flicker from his side. The result is a capital bit of fictitious autobiography, though perhaps “verisimilitude” and “realism” are words too high and serious for it. Under these joint auspices The O’Ruddy invades the land of the haughty Saxon; and stimulated, as it were, by two brains the thread of his adventures passes through a network of commentary pleasantly bracing and ironic. Opening with a duel in which he cannot help fancying that the sturdy colonel opposed to him is his mother, his deadly point crunches, a day or two later, against the shoulder-blade of the first swordsman in England, whom, by the way, he has kicked in the interval “with enthusiasm and success.” He enters London at the head of a retinue consisting of a reformed highwayman and a flameheaded son of Erin. He abashes the wits of

266

the coffeehouses. Nay, more, he confronts and opposes, woos and wins, members of the proudest aristocracy in the world. He is, at will, anachronistic, independent, bland, boisterous, epigrammatic; and the authors seem to enjoy his career throughout, while each, if we may hazard a guess, occasionally indulges in a laugh at his collaborator’s share in him. For instance:— What was the matter with me? Had I grown in stature or developed a ferocious ugliness? No; I now was a famous swordsman. That was all. I now was expected to grab the maids and kiss them wantonly. I now was expected to clout the grooms on their ears if they so much as showed themselves in my sight. [Thus far, at a guess, Mr. Stephen Crane.] In fact [summarizes Mr. Robert Barr] I was now a great blustering, overpowering, preposterous ass! Or again:— I turned and left his chamber. Some few gentlemen yet remained in the drawingroom as I passed out into the public part of the inn. I went quietly to a chamber and sat down to think. [Thus Mr. Robert Barr.] I was for ever [comments Mr. Stephen Crane] going to chambers and sitting down to think after these talks with the Earl, during which he was for ever rearing up in his chair and then falling back among the cushions.

Edward Garnett. “Two Americans.” Speaker 30 (August 4, 1904), pp. 436–437 Of the two novels before us we may say that Stephen Crane’s posthumous work is

the missfire of a man of genius, and that Mr. Winston Churchill’s The Crossing is a most industrious performance on the dead level of mediocrity . . . In The O’Ruddy, on the other hand, we have the curious spectacle of the fire of a true genius trying vainly to prevail over a heap of incombustible material and darting out here and there flickering flame tongues—in a few unforgettable scenes. Some years ago the present writer, in a paper on Stephen Crane’s art, chanced to remark, “If he fails in anything he undertakes it will be through abandoning the style he has invented.” Unhappily for American literature, Stephen Crane is dead, and this posthumous novel comes to us as a careless experiment he made with a scene and period of English life of which he knew practically nothing. The O’Ruddy narrates the adventures of a young fighting Irish gentleman amid fashionable eighteenth-century English society taking the waters at Bath. Now, for Crane to write of the old-world aristocracy was to waste his peculiar power. The first and last impression that the novel conveys is that there is a fundamental disharmony between the author and his subject. There is no illusion in the social atmosphere shown: the plot is a crude collocation of lucky happenings; the minor characters, as Jem and Bottles the highwayman, are, so to say, careless shots at a disappearing target; but none the less it is curious to see how the intensity of Crane’s vision in the best passages almost forces us to accept his conception. In Chapter XVIII, for example, which describes the O’Ruddy’s meeting with the immortal Fancher, a gay ferocity of mood leaps out, and the whole scene has a biting force and sharp movement, seeming to swarm with figures as with lively dancing shadows cast sharply on a wall. Throughout the scenes generally we have a sense as though a cowboy of genius had accidentally strayed into

267

one of Sheridan’s comedies, and the iridescent flashes of democratic phraseology of which Crane showed so unique a mastery help to change the eighteenth-century characters into a society of disconcerted ghosts. The O’Ruddy, in short, is a failure artistically, but yet it holds for us its own special revelation of primitive human emotion. A gay delight in revealing the fantastic irregular rhythms of human appetite and passion, underlying all human motives, Stephen Crane’s work always gave us that, and by that it will always hold its own high place. What American literature has gained by his appearance and what has been lost to it by his death is apparent indeed when we turn to the unnatural and carefully-staged picturesqueness of works such as Mr. Winston Churchill’s. Crane’s best work is always a strange, subtle, and deep revelation of the odd workings of the passions within us, but works of the calibre of The Crossing really add to our knowledge of human nature as much as can a horse grazing in a field. In The Crossing everything conceivable happens: battle, murder, and sudden death, elopements and ambuscades, surrenders of garrisons, the march of armies, love’s raptures and achievements, &c., but all these panoramic effects, speaking literally, reveal to us less about human nature than does a single sketch of Crane’s “An Ominous Baby” (The Open Boat, 1898), which describes how a small child drags a piece of rope about the sidewalk and robs another baby of its toy! It is mysterious, it is disconcerting that this should be so, but so it is. We do not expect the great American public, that solaces itself with the loves of impossible vicomtesses for conventional American patriots, to believe us, but we are prepared to bear that burden calmly. Crane in his somewhat narrow range was a psychologist of genius. In what lay his originality? It is extremely

hazardous to try and trace the subterranean roots of genius, but we may hazard the remark that Crane’s artistic vision sprang from his strange capacity of criticising and analysing the tumultuous rush of the elemental human passions in the very flash of his feeling them. He had an extraordinary gift of feeling actively and imaginatively the blindly animal impulses of the human will, of watching them artistically, and of viewing them in ironical perspective against the environing forces of life with which they clashed. In George’s Mother, for example (pp. 90– 99), there is an extraordinarily fine analysis of a drunken man’s thoughts and feelings, of the whole psychology of getting drunk and being drunk. Stupid people and idealistic moralists may object to the subject being treated, not seeing that Crane’s sympathetic analysis goes deeper and further in summing up pro and contra all that can be said as to the progressive mental stages of drunkenness than all the arguments of all the moralists put together. Crane’s analysis goes further and deeper, because, as a true artist, his picture explains and makes clear the infinitely subtle processes by which human nature persuades itself gently and almost insensibly till the final abysm of moral oblivion is reached. Similarly, in the picture of George’s mother herself, all the mysterious craving of maternal love, its fierce pleasure in self-sacrifice, its self-regarding heroism, and self-denial based on its egoistic interests, is presented with an unerring truthfulness that leaves nothing further to be said. Where Crane, as an artist, beats all his youthful American contemporaries out of the field—and to mention the names of his popular contemporaries, such as Harold Frederic, Paul Leicester Ford, James Lane Allen, Richard Harding Davis, Hamlin Garland, &c., is to show that none of the younger school can enter the lists with him—lies in his

268

lightning-like revelation of these blind animal forces of human nature which impel mankind into all those delicious incongruities, those unseemly and funny exhibitions of self, those attractive, whimsical, repulsive actions and feelings that we sum up under the convenient headings of human appetite, character, temper, &c. To Crane’s intuitive understanding of, and intense delight in, all such manifestations, as we have said, was superadded the finest and most discriminating sense of their meaning, of their value, of their curious interplay in the whole cunning fabric of human life. And in dozens of his stories and sketches, such as “The Duel that Was Not Fought,” “The Monster,” “The Men in the Storm,” “An Ominous Baby,” the primal guiding instincts of human nature are laid bare with a directness of insight that amounts to a special revelation. No other artist—certainly no modern artist— has so led us to concentrate our gaze on the disconcertingly abrupt changes of our human egoism. How admirably in “An Ominous Baby,” for example, do we feel the subtle changes in the mind of the baby who is dragging a piece of rope and gazing at the pretty child playing with the gorgeous toy fire-engine? Humble admiration passes into envy, and envy into a passionate covetousness. The analysis of the baby’s subsequent conduct is a masterpiece of psychological insight, and, we repeat, teaches us far more than all the six hundred pages of The Crossing can teach. But if this is so, why is the most brilliant of all the young American writers— the only genius among them, in fact— thought the least of, while Mr. Winston Churchill’s mediocre works are rapturously hailed? The answer is appallingly

simple. The average man wants to be told that his own sentiments do him credit, that his immediate ideals are glorious, that his self-congratulatory virtues will reap for him subsantial reward in the opinion of his fellows and flattering benefit hereafter; he wants to be soothed, comforted, upheld in his own estimation, and propelled gently upon a profitable path of virtue. He does not, in short, wish to know from art what human nature is, and he wishes, above all, to forget that the dough of his finest actions is always leavened with pride or vanity. Is it any wonder, therefore, that the artist whose vision goes so unerringly to the roots of our being, to the fundamental passions, who creates such subtle and diverting patterns out of what the moralists tell us are our reprehensible human qualities, is it any wonder that such an artist as Stephen Crane should carry little weight with Mr. Winston Churchill’s six million readers?

Checklist of Additional Reviews “Fiction.” New York Tribune Illustrated Supplement, November 22, 1903, p. 12. “New Novels.” Manchester Guardian, July 27, 1904, p. 6. “Fiction.” Academy 67 (August 6, 1904), p. 99. “New Novels.” Athenaeum (August 13, 1904), p. 200. “With the Sword.” T. P.’s Weekly 4 (September 2, 1904), p. 297.

269

Index Abbott, Jacob, 76 Rollo, 76 Rollo Learning to Read, 76 Academy, xxiv, 147, 184, 240, 248, 254 Adolphus, Gustavus, 253, 254, 256 Aesop, 13 Africanus, Scipio, 106 Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women, 230 Alfieri, Vittorio, 84 Alfred A. Knopf (publisher), xi Allen, James Lane, 128, 130, 167, 268 Summer in Arcady, 157 American Ecclesiastical Review, xxi Arena, 4 Argonaut, 110 Aristotle, 124 Army and Navy Gazette, 254 Arnold, Matthew, 197 Athenaeum, xxv, 60, 149, 210, 249 Atlantic Monthly, 19 Atherton, Gertrude, 159 Patience Sparhawk, 159 Austen, Jane, 95 Autolycus, 14 Bachelor of Arts, 50, 116, 145 Baden-Powell, Robert, 128 Baltimore Sun, 151 Balzac, Honor´e de, xvi, 27, 48, 56, 112 Les Chouans, 48 Bangs, John Kendrick, ix Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 230 Barnum, P. T., 61 Barr, Robert, xii, xxiv, 265, 266, 267 Barrie, James M., xxii Barry, John D., xxi, 3, 7, 96, 201 Batchelor Syndicate, xx Bates, H. E., xi, xx Baudelaire, Charles, 178 Petits Po`emes en Prose, 178

Beardsley, Aubrey, xviii, 11, 15, 195, 198, 202, 203, 204 Beer, Thomas, x, xi, xx Bennett, Arnold, xx Bierce, Ambrose, 23, 27, 34, 36, 60, 61, 64 “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” 61 “Chickamauga,” 61 Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 60 Blackwoods Magazine, 52, 53, 59 “The Blue Blazed Path of the Scarlet Woman,” 113 Bok, Edward W., 73 Bonaparte, Joseph, 255 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 30, 41, 106, 255 Book Buyer, 139, 171, 198, 218 Bookman, xviii, 11, 80, 153 Bookseller, 120 Boston Beacon, 35, 58 Boston Budget, 107 Boston Commonwealth, 14 Boston Courier, 58 Boston Daily Advertiser, 13, 58, 227 Boston Evening Transcript, xx, 35, 58, 155, 202, 217 Boston Home Journal, 35 Boyd, Ernest, xi Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, 94 Bradley, Will H., xviii, 195, 197, 198–200, 202, 203 Bright, Edward, 109 Brooke, Emma, 171 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, xxii, 58, 72, 107, 145, 225, 253 Brooks, Sydney, 59 Brown, Alice, 130 Meadow-Grass, 130 Browning, Robert, 14, 17, 42 “England in Italy,” 17 “Martin Relf,” 42 The Ring and the Book, 42 Brunton, Lauder, 62 Buffon, Comte de (Georges Louis Leclerc), 75 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 7

271

Cable, George Washington, 130 Cadogan, William, 255 Cady, Edwin H., xiii Cahan, Abraham, 87, 113, 116 Yekl, a Tale of the New York Ghetto, 87, 113, 116 Carlyle, Thomas, 65, 217 Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland, 90, 230 Cather, Willa (“Siebert”), 200 Catholic World, 236 Century Magazine, xv The Century’s Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, xv, 50 Cervantes, Miguel de, 56, 84 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 182 “Chelifer” (see Rupert Hughes) “Chevy Chase,” 183 Chicago Daily Tribune, 104, 150, 170, 208 Chicago Daily News, 111 Chicago Evening Post, xix, 30, 35, 58, 105, 189, 208, 215, 243 Churchill, Winston, 267, 268, 269 The Crossing, 267, 268, 269 Churchman, xx, xxi, 215 Clapp, Henry Austin, 227 Clark, Frederick T., 130 The Mistress of the Ranch, 130 Cleveland Plain-Dealer, 35, 58 Cleveland World, 58 Cobbett, William, 182 Cody, Sherwin (In the Heart of the Hills), 94–95 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 146 Condillac, Etienne Bonnet de, 75 Conrad, Joseph, x–xi, xvii–xviii, 66 The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 66 Cooper, James Fenimore, 136 Copeland and Day, xiv, 12, 13, 14 Corelli, Marie, 171 Cosgrave, John O’Hara, 26 Courtney, William Leonard, 166 Crane, Cora, ix, xx, xxiv Crane, Jonathan Townley (father), 3 Crane, Jonathan Townley (brother), xii Crane, Stephen agnosticism, 12–13 controversy, ix, xiv–xv, xvii–xviii death, ix–x, xii decadence, 12, 13, 14, 15, 26, 52, 155, 199 dialect, xiii, 3, 4, 32, 34, 38, 55, 73, 78, 87, 115, 122 environment, xvi, 3, 5, 8, 106 heroism, xi–xii impressionism, xvii–xviii, 166–167, 173, 186, 232, 259 local color, 55–56

realism, xiii, xv–xvi, 5, 6, 11, 20, 32, 34, 35, 37, 55, 56, 80–81, 84–85, 88, 103–104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111–113, 116, 117, 125, 127, 130, 139, 166–167, 203, 218, 231, 234–235, 266 symbolism, 12 Stephen Crane’s works Active Service, xviii–xix, 205–212, 231 “At Clancy’s Wake,” 26 “A Detail,” xvii, 176, 178 “An Eloquence of Grief,” xvii “An Experiment in Luxury,” 6 “An Experiment in Misery,” xvii, 6 “A Gray Sleeve,” 140 “A Great Mistake,” xvii “A Man and Some Others,” xvii, 177, 179, 180–181 “A Mystery of Heroism,” 135 “An Illusion in Red and White,” xix, 235, 248, 249 “An Ominous Baby,” xvii, 268, 269 Bowery Tales, xii, xx, 219–222 “Death and the Child,” xvii, 173, 176, 178, 179, 180, 248 “Flanagan and his Short Filibustering Adventure,” xvii, 165, 166, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181, 184 George’s Mother, xii, xv, xvi, xx, 69–98, 106, 109, 111, 114, 119, 121, 126, 127, 131, 135, 137, 146, 158, 185, 221, 231, 268 Great Battles of the World, xii, xxiii–xxiv, 251–256 “His New Mittens,” xix, xx, 215, 218, 235, 247, 248 “Irish Notes,” 261 Last Words, xii, xxiv, 257–261 “lines” (poems), xiv, 7, 23, 111 “Lynx Hunting,” 235 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York) (1893), xiii, 1–8, 11, 15, 32, 51, 80–81, 85, 91, 97, 101, 102 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1896) (or Maggie: A Child of the Streets), xii, xv, xvi, xx, xxi, xxv, 79, 81, 82–83, 86, 99–132, 135, 141, 145, 146, 149, 150, 151, 153, 158, 163, 165, 166, 221, 231, 235, 248 “Making an Orator,” 228 “Manacled,” xix, 248, 249 “The marines signaling under fire at Guantanamo,” 240 “The Men in the Storm,” xvii, 178, 269 “Midnight Sketches,” xvii, 176 “Minor Conflicts,” xvii “The Monster,” xix, xx, 215, 216–218, 235, 247–248, 249, 269

272

“Moonlight on the Snow,” xix “One Dash—Horses,” xvii, 166, 176, 179 Pictures of War, 187–191 “Shame,” 235 “Spitzbergen Tales,” 261 “The Angel-Child,” 235 “The Auction,” xvii, 165 The Black Riders and Other Lines, 9–20, 37, 52, 73, 89–90, 91–92, 111, 118, 119, 164, 200, 201, 202 “A man went before a strange God,” 17 “Behold the grave of a wicked man,” 17 “Blustering God, stamping across the sky,” 13 “I looked here,” 92 “I saw a man pursuing the horizon,” 11, 14, 16, 73 “I stood musing in a black world,” 13 “I was in the darkness,” 19 “If I should cast off this tattered coat,” 12, 15 “In a lonely place,” 17 “In the desert,” 18, 19–20, 51 “‘It was wrong to do this,’ said the angel,” 12 “Love walked alone,” 13 “Many red devils ran from my heart,” 12, 15 “On the horizon the peaks assembled,” 17 “Once there was a man,” 20 “Should the wide world roll away,” 12, 16, 18, 92 “There was a man who lived a life of fire,” 15 “There was, before me,” 18–19 “‘Think as I think,’ said a man,” 13 “Tradition, thou art for suckling children,” 13 “Two or three angels,” 11, 51 “The Blue Hotel,” xix, xx, 215, 218, 235, 248, 249 “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” xvii, 165, 175, 177–178, 179, 181, 183, 185 “The Clan of No-name,” 240, 242–243, 244 “The Duel that was not Fought,” xvii, 269 “The Five White Mice,” xvii, 165, 176, 180 The Little Regiment, xvi, 129, 133–142, 145, 149, 151, 231 The Little Regiment,” 189 The Monster and Other Stories (1899), xviii, xix–xx, 213–218, 235 The Monster and Other Stories (1901), 235, 245–249

273

“The Open Boat,” xvii, xviii, 163, 164–165, 166, 167, 168–169, 170–171, 172–175, 176–177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183–184, 215, 233–234, 248, 261 The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure, xvii, xix, 161–186, 268 “The Pace of Youth,” xvii “The Price of the Harness,” 243 The Red Badge of Courage (newspaper version 1894–95), xiii–xiv, 23 The Red Badge of Courage, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, xxi, xxii, xxv, 15, 21–67, 71, 72, 74, 76, 81, 84, 85–86, 88–89, 90, 91, 92–93, 94, 96, 97, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108–109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167–168, 173, 175, 177, 178, 180, 183, 185–186, 189, 191, 197, 202, 203, 207, 208, 221, 225, 231, 232, 235, 236, 239, 240, 242, 243, 248, 253, 254, 255, 256, 261, 266 The O’Ruddy, xii, xxiv–xxv, 244, 263–269 “The Second Generation,” xxiii, 241, 243 “The Sergeant’s Private Madhouse,” 243 The Third Violet, xvi, xvii, xix, 129, 143–159, 167, 171, 210, 231 “The Trial, Execution and Burial of Homer Phelps,” 228 “The Veteran,” 137, 140 “The Wise Men,” xvii, 165, 176, 179, 183 “Three Miraculous Soldiers,” 139 “Twelve O’clock,” xix, 248 “Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle,” xii War is Kind, xviii, 193–204 “A man said to the universe,” 199 “A slant of sun on dull brown walls,” 196 “Ah, God, the way your little finger moved,” 199, 200 “Aye, workman, make me a dream,” 198 “Fool, not to know that thy little shoe” [from “Love forgive me if I wish you grief”], 195 “God give me medals” [from “Love forgive me if I wish you grief”], 196 “‘Have you ever made a just man?,’” 201 “I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night,” 198 “I have heard the sunset song of the birches,” 197 “In the night,” 201 “‘My good friend,’ said a learned bystander” [from “Forth went the candid man”], 196, 200

Crane, Stephen (cont.) “Now let me crunch you” [from “Love forgive me if I wish you grief”], 196, 200 “On the desert a silence,” 197, 198 “The chatter of a death-demon from a tree-top,” 89, 200, 204 “The flower I gave thee once” [from “Love forgive me if I wish you grief”], 196 “The impact of a dollar upon the heart,” 201 “The trees in the garden,” 198 “Thou art my love,” 195, 199, 200, 204 “War is kind,” 196, 198, 199, 200, 204 “Woe is Me” [from “Intrigue”], 199 “‘You are too candid,’ cried the candid man,” 201 “War Memories,” xxiii, 239, 243, 244 Whilomville Stories, xii, xx, xxi–xxii, 223–236, 248 Wounds in the Rain, xii, xx, xxii–xxiii, 231, 234, 237–244 Crane, William H., 3 Criterion, xvii, 163, 198 Critic, xvii, 37, 58, 78, 156 Crockett, Samuel Raymond, 111–112 Cleg Kelley, 111 D. Appleton and Company, xiv, xv, xvi, xxv, 15, 57, 85, 105, 111, 135, 136 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 185 “La Joconda,” 185 Daily Inter Ocean, 13, 26 Daily Tatler, 96, 136 Daily Telegraph, 166 Dallas Morning News, 239 Daniel, 92 Daudet, Alphonse, 116, 207 Davis, Richard Harding, xi, 4, 110, 130, 167, 172, 179, 268 Gallegher, 130 Van Bibber, 4 De Quincey, Thomas, 74, 75, 76 Defoe, Daniel, 182 Denyes, Thomas, 40 Detroit Free Press, 35 Dial, 52, 57, 59 Dickens, Charles, 95, 96, 176, 182, 230 Wreck of the Golden Mary, 176 characters Little Nell, 230 Paul Dombey, 230 Sary Gamp, 209 Tiny Tim, 230 Weller, 195

Dickerman, Nathan, 230 Dickinson, Emily, 16, 17, 19, 202 Digby, Long and Company, xxiv Doubleday & McClure, xvii Douglas, George, 131 The House with the Green Shutters, 131 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 65 Micah Clarke, 65 Dreiser, Theodore (“Edward Al”), 57 Du Maurier, George, xvi, xvii Trilby, xvi, xvii, 155 (character) Trilby, 150, 152, 153 Duclos, Charles Pinot, 75 Dunn, Robert Steed, 97 Dus´e, Eleonora, 185 Edinburgh Review, 128 Edward Arnold (publisher), xv, 74, 106 Edwards, Elisha J. (“Holland”), 6, 23, 24 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 64, 73 Erckmann-Chatrain, 30, 46, 217 Conscript, 30 Euripides, 91 Medea, 91 Evans, Richardson, 261 Ev’ry Month, 57 Faulkner, William, xv Fawcett, Edgar, 5 Field, Eugene, 236 Fielding, Henry, 95 Fildes, Luke, 166 Applicants to a Casual Ward, 166 Fitch, George Hamlin, 176 Flaubert, Gustave, 61, 171, 232 Fleming, Marjorie, 230 Florian (Captain), 88 Ford, Isaac N., 85 Ford, Paul Leicester, 268 Fortnightly Review, 125 Frederic, Harold, xii, 47, 130, 167, 172, 229, 268 Frederick A. Stokes (publisher), xviii, xx, xxiv, 198, 239 Frederick the Great, 106, 253, 254 Frost, A. B, 197 Fuller, Henry B., 157 Garland, Hamlin, xiii, 4, 27, 50, 58, 130, 268 A Little Norsk, 130 Main Traveled Roads, 27 Garnett, Edward, x–xi, xx, 184, 267 Friday Nights, x Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth, 95 Gilbert, William S., 88 Gilder, Jeannette L., xviii, 135 Gissing, George, 94, 95

274

Gladstone, William E., x A Glance at New York (by Benjamin A. Baker), 84 Glasgow Evening News, 163 Godey’s Magazine, 8, 89, 158 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, x, 66 Goldsmith, Oliver, 95 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, 232 Goss, Warren Lee, 50 Personal Recollections of a Private, 50 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jos´e de, 260 Grahame, Kenneth, 235 The Golden Age, 235

Hugo, Victor, 7, 27, 35, 48, 123, 164, 199 Les Mis´erables, 7, 48 (character) Fantine, 123 Hume, David, 234 Hyde, George Merriam, 171

Hardy, Thomas, 81, 86, 124, 146 Desperate Remedies, 81 Jude the Obscure, 86, 124 “The Roman Road,” 235 Harper & Brothers, xix, xx Harper’s Magazine, xi, xxi, 55 Harper’s Weekly, xiii, 18, 32 Harrigan, Edward A., 85 Harte, Bret, xx, 58, 66, 170, 183, 248 Snow-Bound at Eagle’s, xx Hartford Daily Courant, 106 Hartford Daily Times, 58, 112, 138 Harvard Monthly, 97, 230 Hawthorne, Julian, 215 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, x, 119 Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 75 Hemingway, Ernest, xv Herodotus, 45 Aristodemus, 45 Hichens, Robert S., The Green Carnation, 47 “Hickity, Pickity, My Black Hen,” 200 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 16, 64 Hitchcock, Ripley, 57 Hobson, Richmond P., 241, 244 “Holland” (see Elisha J. Edwards) Homer, 38; Iliad, 73 Hope, Anthony, 81 The Dolly Dialogues, 149 Howe, Edgar Watson, 6 A Story of a Country Town, 6 Howe, Mark Anthony DeWolfe, 19 Howells, William Dean, xiii, 5, 6, 7, 15, 18, 32, 33, 35, 58, 72, 73, 84, 87, 105, 113, 120, 126, 130, 131, 155, 157, 184 “Appreciation,” 120, 123, 124, 126 Hubbard, Elbert, xviii Hughes, Thomas, 230 Tom Brown’s Schooldays, (character) Tom Brown, 230 Hughes, Rupert (“Chelifer”), 8, 89, 158, 198

“Jack and Jill,” 200 Jackson, Thomas “Stonewall,” 35 James, Henry, 33, 66, 96, 116, 149, 157, 184 Jeffrey, Francis, 74 Jerome, Jerome K., Three Men in a Boat, 260 “Johnston Smith,” xiii, xxv Joubert, Joseph, 17 Julius Caesar, 106

Ibsen, Henrik, 15, 93 Ideas, 179 Illustrated American, 109 Illustrated London News, 172, 191 Independent, xix, 32 Indianapolis Journal, 265 Isle of Man Examiner, 191

Kansas City Journal, 58 Keats, John, 31 Endymion, 31 Kennedy, Sidney R., 123 Kerfoot, J. B., xxiii–xxiv Kingsley, Henry, 141 Kipling, Rudyard, 31, 35, 76, 104, 129, 149, 163, 169, 170, 178, 183, 185 Stalky & Co., 230 Lady’s Pictorial, 158 Landseer, Andrew, 124 Lang, Andrew, 35, 94 Lathrop, George Parsons, 136 Le Gallienne, Richard, 95 Leslie, Amy, 111 Lever, Charles, xxiv Lewis, Charles Bertrand (“M. Quad”), 24 Life, 115 Lincoln, Abraham, 53 Lippincott, J. B., xxiii Lippincott’s Magazine, xxiii Literary World, 114, 201 Literature, 173, 189, 235 Liverpool Post, 157 Logan, Annie, xxi London Times, xxii, 20, 183 Longman’s, 94 Lorraine, Claude, 218 Lotus, 117 Louisville Courier-Journal, 154 Lowell, James Russell, 19, 119 Last Poems of James Russell Lowell, 19 Lyons, Kate, xii, xxiii

275

“M. Quad” (see Charles Bertrand Lewis) Macaulay, George Babington, 74 McClurg, Alexander C. (“A. C. McC.”), xiv, 52, 59, 60 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 12, 13, 26, 74, 75, 140, 157, 180 Manchester Guardian, xxv, 38, 122, 177, 211, 221, 247, 259 Marbot, Jean-Baptiste, 40 The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot, 40 Marriott-Watson, H. B., 36 Marshall, Edward, 5 Matthews, Brander, 218 Maugham, Somerset, 130 Liza of Lambeth, 130 Maupassant, Guy de, 171, 184, 200 Melbourne Age, 157 Meredith, George, 52, 95, 96, 184, 202 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 202 M´erim´ee, Prosper, 48 Methuen & Co., xx, xxiv Milton, John, 197 Paradise Lost, 73 Minneapolis Journal, 58 Minneapolis Times, 35 Mitchell, S. Weir, 50 Moltke, Helmuth von, 255 Monet, Claude, 97 Montague, Gilbert H., 230 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 75 Moore, George, 94, 111 Morrison, Arthur, 8, 122, 124, 125, 127–128, 130, 167 A Child of the Jago, 127, 130, 167 (characters) Leary, 124 Perrott, 124 Dick Perrott, 124 Tales of Mean Streets, 122, 127 Morrow, Marco, 113 Murray, David Christie, 50 Murray, Lindley, 89 Muybridge, Eadweard, 50 Napier, Charles, 129 Napoleon III, 256 Nation, xxi, 16, 108 “Nearer My God to Thee,” ix Nelson, Horatio Lord, 64, 106 New Haven Leader, 58 New Review, 39, 48 New York Commercial Advertiser, 16, 58, 77, 87 New York Herald, xxii, 58, 71 New York Journal, 60 New York Mail and Express, 31, 58, 101, 152, 207, 242

New York Observer, 203 New York Press, 5, 6, 137 New York Recorder, 11, 12 New York Sun, 33, 106, 195 New York Times, xxiii, 27, 47, 58, 102, 172, 174, 211, 229, 265 New York Times—Saturday Review, 197 New York Tribune, ix, xvi, 14, 25, 81, 103, 139 New York Tribune Illustrated Supplement, 164, 226 New York World, xviii, 84, 135 Newell, Peter, xxi, 226, 227, 235, 236 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20 Nordau, Max, 76 Norris, Frank, 131, 132 North American Review, 131 Ollendorff, Henri, 75 Outlook, xix, xxii, 58, 175 Page, Thomas Nelson, 130 Pains Fireworks, 136 Pall Mall Gazette, 36, 121, 141 Parker, Gilbert, 7 Pascal, Blaise, 75 Pasha, Osman, 255–256 Payne, William Morton, 52 Peck, Harry Thurston, 11, 80 Penn, Jonathan, 117 “I heard a man mumbling in the horrid silence of the night,” 118 Pepys, Samuel, 182 Philadelphia American, 181 Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 71 Philadelphia North American, 215 Philadelphia Press, xiii, 5, 23, 58 Philistine, xviii, 64 Picton, Thomas, 255 Pilsbury, Caroline T., 179 Pittsburg Leader, 200 Poe, Edgar Allan, 61, 93, 96, 183, 197, 215, 217, 218, 231–232 “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” 215 “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 45 Pollard, Percival, 60 Port Jervis Union, 3, 34 Providence News, 35 Providence Sunday Journal, 146 Publishers’ Circular, xxiv Queen, the Lady’s Newspaper and Court Chronicle, 159 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 266

276

Ralph, Julian, 73, 85 Rembrandt, 55 Retreat of the Ten Thousand, 31, 35 Richardson, Samuel, (character) Lovelace, 127 Richmond, Leigh, The Young Cottager, 230 Riis, Jacob, xv Riley, James Whitcomb, 236 Rood, Henry Edward, 101 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 75 St. Louis Republic, 15 St. Paul Globe, 35, 58 St. Paul Pioneer Press, 58 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, Paul and Virginia, 157 Saltus, Edgar, 5 Sampson, William T., 239, 244 San Francisco Chronicle, 114, 176 Saroyan, William, xv Satrap, 255 Saturday Review, 49, 53, 87, 93, 123, 124, 178 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 88 Schwob, Marcel, 175 Scott, Sir Walter, 52, 56, 93 Scranton Tribune, 24 Sedgwick, Arthur George, 108 Seward, William H., 53 Shafter, William R., 244 Shakespeare, William, 52, 56, 74, 84 Hamlet, 157 (characters) Falstaff, 88, 95 Hamlet, 157 Pistol, 88 Romeo, 45 Touchstone, 76 Shaw, George Bernard, 61 Arms and the Man, 61 Shelley, Mary, 215 Frankenstein, 215 (character) Frankenstein, 215 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, x Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 268 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 200 “Siebert” (see Willa Cather) “Simple Simon,” 200 Sioux City Times, 58 Sister-Songs, 19 Sketch, xxii Skobeleff, Mikhail, 256 Smith, Ashley A., 197 Smith, F. Hopkinson, 197 Smollett, Tobias, 95 Society of Philistines, 73 Sophocles, 126 Speaker, 46, 66, 267

Spectator, xix, 62, 152, 180, 241, 247, 254, 259 Springfield Sunday Republican, 74 Starrett, Vincent, xiv Steevens, George W., 185 Sterne, Laurence, 95, 186 Stevens, Wallace, ix–x, xi Stevenson, Robert Louis, 184, 215, 235, 266 Kidnapped, 184 St. Ives, 266 The Lantern Bearers, 235 The Wrecker, 215 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 31 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, xx Uncle Tom’s Cabin, xx Sunday-School Times, 61 Sunday Special, 165 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 186, 235 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, xviii, 42, 199 Maud, 42 Thackeray, William Makepeace, xxiv, 56, 95, 146, 266 (character) Barry Lyndon, xxiv, 266 Thompson, Vance, 87 Thoreau, Henry David, 17, 51 Thrax, Dionysius, 89 Time and the Hour, 154 Times Literary Supplement, xxiv, 266 Tolstoy, Leo, 6, 7, 26, 27, 32, 36, 41, 46, 48, 56, 60, 64, 65, 85, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 175, 184, 189, 191, 244 S´ebastopol, 41, 56, 64, 92, 175 The Cossacks, 64, 65 War and Peace, 48, 64 Peace and War, 27, 175 La Guerre et la Paix, 41, 191 Tomkinson, William, 40 Diary of a Cavalry Officer, 40 Tourg´ee, Albion W., 50 Story of a Thousand, 50 Tourg´enieff, Ivan (Turgenev), 19, 56, 93, 94, 95, 96 Poems in Prose, 19 Town Topics, 92 “A bat on a church steeple,” 92 Townsend, Edward, 73, 85, 104, 108, 115 Chimmie Fadden, xiii, 108, 109, 116, 150 Traill, H. D., 125 Trollope, Anthony, 146 Truth, xii, 120 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), 170 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, xxi The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 229 (characters)

277

Twain, Mark (cont.) Huck Finn, xxi Tom Sawyer, xxi Verestchagin, Vassily, 35, 37, 60 Virgil, 152 Voltaire (Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet), 75 Vorse, Albert White, 14 Wallace, Lew, 50 Warner, Charles Dudley, 55 Wave, 26, 82 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 255 Wells, H. G., xix, 124 Westminster Gazette, 112, 169 Weyman, Stanley J., 65 Whistler, James, 124 Whitman, Walt, 7, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 92, 138, 197, 198, 200, 201–202, 231 Leaves of Grass, 13 “Poetry To-Day in America,” 200

Wilkins, Mary E., 130, 167 William Heinemann (publisher), xx, 121, 191 Williams, Ames W., xiv Womankind, 113 Wordsworth, William, 16, 31 “The Excursion,” 31 “The White Doe of Rylstone,” 16 Wyndham, George, 39, 48, 189–190, 191 Yale Courant, 123 ´ Zola, Emile, 26, 41, 44, 45, 46, 48, 60, 71, 81, 89, 92, 101, 113, 123, 191, 217 Attack on the Mill, 48 L’Assommoir, 81, 82 ˆ La D´ebacle, 41, 44, 48, 92, 191 Th´er`ese Raquin, 123 (character) Nana, 82

278