Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  “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 expression. Two of the most effective are X. and XXXVII:

  “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.”

  “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!’”

  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 Debacle.” All these books forsake the traditional 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 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 tills 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.

  Chelifer.

  From: The New Republic, V. IV, No. 45, September 11, 1915, p. 148-150

  Stephen Crane. (The New Republic, V. IV, No. 45, September 11, 1915)

  Whatever is deeply thought is well written, in the view of M. Remy de Gourmont. The observation has an aerial beauty. From its outlook one instinctively casts a revisiting glance of speculation at well written places in expression one had lost awhile, to find how deeply thought they are.

  In this speculative glance, not long since, I chanced to be arrested by the memory of Stephen Crane. Endowed with a genius for direct expression, he was able in his short existence to present a surprising number of penetrating ascertainments of American life, with a high degree of clarity and power.

  One encounters occasionally a popular conception of Stephen Crane as the author of one or two slight prose tales, and a few lines of grotesque verse — a writer of fragmentary achievement, with a talent of distinct originality, but somewhat narrow. The conception has come into being, doubtless from our widespread custom of asking concerning each subsequent work of an author whether it is just like his first book, and of ignoring the subsequent work if it is not. With many authors this is the only means we have of supporting a certain, correct, traditional attitude of consistent disappointment in their efforts. The prevalence of the attitude is attested by the celebrated response of a veteran editor of Punch to a friend’s remark that Punch wasn’t as good as it used to be: “No, it never was.”

  To interested readers of Stephen Crane’s work, no impression of it could be further than the fabular repute we have mentioned from the facts of his productive career as a writer. Before his death in his thirtieth year, Stephen Crane had published eleven books. While none of these is a large book, it is true, they are for the most part of remarkable concentration and substance, and of a marked variety in subject, in kind, in tone, and in treatment — historical essays, special articles, poetry and fiction; among these publications there are perhaps forty short stories, and five very dissimilar brief novels, ranging from the sustained tragedy of “Maggie” to mockery’s lightest touch in “The Third Violet.”

  “The line of Sesshu,” says a critic of Japanese line-drawing, “vibrates with the nervous force of the artist’s hand.” With the exception of “Active Service,” a work composed, as one understands, in illness, and two or three of the Mexican tales, which are rather standardized and weakly handled, the description might characterize all these contributive pieces of fiction.

  The world of misery, the world of poverty, the very presence of exploiting meanness, of the impulse to pride oneself on using human beings and casting them aside, rises in the tale of “Maggie.” A story of the “poor among the poor,” of a warm-hearted, pleasure-loving girl, a stitcher in a collar factory, who is betrayed and deserted by a barkeeper and remains in poverty through the last despair of unsuccess in her final calling as a street-walker, the novel is all narrated in the first-hand terms of crowded life, the terms of the life of New York tenements, tenement-streets and saloons, selectively rendered, without comment, without shallow judgments, with the searching and complete humor of the desire of truth in our exploitational world, where Maggie’s exploiter is himself exploited. Much “happens” in both this book and “George’s Mother” — sins, shames, gaieties, injustices. Delicately analytical, the method of the narratives spreads no analysis upon the page. They proceed by a realization of the movement, color, sound, odor, form and contact of their scene and incident, often desperate incident, wrought by struggling characters in their course through the wilds of a random civilization.

  One touch of dulness which makes many novels kin, purporting falsely to be realistic, is a lack of unified expression. Relating much about lives, they tell us nothing at all about life. They fail in the power of seizing some one positive, though hitherto undiscriminated, aspect of creation — something as actual and yet as intangible as the look of an individual countenance — and thus miss the nameless fusion which illuminates a realized presentment. It is in this faculty of penetrating social criticism, of a vivid, well-chosen focus of the human circles and aims he presents, that Stephen Crane excels and interests.

  We have no more spirited portrait of the mob-meanness of our democracy — the peculiarly American disgrace that shames
us among nations — than his short story, “The Monster,” a chronicle of the cruelty of the people of an eastern town to a negro maimed in recovering from a fire the child of the town’s best doctor. The completely miserable performance of these people; their laudation of poor Henry Johnson; their editorial on his heroism when it is supposed he is dead; and their disapprobation of him after he is saved by Dr. Trescott’s skill and returns to live among them, in his disfigurement and idiocy, faceless, and horrible to look upon; their insistence that he be taken out of the town to spare their sensibilities; and their desertion and ruin of the career of Dr. Trescott, his one friend — all this is of the best stuff of tragedy, a living likeness of the wilds of a cowardly tyranny, splendidly and thoroughly understood and told, and of the same piece of appreciation of the minds and motives of men as Kent’s blinding.

  If the pity and terror of democracy’s mob-meanness are vividly revealed by Stephen Crane, so is the inspiration and swing of democracy’s impulse to keep in line.

  On the morning of July 2nd, I sat on San Juan hill and watched Lawton’s division come up. I was absolutely sheltered, but still where I could look into the faces of men who were trotting up under fire. There wasn’t a high heroic face among them. They were all men intent on business. That was all. It may seem to you that I am trying to make everything a squalor. That would be wrong. I feel that things were of the sublime. They were not of our shallow and preposterous fictions. They stood out in a simply majestic commonplace. It was the behavior of men on the street. It was the behavior of men. In one way, each man was just pegging along at the heels of the man before him, who was pegging along at the heels of still another man who — It was that in the flat and obvious way. In another way it was pageantry, the pageantry of the accomplishment of naked duty. One cannot speak of it — the spectacle of the common man serenely doing his work, his appointed work. It is the one thing in the universe which makes one fling expression to the winds and be satisfied to simply feel.

  This passage from a special article in “War Memories” is quoted not only as an instance of Stephen Crane’s manner in giving the reader the peculiar special light on the countenance of the situation he describes, but as an example of the extraordinary directness of that manner.

  “Direct treatment of subject.” In the last few years we have heard the phrase much used by the Imagists. Stephen Crane’s two slender volumes of verse, “ The Black Riders” and “ War Is Kind,” have just now a timely interest from their achievement in a certain art of poetic expression regarded by numbers of persons — though certainly not, one believes, by the Imagists themselves — as only recently attempted. As both Stephen Crane and most of the Imagists are American poets it is curious to compare their likeness and divergence on this special point—”direct treatment of subject” — which is, according to Mr. Richard Aldington, the Imagists’ first tenet.

  To my own perception, with all deference to the Imagists’ seriousness of purpose, and with a liking for their poetry though by no means an abject worship of it, this power of direct treatment in which Stephen Crane’s verses excel is an art absent even from the aim of most of the poems the Imagists themselves regard as their most distinctive work — poems such as “After Ch’u Youan,” “Acon, (after Joannes Baptista Amaltheus)” and “To Atthis (after the mss. of Sappho now in Berlin.) “ ,

  With the same brevity, exactitude and simp1icity of outline which characterize Stephen Crane’s verses, these poems of the Imagists’ treat certain situations in existence, by no means in the method of a straightforward, first-hand understanding, but very indirectly, and through the media of the spirit and manner of certain remote, approved civilizations and habits of thought. Their charm, the charm of classic echo or historic fancy, has the scholarly grace and lovely refinement of line of a Wedgwood design. But this treatment of subject, while both simple and precise, is by no means direct. Akin to the Imagists’ work in several attractive attributes, in this peculiar quality of an authentic, firsthand vision, Stephen Crane’s poems seem to me to evince a far deeper and better conception than the Imagists’ of direct expression in poetry.

  Here is a love poem:

  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 they white arms were there,

  And the fall to doom a long way.

  Here is a characterization:

  With eye and with gesture

  You say you are holy.

  I say you lie.

  For I did see you

  Draw away your coats

  From the sin upon the hands

  Of a little child.

  Liar!

  Who are the men who are creators? Who will express truly the quality of his own knowledge of life; and leave behind a moving image that he has conceived of our own mortal ways —— our little ways and large ways, in a fast-changing universe?

  Such a creator was Stephen Crane. In his static lines of verse, in the lyric movement of his stories, vibrate unforgettable and authentic moods of the very nature of our country — the smell of the wet turf along the shaded house-walls, the pluming maple-tops, the muteness of neighbor and neighbor, the scorching breath of injustice, the air of wartime memories on cloudy bluff and valley, the wind’s will blowing through the soul of youth, death in struggle everywhere, and the strength of love stronger than death, and the failures and the prides of our mortality.

  Oh, nothing, nothing, commonest things,

  A touch, a sound, a glimpse, a breath!

  Again you turn, and look again and listen to the sense and spirit of his clear-voiced pages, and perceive you had forgotten how well written they are in remembering how deeply they are thought.

  EDITH WYATT.

  From: The Harvard Monthly, V. XXI, No. 2, November 1900, p.76-83

  THE GENIUS OF STEPHEN CRANE. (The Harvard Monthly, V. XXI, No. 2, November 1900)

  Something more than mere posthumous interest attaches to these two latest books by Stephen Crane. Together, they 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 love-story; 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 formulae 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 wa
r 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 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.