Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  “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.”

  “If war be kind,” wrote a clever reviewer, when the second volume appeared, “then Crane’s verse may be poetry, Beardsley’s black and white creations may be art, and this may be called a book”; — a smart summing up that is cherished by cataloguers to this day, in describing the volume for collectors. Beardsley needs no defenders, and it is fairly certain that the clever reviewer had not read the book, for certainly Crane had no illusions about the kindness of war. The title poem of the volume is an amazingly beautiful satire which answers all criticism.

  “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.

  “Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,

  Little souls who thirst for fight,

  These men were born to drill and die.

  The unexplained glory flies above them,

  Great is the battle-god, and his kingdom —

  A field where a thousand corpses lie.

  ******

  “Mother whose heart hung humble as a button

  On the bright splendid shroud of your son,

  Do not weep.

  War is kind.”

  Poor Stephen Crane! Like most geniuses, he had his weaknesses and his failings; like many, if not most, geniuses, he was ill. He died of tuberculosis, tragically young. But what a comrade he must have been, with his extraordinary vision, his keen, sardonic comment, his fearlessness and his failings!

  Just a glimpse of Crane’s last days is afforded by a letter written from England by Robert Barr, his friend — Robert Barr, who collaborated with Crane in “The O’ Ruddy,” a rollicking tale of old Ireland, or, rather, who completed it at Crane’s death, to satisfy his friend’s earnest request. The letter is dated from Hillhead, Woldingham, Surrey, June 8, 1900, and runs as follows: —

  “My Dear –

  “I was delighted to hear from you, and was much interested to see the article on Stephen Crane you sent me. It seems to me the harsh judgment of an unappreciative, commonplace person on a man of genius. Stephen had many qualities which lent, themselves to misapprehension, but at the core he was the finest of men, generous to a fault, with something of the old-time recklessness which used to gather in the ancient literary taverns of London. I always fancied that Edgar Allan Poe revisited the earth as Stephen Crane, trying again, succeeding again, failing again, and dying ten years sooner than he did on the other occasion of his stay on earth.

  “When your letter came I had just returned from Dover, where I stayed four days to see Crane off for the Black Forest. There was a thin thread of hope that he might recover, but to me he looked like a man already dead. When he spoke, or, rather, whispered, there was all the accustomed humor in his sayings. I said to him that I would go over to the Schwarzwald in a few weeks, when he was getting better, and that we would take some convalescent rambles together. As his wife was listening he said faintly: ‘I’ll look forward to that,’ but he smiled at me, and winked slowly, as much as to say: ‘You damned humbug, you know 111 take no more rambles in this world.’ Then, as if the train of thought suggested what was looked on before as the crisis of his illness, he murmured: ‘Robert, when you come to the hedge — that we must all go over — it isn’t bad. You feel sleepy — and — you don’t care. Just a little dreamy curiosity — which world you’re really in — that’s all.’

  “To-morrow, Saturday, the 9th, I go again to Dover to meet his body. He will rest for a little while in England, a country that was always good to him, then to America, and his journey will be ended.

  “I’ve got the unfinished manuscript of his last novel here beside me, a rollicking Irish tale, different from anything he ever wrote before. Stephen thought I was the only person who could finish it, and he was too ill for me to refuse. I don’t know what to do about the matter, for I never could work up another man’s ideas. Even your vivid imagination could hardly conjecture anything more ghastly than the dying man, lying by an open window overlooking the English channel, relating in a sepulchral whisper the comic situations of his humorous hero so that I might take up the thread of his story.

  “From the window beside which I write this I can see down in the valley Ravensbrook House, where Crane used to live and where Harold Frederic, he and I spent many a merry night together. When the Romans occupied Britain, some of their legions, parched with thirst, were wandering about these dry hills with the chance of finding water or perishing. They watched the ravens, and so came to the stream which rises under my place and flows past Stephen’s former home; hence the name, Ravensbrook.

  “It seems a strange coincidence that the greatest modern writer on war should set himself down where the greatest ancient warrior, Caesar, probably stopped to quench his thirst.

  “Stephen died at three in the morning, the same sinister hour which carried away our friend Frederic nineteen months before. At midnight, in Crane’s fourteenth-century house in Sussex, we two tried to lure back the ghost of Frederic into that house of ghosts, and to our company, thinking that if reappearing were ever possible so strenuous a man as Harold would somehow shoulder his way past the guards, but he made no sign. I wonder if the less insistent Stephen will suggest some ingenious method by which the two can pass the barrier. I can imagine Harold cursing on the other side, and welcoming the more subtle assistance of his finely fibred friend.

  “I feel like the last of the Three Musketeers, the other two gone down in their duel with Death. I am wondering if, within the next two years, I also shall get the challenge. If so, I shall go to the competing ground the more cheerfully that two such good fellows await the outcome on the other side.

  “Ever your friend,

  “Robert Barr.”

  The last of the Three Musketeers is gone, now, although he outlived his friends by some years. Robert Barr died in 1912. Perhaps they are still debating a joint return.

  There could be, perhaps, no better close for a paper on Stephen Crane than the subjoined paragraph from a letter written by him to a Rochester editor: —

  “The one thing that deeply pleases me is the fact that men of sense invariably believe me to be sincere. I know that my work does not amount to a string of dried beans — I always calmly admit it —— but I also know that I do the best that is in me without regard to praise or blame. When I was the mark for every humorist in the country, I went ahead; and now when I am the mark for only fifty per cent of the humorists of the country, I go ahead; for I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision — he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to this personal honesty is my supreme ambition.”

  Vincent Starrett.

  From: Godey’s Magazine V.CXXXIII No.795 September 1896, p. 317-319

  “The Rise of Stephen Crane”. Godey’s Magazine V.CXXXIII No.795 September 1896

  So sudden a bound into fame us 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 cloud”. 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 things happen in the literary china-shop, one is justified in likening Mr. Cr
ane 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. Hut the rocket arrives, too, and then drops back into oblivion, the profounder for its daring 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 self-criticism, and vigilance that the value of a marked individuality may not warp off into the nagging of a mere eccentricity arc 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 descent tor 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 its 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 “who” and “which” in restrictive clauses where “that” should he 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.124, 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. 104); “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. 1751

  Mr. Crane, in his remarkable aptitude for bold and striking effect, is not only led into a frequent neglect of the time-hallowed 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 ‘sputtering.’ 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 schruttering, phthuttering, bjuttering, and mnuttering. Mr. Crane is prone to repetition, too — a sort of self-encoring that always saps the reader’s former enthusiasm. It gets on one’s nerves, 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 “melee” of noise twice in five pages. Everything is “like” something or other till the little word takes on the torment of the water-drops of the Japanese torture-chamber.

  Mr. Crane is much noted for his color-scheming. 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 unsealed 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 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.):

  “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.”

  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: