Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  For Mr. Arthur Morrison, author of Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago, undoubtedly carries heavier guns that 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. He has outgrown that touching naivete” displayed in the younger writer’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 hot 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 he deserves to that extent more serious and detailed criticism…

  From: The Book Buyer, V. XIV, No. 6, July 1897, p.609-610

  OF MR. STEPHEN CRANE (The Book Buyer, V. XIV, No. 6, July 1897)

  Mr. Crane reads his title clear. If he had called it “The Second Violet,” it would have lacked character. “The First Violet” would have been little better. “The First Violin” does very well, but down in the depths of that mystical, unreasonable, infallible tiling a man calls his artistic sense, he wants more violets. He may not know why. But he does. One violet lacks plot, relation, progress, culmination. It is out of the question.

  But, there are numbers enough. Why did not Mr. Crane call it “The Fourth Violet”? Because there is creative accuracy and inevitableness in The Third Violet. Three violets settle things. If it were “The Fourth Violet” there would be no reason for not calling it “The Fifth” or “The Fifteenth” or “The Fifty-fourth” or any of the other plain ordinary undramatic numbers. With that fundamental instinct for expectancy and suspense and finality at once, which is always characteristic of the artist. Mr. Crane selects his words on the back of his books and behind their backs, with that kind of exactness toward his vision that can only come of having a vision worth exactness.

  It is interesting to note, however, that, although his titles are all exceptionally good, Mr. Crane stands distinctly apart from the title-tailors of the day and all their deceitful ways. One does not find him doing any cutting and fitting for dummies. His books wear their clothes. They move about in them, and we who are title-hardened, who have lost long since our gentle guilelessness toward the wiles of modern authorship, can only breathe forth gratefulness for a writer who neither hides in his title, as the manner of some is, nor carries it carelessly on his arm, but who wears it from the first page to the last as a gentleman artist should. There is no need to lay one of Mr. Crane’s titles away in a drawer when we know the book.

  The author of “The Red Badge of Courage” has been obliged to pay rather soon in life the penalty of succeeding too well. Like all more promising men, he is either very good indeed or very bad. He compels discrimination before his readers are really quite ready to make it. People have to say something — or they think that they have to say something. So the furor of the superficial dins in our ears, and in Mr. Crane’s ears. But men who look at literature in broad spaces and from a catholic standard, or from the greater catholicity of having no standards at all, who see what they see through their own great vital delights — delights that are drawn from old worlds and from now ones, delights that root themselves down into dreams and worlds unborn — such men as these require no critics, no Committee from Posterity to tell them that there is one quality in Mr. Crane’s work which, by all historic precedent, entitles him at the hands of his judges to the most sincere and conscientious and deliberate and constant benefit of the doubt. Mr. Crane has earned the benefit of the doubt. The quality that earns it for him is the challenging quality in all that he does. He makes men take sides. He inspires the question mark, and who cares to deny that from the beginning of the world the question mark is the way that inspiration has always come? It would not be orthodox, it would not be correct, it would not be classic, it would not be even conventional, for anything to come into this conventional world that it really needs, anything that is beautiful or vital or masterful, unless it covered the sky with wondering, and burst upon us out of a glowing, splendid, imperious question mark. Beauty is an eternal challenge. Truth is always a dare until it begins to become a lie. Admitting that this is a canon of art, a fundamental principle of the creative mood, a law of aesthetics, the inevitable rule of every truly artistic method, is it possible that any one of us in this enlightened century, when all the beauty that we have stands by and mocks us with forgetting how it came, can be guilty of denying the power of an artist because we have perchance in our honest, considering minds some doubts about him? Heaven help us! It is rather a marvel that we rush not with the hurry of many feet into mad, garrulous, hysterical conviction that here in our very presence is an absolute, indubitable, guaranteed immortal at last — for the very reason that we have doubts about him. But enough. Having duly said that Mr. Crane’s work has the challenge quality in it, having put this down as the best quality a man’s work can have, in the beginning at least — the main thing worth having on the whole — we are now left at liberty to proceed to say what we please, which is well enough in its way, or to change our minds if we please, which is vastly better sometimes, and always more of a privilege.

  Claiming at the very least that Mr. Crane is entitled to the benefit of the doubt in the smaller aspects of his art because he has conquered in the greatest — has somehow managed the almost impossible achievement, as artists are found to-day, of being distinctly himself, we leave it yet to be determined whether, considering things by and large, the art of being Mr. Stephen Crane is worth all the trouble it must have cost. He has time. He has genius. When enough of the time has passed and the genius has come to its full grapple with life, it will be fitting to dogmatize, to declare what the personality is and what it stands for in our little writing world.

  Gerald Stanley Lee.

  From: Williams Literary Monthly, V. XVI, No. 7, February 1901, p.278-282

  THE PROSE OF THE LATE STEPHEN CRANE. (Williams Literary Monthly, V. XVI, No. 7, February 1901)

  By the death of Stephen Crane the world of literature has suffered a severe loss, a loss greater, perhaps, than was at first supposed. He was a man of rare force and ability who had lately raised himself to a conspicuous position, not so much because of what he was doing as on account of what he had already accomplished and of what he might do in the future. His best work was done in his early youth, while the latter part of his life was devoted chiefly to newspaper correspondence. Nevertheless, it was obvious that a man of such possibilities might in his maturity produce a work that would place him in the front rank of American writers. Robert Barr, the eminent literary critic, in a magazine article a little over a year ago, ventured the opinion that of all writers then before the public, Stephen Crane was the one most likely to produce the great American novel. Anyone who had stud
ied the author could readily realize that the suggestion was by no means a rash one.

  Stephen Crane was born in Newark, N. J., in 1871. After going through the schools of his native town he spent some time at Syracuse University and at Lafayette College, but he did not complete the course at either institution. He never could apply himself to any work that he did not like, and as few of his studies at college interested him, he was a bad scholar. He always was very fond of literature, and had begun to write when sixteen years of age. Though this work was nothing more than the efforts of a schoolboy, it was the forerunner of what was to come. In 1892 Crane went to New York with the idea of entering newspaper work, but he did not find it such an easy matter as he had imagined. “He tramped Park Row day after day, climbing grimy stairways, timidly approaching ‘city editors,’ until at length, when on the verge of absolute destitution, he found employment in a mercantile house.” But Crane was not cut out for a business life and the many disappointments he had met with on “newspaper row” did not in any way curb his aspirations. He spent all his spare time in writing short stories and in wandering through the great east side slums of the city. The stories were never published, but the investigations and observations made during his rambles formed the foundation of the book, “Maggie, A Child of the Streets,” which he published in 1893.

  This story dealt with doings and sayings of the people of the slums, — a reflection of the scenes and actions of city life as Crane saw it. While this work made no great impression on the general public, it brought the author to the attention of many literary men, especially William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland, who encouraged Crane and helped him whenever they could find opportunity. Though this book was far-fetched and over-drawn in many instances, it, nevertheless, showed a peculiar literary merit. In this style of story, Crane reached a much higher standard in “George’s Mother,” which was published three years later. It is a masterpiece in character study. It deals with the relations between an old woman and her son, who live in a New York tenement house. An ordinary writer would have sought to expose to view the mind of the old woman; to follow its workings hidden under the pressure of her surroundings. A great artist would have so constructed her life that its joys and sorrows would be significant of the joys and sorrows of all mothers. Crane did neither. He reproduced the individual life of the old woman so perfectly that the very manner in which she went about her daily doings reflected her hidden thoughts and feelings.

  In 1893 the “Red Badge of Courage” was brought out as a serial in a Philadelphia newspaper, and in 1895 was published in book form by the Appletons. Undoubtedly this was Crane’s greatest work. At once it made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic and raised him to the front rank of literary men of the time. So vivid are the scenes and so true to life are the characters that it was commonly thought that the story must have been written by one who had been through the War of the Rebellion, instead of by an author born five years after its termination. It undoubtedly shows a marvelous imagination and a great art in word-painting. “It is the imagination of a young man who had never seen war. It is the analysis of a young recruit’s soul which is as vivid and clear as the finest anatomical dissection, and yet instinct with life and palpitating with emotion.” The book is composed of a series of descriptive scenes, all melting naturally into one another and forming a perfect whole. The story deals with the actions, thoughts, and emotions of a young man in his first experience of warfare. He is, and is intended to be, a more sensitive and imaginative person than the ordinary soldier. He is an idealist, a dreamer, brought suddenly to the test of danger and the presence of death. The book is replete with a daring originality. Its freshness of method, its vigor of imagination, and its marvelous coloring create a pleasure and an impression that is lasting.

  After the “Red Badge of Courage” came the “Third Violet,” — a novel, — and a volume of war stories complementary to the “Red Badge,” entitled “The Little Regiment.” Neither of these books, however, is of great importance; they were not up to the standard of his former work.

  Crane had a style, or rather an art, peculiarly his own. The rare thing about his art is that he keeps nearer to the surface than, perhaps, any living author, and like a great painter makes the surface depict the depths. Many great writers, in constructing character, dive so deeply into the depths of life that the reader cannot think of them as living personalities, but rather as people of a different world. Crane, by making actions show the thoughts and aspirations of his creations, has given us men and women out of the common, but still as real as our own companions and friends. His interpretation of character was masterly. In a few rapid strokes he gives us an amazing insight into the individual life by simply touching upon the significant things. A genius for expressions, an unique faculty of exposing a singular scene by an odd simile, a power of reading a face or interpreting an action, a keen realizing of emotions — this was Crane’s talent.

  Crane was influenced greatly by Tolstoi, in fact, he has himself said that Tolstoi was the writer he most admired. His creed was that the nearer a writer gets to life, the greater he becomes; so he devoted all his energies toward the goal partially described by that misunderstood and often abused word, realism. Yet he did not understand his own ability. His mind was full of words, images, sentences, and pictures already to be drawn off. When he put pen to paper they came with an ease and regularity that was inexplicable. With nothing but his extraordinary brain and his wonderful deduction from recorded things he could build up the truest and most convincing pictures of life and individuality.

  It is unfortunate that a man of such ability should be cut off by the hand of death before he could give full scope to his powers. Still his name will be perpetuated by what little writing he has done, not so much on account of its beauty of finish, but because of its truth of scene and its perfection of character. Crane, the man, is gone from us, but the results of his labors remain as an everlasting monument to his memory.

  William Henry Stanley.

  From: Friday Nights – Literary Criticisms and Appreciations, by Edward Garnett, Alfred A. Knopf, 1922, p.200-217

  STEPHEN CRANE AND HIS WORK by Edward Garnett

  A short time ago I picked up on a London book-stall, the first edition of “The Red Badge of Courage.” Its price was sixpence. Obviously the bookseller lay no store by it, for the book had been thrown on the top of a parcel of paper-covered novels among the waifs and strays of literature. Chancing to meet a young American poet I asked him, curiously, how his countrymen esteemed today that intensely original genius, Crane, the creator of “The Open Boat,” “George’s Mother,” “Maggie,” “The Black Riders.” He answered, “One rarely hears Crane’s name mentioned in America. His work is almost forgotten, but I believe it has a small, select circle of admirers.” I confess I was amused, especially when a little later a first edition of “Almayer’s Folly,” the first Conrad, was sold at auction for five hundred times the amount of the early Crane. And Conrad was also amused when I told him, and we suggested a title for an allegorical picture yet to be painted — the Apotheosis of an Author crowned by Fashion, Merit and Midas. For we both had in mind the years when the critics hailed “The Nigger of the Narcissus” as a worthy pendent to the battle-pictures presented in “The Red Badge of Courage,” and when Sir, then Mr. Arthur Quiller-Couch spoke of “The Nigger,” as “having something of Crane’s insistence.”

  We talked together over Crane and his work and cast our memories back over twenty years when we were both in touch with “poor Steve,” he more than I. And we agreed that within its peculiar limited compass Crane’s genius was unique. Crane, when living at Oxted, was a neighbour of mine, and one day, on my happening to describe to him an ancient Sussex house, noble and grey with the passage of five hundred years, nothing would satisfy him but that he must become the tenant of Brede Place. It was the lure of romance that always thrilled Crane’s blood, and Brede Place had had indeed, an unlucky, chequered history. I
saw Crane last, when he lay dying there, the day before his wife was transporting him, on a stretcher bed, to a health resort in the Black Forests in a vain effort to arrest the fatal disease, and I see again his bloodless face and the burning intensity of his eyes. He had lived at too high pressure and his consumptive physique was ravaged by the exhausting strain of his passionate life, and sapped by the hardships of the Cuban campaign, which he suffered as a war-correspondent. (Crane’s strange eyes, with their intensely concentrated gaze, were those of a genius and I recall how on his first visit to our house I was so struck by the exquisite symmetry of his brow and temples, that I failed to note, what a lady pointed out when he had left, the looseness of his mouth. Yes, the intensity of genius burned in his eyes, and his weak lips betrayed his unrestrained temperament. Crane’s genius, his feeling for style were wholly intuitive and no study had fostered them. On first reading “The Red Badge of Courage,” I concluded he had been influenced by the Russian masters, but I learned when I met him, that he had never read a line of them. Would that he had! For Crane, as Conrad reminded me, never knew how good his best work was. He simply never knew. He never recognized that in the volume “The Open Boat,” he had achieved the perfection of his method. If he had comprehended that in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and in “Death and the Child” he had attained then, his high water mark, he might perhaps have worked forward along the lines of patient, ascending effort; but after “The Open Boat,” 1898, his work dropped to lower levels. He wrote too much, he wrote against time, and he wrote while dunned for money. At first sight it appears astonishing that the creator of such a miracle of style as “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” should publish in the same year so mediocre a novel as “On Active Service.” But Crane ought never to have essayed the form of the novel. He had not handled it satisfactorily in “The Third Violet,” 1897, a love story charming in its impressionistic lightness of touch, but lacking in force, in concentration, in characterization. My view of Crane as a born impressionist and master of the short story, I emphasized in an Appreciation in 1898, and since it is germane to my purpose here, I reprint the criticism: —