MR. STEPHEN CRANE: AN APPRECIATION
“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, Tolstoy, 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 just in itself, rhythmical, self-poising as is the art of a perfect dancer. There are no 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 his peculiar power, and what is the realm his art commands, and his limitations.
“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 the essentials. 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 Duse at her best, or when he stands before Leonardo 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 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 realizing 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 us1 say, Mr. G. W. Steevens is, perhaps, the ablest exponent of today, 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 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 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 our day as Sterne was the great impressionist, in a different manner, of his day. 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 had 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.”
On the above criticism Conrad wrote me at the time, “The Crane thing is just — precisely just a ray of light flashed in and showing all there is.”
II
But when I wrote that criticism, that journalistic novel “On Active Service” was yet to be published, and I did not fully comprehend Crane’s training and his circumstances. I sounded a warning note against “reporting,” but though he had emerged from journalism, he was still haunted by journalism and was encircled by a — well! by a crew of journalists. I remarked, “I do not think Mr. Crane can or will develop further,” but pressing him were duns and debts and beckoning him was the glamour of the war-correspondent’s life, and before him were editors ready for ephemeral stuff, while they shook their heads sadly over such perfect gems as “The Pace of Youth.” Crane had seen much for a man of his years, but he was still thirsting for adventure and the life of action, and he had no time to digest his experiences, to reflect, to incubate and fashion his work at leisure. In the two or three hurried years that remained to him after the publication of “The Open Boat,” he created some notable things, but the dice of fate were loaded by all his circumstances against his development as craftsman.
We must therefore be thankful that his instinct for style emerged when his psychological genius broke out and so often possessed him in the teeth of the great stucco gods and the chinking of brass in the market place. He had written his best things without advice or encouragement, urged by the demon within him, and his genius burn
ed clear, with its passionate individuality, defying all the inhibitions and conventions of New England. Was that genius ever appreciated by America? I doubt it, though Americans were forced to accept him, first because of the fame which “The Red Badge of Courage” brought Crane in England, and secondary because his subject was the American Civil War, a subject that could not be disregarded. On re-reading “The Red Badge of Courage” I am more than ever struck by the genius with which Crane, via imagination, pierced to the essentials of War. Without any experience of war at the timer Crane was essentially true to the psychological core of war — if not to actualities. He naturally underestimated the checks placed by physical strain and fatigue on the faculties, as well as war’s malignant, cold ironies, its prosaic dreadfulness, its dreary, deadening tedium. But as Goethe has pointed out, the artist has a license to ignore actualities, if he is obeying inner, aesthetic laws. And Crane’s subject was the passions, the passions of destruction, fear, pride, rage, shame and exaltation in the heat of action. The deep artistic unity of “The Red Badge of Courage,” is fused in its flaming, spiritual intensity, in the fiery ardour with which the shock of the Federal and Confederate armies is imaged.”“ The torrential force and impetus, the check, sullen recoil and reforming” of shattered regiments, “and the renewed onslaught and obstinate resistance of brigades and divisions are visualized with extraordinary force and colour. If the sordid grimness of carnage, is partially screened, the feeling of War’s cumulative rapacity, of its breaking pressure and fluctuating tension is caught with wonderful fervour and freshness of style. It is of course, the work of ardent youth, but when Crane returned from, the Graeco-Turkish war he said to Conrad, “My picture of war was all right! I have found it as I imagined it.” And his imaginative picture he supplemented, four years later, in that penetrating, sombre, realistic piece “Memories of War” in “Wounds in the Rain,” his reminiscences of the Cuban campaign that in fact had set death’s secret mark already on him. I may note, too, how Crane, sitting in our garden, described that on questioning Veterans of the Civil War about their feelings when fighting, he could get nothing out of them but one thing, viz., “We just went there and did so and so.”
III
And here I must enlarge and amend my criticism of 1898 by saying that two qualities in especial, combined to form Crane’s unique quality, viz his wonderful insight into, and mastery of the primary passions, and his irony deriding the swelling emotions of the self. It is his irony that checks the emotional intensity of his delineation, and suddenly reveals passion at high tension in the clutch of the implacable tides of life. It is the perfect fusion of these two forces of passion and irony that creates Crane’s spiritual background, and raises his work, at its finest, into the higher zone of man’s tragic conflict with the universe. His irony is seen in its purest form in “Black Riders,” 1896, a tiny collection of vers libres, as sharp in their naked questioning as sword blades. These verses pierce with dreadful simplicity certain illusions of unregarding sages, whose earnest commentaries pour, and will continue to pour from the groaning press. In “Maggie,” 1896, that little masterpiece which drew the highest tribute from the veteran, W. D. Howells, again it is the irony that keeps in right perspective Crane’s remorseless study of New York slum and Bowery morals. The code of herd law by which the inexperienced girl, Maggie, is pressed to death by her family, her lover and the neighbours, is seen working with strange finality. The Bowery inhabitants, as we, can be nothing other than what they are; their human nature responds inexorably to their brutal environment; the curious habits and code of the most primitive savage tribes could not be presented with a more impartial exactness, or with more sympathetic understanding.
“Maggie” is not a story about people; it is primitive human nature itself set down with perfect spontaneity and grace of handling. For pure esthetic beauty and truth no Russian, not Tchehov himself, could have bettered this study, which, as Howells remarks, has the quality of Greek tragedy. The perfection of Crane’s style, his unique quality, can, however, be studied best in “The Open Boat,” 1898. Here he is again the pure artist, brilliant, remorselessly keen, delighting in life’s passions and ironies, amusing, tragic or grimacing. Consider the nervous audacity, in phrasing, of the piece “An Experiment in Misery,” which reveals the quality of chiaroscuro of a master’s etching. No wonder the New York editors looked askance at such a break with tradition. How would they welcome the mocking verve and sinister undertone of such pieces as “A Man and Some Others,” or the airy freshness and flying spontaneity of “The Pace of Youth”? In the volume “The Open Boat” Crane’s style has a brilliancy of tone, a charming timbre peculiar to itself. As with Whistler, his personal note eschews everything obvious, everything inessential, as witness “Death and the Child,” that haunting masterpiece where a child is playing with pebbles and sticks on the great mountain-side, while the smoke and din of the battlefield, in the plain below, hide the rival armies of pigmy men busy reaping with death. It is in the calm detachment of the little child playing, by which the artist secures his poetic background; man, pigmy man, watched impassively by the vast horizons of life, is the plaything of the Fates. The irony of life is here implicit. Perfect also is that marvel of felicitous observation “An Ominous Babe,” where each touch is exquisitely final; a sketch in which the instincts of the babes betray the roots of all wars, past and to come. This gem ought to be in every anthology of American prose.
The descent of Crane in “On Active Service” 1898, to a clever, journalistic level, was strange. It was a lapse into superficiality; much stronger artistically was “The Monster,” 1901, a book of stories of high psychological interest, which might indeed have made another man’s reputation, but a book which is ordinary in atmosphere. The story “The Blue Hotel” is, indeed, a brilliant exploration of fear and its reactions, and “His New Mittens” is a delightful graphic study of boy morals, but we note that when Crane breathes an every-day, common atmosphere his aesthetic power always weakens. One would give the whole contents of “Whilomville Stories,” 1902, for the five pages of “An Ominous Baby”; and the heterogeneous contents of “Last Words,” 1902, a volume of sweepings from Crane’s desk, kick the balance when weighed against the sketch “A Tale of Mere Chance,” the babblings of a madman, which Dostoevsky might be proud to claim. The companion sketch “Manacled” (in “The Monster”) bears also the authentic stamp of Crane’s rare vision.
To conclude, if America has forgotten or neglects Crane’s achievements, above all in “Maggie” and “The Open Boat,” she does not yet deserve to produce artists of rank. Crane holds a peculiar niche in American literature. Where it is weak, viz in the aesthetic and psychologically truthful delineation of passion, Stephen Crane is a master. And masters are rare, yes how rare are masters, let the men of Crane’s generation, looking back on the twenty years since his death, decide.
From: The New Bohemian, V. II, No.6, June 1896, p.282
The New Bohemian, V. II, No.6, June 1896
There has been much laughter in Bohemia, of late days, at the English recognition of Stephen Crane — laughter which had in it, however, an interrogative note. The question arises as to whether the world intends to give full encouragement to the formless, jelly-fish poetry of Crane; and all the Bohemians have been hot in discussions as to whether there is promising life in the thing and whether there will some day be evolved that mighty creation — a genius. There be not a few who declare that they see nothing in the verse; but there be other wide-eyed mortals in Bohemia, who rise up after reading and bless the thing as promising a sure fulfillment for their own erotic tendencies. There is no doubt that Crane has affected the brood of young singers who need pruning and mellowing much more than any further accession of audacity. By the way, Crane is not badly named. At present he stands on the one leg of Thought, and the other leg of Expression he keeps well up under his feathers. Withal, he is a high-stepping young fellow who loves solitude and haunts no cities.
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 198
