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 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:
“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 invariably 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:
“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 sense-impressions 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, 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.
G. H. Montague.
From: The North American Review, No. DXXV, August 1900, p.233-242
“Stephen Crane from an English Standpoint” by H. G. Wells
The untimely death at thirty of Stephen Crane robs English literature of an interesting and significant figure, and the little World of those who write, of a stout friend and a pleasant comrade. For a year and more he had been ailing. The bitter hardships of his Cuban expedition had set its mark upon mind and body alike, and the slow darkling of the shadow upon him must have been evident to all who were not blinded by their confidence in what he was yet to do. Altogether, I knew Crane for less than a year, and I saw him for the last time hardly more than seven weeks ago. He was then in a hotel at Dover, lying still and comfortably wrapped about, before an open window and the calm and spacious sea. If you would figure him as I saw him, you must think of him as a face of a type very typically American, long and spare, with very straight hair and straight features and long, quiet hands and hollow eyes, moving slowly, smiling and speaking slowly, with that deliberate New Jersey manner he had, and lapsing from speech
again into a quiet contemplation of his ancient enemy. For it was the sea that had taken his strength, the same sea that now shone, level waters beyond level waters, with here and there a minute, shining ship, warm and tranquil beneath the tranquil evening sky. Yet I felt scarcely a suspicion then that this was a last meeting. One might have seen it all, perhaps. He was thin and gaunt and wasted, too weak for more than a remembered jest and a greeting and good wishes. It did not seem to me in any way credible that he would reach his refuge in the Black Forest only to die at the journey’s end. It will be a long time yet before I can fully realize that he is no longer a contemporary of mine; that the last I saw of him was, indeed, final and complete.
Though my personal acquaintance with Crane was so soon truncated, I have followed his work for all the four years it has been known in England. I have always been proud, and now I am glad, that, however obscurely, I also was in the first chorus of welcome that met his coming. It is, perhaps, no great distinction for me; he was abundantly praised; but, at least, I was early and willing to praise him when I was wont to be youthfully jealous of my praises. His success in England began with “The Red Badge of Courage,” which did, indeed, more completely than any other book has done for many years, take the reading public by storm. Its freshness of method, its vigor of imagination, its force of color and its essential freedom from many traditions that dominate this side of the Atlantic, came — in spite of the previous shock of Mr. Kipling — with a positive effect of impact. It was a new thing, in a new school. When one looked for sources, one thought at once of Tolstoi; but, though it was clear that Tolstoi had exerted a powerful influence upon the conception, if not the actual writing, of the book, there still remained something entirely original and novel. To a certain extent, of course, that was the new man as an individual; but, to at least an equal ex-. tent, it was the new man as a typical young American, free at last, as no generation of Americans have been free-before, of any regard for English criticism, comment or tradition, and applying to literary work the conception and theories of the cosmopolitan studio with a quite American directness and vigor. For the great influence of the studio on Crane cannot be ignored; in the persistent selection of the essential elements of an impression, in the ruthless exclusion of mere information, in the direct vigor with which the selected points are made, there is Whistler even more than there is Tolstoi in “The Red Badge of Courage.” And witness this, taken almost haphazard:
“At nightfall the column broke into regimental pieces, and the fragments went into the fields to camp. Tents sprang up like strange plants. Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night.’ ‘‘From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms or men
Passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird and satanic effects.”‘
And here again; consider the daring departure from all academic requirements, in this void countenance:
“A warm and strong hand clasped the youth’s languid fingers for an instant, and then he heard a cheerful and audacious whistling as the man strolled away. As he who had so befriended him was thus passing out of his life, it suddenly occurred to the youth that he had not once seen his face.”
I do not propose to add anything here to the mass of criticism upon this remarkable book. Like everything else which has been abundantly praised, it has occasionally been praised “all wrong;” and I suppose that it must have been said hundreds of times that this book is a subjective study of the typical soldier in war. But Mr. George Wyndham, himself a soldier of experience, has pointed out in an admirable preface to’ a re-issue of this and other of Crane’s war studies, that the hero of the “Red Badge” is, and is intended to be, altogether a more sensitive and imaginative person than the ordinary man. He is the idealist, the dreamer 0f boastful things brought suddenly to the test of danger and swift occasions and the presence of death. To this theme Crane returned several times, and particularly in a story called “Death and the Child” that was Written after the Greek war. That story is considered by very many of ‘Crane’s admirers as absolutely his best. I have carefully re-read it in deference to opinions I am ‘bound to respect, but I still find it inferior to the earlier work. The generalized application is, to my taste, a. little too evidently underlined; there is just that touch of insistence that Prevails so painfully at times in Victor Hugo’s work, as of a writer not sure of his reader, not happy in his reader and seeing to drive his implication (of which also he is not quite sure) home. The child is not a natural child; there is no happy touch to make it personally alive; it is THE CHILD, something unfalteringly big; a large, pink, generalized thing, I cannot help but see after the fashion of a Vatican cherub. The fugitive runs panting to where, all innocent of the battle about it, it plays; and he falls down
Breathless, to be asked, “Are you a man?” One sees the intention clearly enough; but in the later story it seems to me there is a new ingredient that is absent from the earlier stories, an ingredient imposed on Crane’s natural genius from without – a concession to the demands of a criticism it had been wiser, if less modest, in him to disregard – criticism that missed this quality of generalization and demanded it, even though it had to be artificially and deliberately introduced.
Following hard upon the appearance of “The Red Badge of Courage” in England came reprints of two books, “Maggie” and “George’s Mother,” that had already appeared in America six years earlier. Their reception gave Crane his first taste of the peculiarities of the new public he had come upon. These stories seem to me in no way inferior to the “Red Badge ;” and at times there are passages, the lament of Maggie’s mother at the end of “Maggie,” for example, that it would be hard to beat by any passage from the later book. But on all ‘hands came discouragement or tepid praise. The fact of it is, there had been almost an orgie of praise-for England, that is; and ideas and adjectives and phrases were exhausted. To write further long reviews on works displaying the same qualities as had been already amply discussed in the notices of the “Red Badge” would be difficult and laborious; while to admit an equal excellence and deny an equal prominence would be absurd. But to treat these stories as early work, to find them immature, dismiss them and proceed to fresher topics, was obvious and convenient. So it was, I uncharitably imagine, that these two tales have been overshadowed and are still comparatively unknown. Yet, they are absolutely essential to a just unde
rstanding of Crane. In these stories, and in these alone, he achieved tenderness and a compulsion of sympathy for other than vehement emotions, qualities that the readers of “The Third Violet” and “On Active Service,” his later love stories, might well imagine beyond his reach.
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 194
