From: The Social Gospel, No. 38, New Series 9, April 1901, p.29-31
STEPHEN CRANE AND HIS WORK. (The Social Gospel, No. 38, New Series 9, April 1901)
The world never quite gets over a certain piqued sense of curiosity in contemplating the literary might-have-beens whose actual potentiality has been obscured by disease, or bidden in death. But nature is evidently no respecter of persons, and in her literary as’ well as her geographical worlds forever plays a bo-peep game, cutting off complete discovery and compelling man to write “Unknown Regions “ — as lie does on his geographical charts — over the promised but unsurveyed lands of those who die with half their music in them.
But these considerations are only secondary to the more sympathetic and personal ones that follow an event so regrettable as the untimely passing of a genius unique and lovable.
Stephen Crane began writing when he was sixteen years of age, and was only twenty-four when he was overtaken by the fame that followed the publication of “The Red Badge of Courage,” a book whose imaginative realism, fine color sense, and well marshaled English proclaimed him an artist in the making. “No English prose writer of his years,” wrote Harold Frederic, “approaches his wonderful gift of original and penetrating observation,” — a criticism an extract from “The Red Badge of Courage” will justify.
“He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of which he was a part — a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country, — was in a crisis. He was welded into a common Personality which was dominated by a single desire. For some moments he could not flee no more [this English is the author’s] than a little finger can commit a revolution from a hand. . . . There was a consciousness always of the presence of his comrades about him. He felt the subtle battle brotherhood more potent even than the cause for which they were fighting. It was a mysterious fraternity born of the smoke and danger of death.
“…..Following this came a red rage. He developed the acute exasperation of a pestered animal, a well-meaning cow worried by dogs. He had a mad feeling against his rifle, which could only be used against one life at a time.”
“The Red Badge of Courage “ is indeed, so far as its pictures of the external events of war are concerned, a prose epic; but in its masterly painting of the battle spirit, its loner workings and its strange exhibitions of animal ferocity and frenzied self-forgetfulness, it is a rare study in imaginative psychology.
Let any one compare the pages of an ordinary history describing a battle engagement, and be will at once appreciate the great difference that a little difference can make. Note the poetry of color and motion of one of his typical sentences; “Again be saw a blue wave dash with such thunderous force against a gray obstruction that it seemed to clear the earth of it and leave nothing but the trampled sod.”
Scarcely less remarkable in an author of his years was the marvelous analysis of the reaction which follows his hero’s first battle fear — or stage fright — and flight, and its transformation into a goad that stung him to subsequent daring, heroism and glory..
In “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,” Mr. Crane brings to his realistic study the same originality and imagination that mark all his work. The general aim and scope of this story may be conjectured from the contents of a letter which Mr. Crane sent to a clergyman with a copy of the book: ‘‘It is inevitable,” he wrote, “that this book will greatly shock you; but continue, pray, with great courage to the end, for it tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and often shapes things regardlessly. If one could prove that theory one would make room in Heaven for all sorts of souls (notably an occasional street girl) who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people.”
In some of his short stories, notably in his long short story, “The Monsters’ — published in Harper’s during the summer of ‘98 — there is a Poe-like gruesomeness and an uncanny atmosphere that suggests the most grisley scenes of Kipling. In this tale, and in nearly all his work, except “The Red Badge of Courage,” there is a strong undertow of tragic hopelessness, in its workings like the An Dan of Gaelic tradition. Even in the most sane and brilliant passages there is a hint of morbidity.
The same characteristics are visible in his book of weird poems under the title, “War Is Kind,” a book in which some of the questionable daring is atoned for by fancies as dainty and delicate as a snow crystal. As an illustration of his daring mood one stanza will suffice:
You tell me tills Is God?
I tell you this is a printed list
A burning candle and an ass.
It is something of a stride from lines like these to the real poetry of this extract:
Thou art my love
And thou art the peace of sundown
When the blue shadows soothe.
And the grasses and the leaves sleep
To the song of the little brooks.
Or the gentle lyric timbre of this:
I have heard the sunset song of the birches.
A white melody in silence —
I have seen a quarrel of the pines
At nightfall.
Not less charming in its fancy is the following fragment:
A dream for my love
Cunningly weave sunlight.
Breezes and flowers;
Let it be the cloth of the meadows.
In most of his poetry, however, Mr. Crane adopted the roadside gait of Whitman, so that his verses are oftener prose epigrams or shrewd definitions than what is generally understood as poetry.
Although there is scarcely any evidence of humor in “The Red Badge of Courage,” the short stories of Whilomville, recently published in Harper’s are brimful of drollery, wit and satire that sometimes suggest Thackery himself; witness his description of one of the pillars of a certain church as one of the most noteworthy “look-at-me-sinner deacons that ever graced the handle-of a collection basket, . . . so obstinately good on Sunday that you could see his sanctity through a door.” Equally photographic is the author’s description of the rise and fall of a “tea:” “The ordinary habits of the household began to disagree with her, and her unfortunate husband and children fled to the length of their tethers. Then there was a hush. Then there was a tea-party. On the fatal afternoon a small picked company of latent enemies would meet. There would ‘be a fanfare of affectionate greetings, during which everybody would measure to an inch the importance of what everybody else was wearing And they gave and took heart-bruises — fierce, deep heartbruises — under the clear impression that of such kind of rubbish was the kingdom of nice people.”
Despite his ill health Stephen Crane has been a prodigious worker; though his work has necessarily been spasmodic, as was the work of Stevenson and others who have had to keep on “fiddling under Vesuvius,” furnishing music for the robust who could dance to it at a safe distance.
When one remembers that Stephen Crane was only twenty-nine years old when he die, one cannot help wishing that some good Maecenas had discovered him while he was a boy and rusticated him into health at one of his villas.
Ellen Burns Sherman
Abercorn, Quebec
From: The Literary Digest, V. XII, No. 24, April 11, 1896, p.12 (702)
IN PRAISE OF STEPHEN CRANE. (The Literary Digest, V. XII, No. 24, April 11, 1896)
It is now pretty generally admitted that Stephen Crane is a “genius.” Mr. Elbert Hubbard, writing for The Lotus, declares that he is such, and says that if pushed for a definition he would say that genius is only woman’s intuition carried one step farther; that the genius knows because he knows, and if you should ask the genius whence comes this power, he would answer you (if he knew) in the words of Cassius: “My mother gave it me.” Mr. Hubbard asserts that every genius has had a splendid mother, and avers that he could name a dozen great men who were ushered into this life under about the following conditions: A finely organized, receptive, aspiring woman is
thrown by fate into an unkind environment. She thirsts for knowledge, for music, for beauty, for sympathy, for attainment. She has a heart-hunger that none about her understand; perhaps even her husband does not comprehend. She prays to God, but the heavens are as brass. A child is born to her. This child is heir to all of his mother’s spiritual desires, but he develops a man’s strength and breaks the fetters that held her fast. The woman’s prayer is answered. God heard her after all. She goes to her long rest soothed only by the thought that she did her work as best she could. But after a while, far away in the gay courts of great cities, the walls echo the praises of her son, and men say, “Behold, a Genius!” Having thus intimated his belief as to the psychological endowment of his subject, Mr. Hubbard says:
“When in 1891 Stephen Crane wrote a tale called ‘Maggie of the Streets,’ Mr. Howells read the story, and after seeing its author, said, ‘This man has sprung into life full-armed;’ and that expression of .Ir. Howells fully covers the case. I can imagine no condition of life that might entangle a man or woman within its meshes that Stephen Crane could not fully comprehend and appreciate. Men are only great as they possess sympathy. Crane knows the human heart through and through, and he sympathizes with its every pulsation. From the beggar’s child searching in ash-barrels for treasure, to the statesman playing at diplomacy with a thought for next fall’s election, Stephen Crane knows the inmost soul of each and all. Whether he is able to translate it to you or not is quite another question; but in the forty or more short stories and sketches he has written I fail to find a single false note. He neither exaggerates nor comes tardy off. “The psychologists tell us that a man can not fully comprehend a condition that he has never experienced. But theosophy explains the transcendent wisdom of genius by saying that in former incarnations the man passed through these experiences. Emerson says: ‘We are bathed in an ocean of intelligence, and under right conditions the soul knows all things.’ These things may be true, but the essence of Crane’s masterly delineation is that he is able to project himself into the condition of others. He does not describe men and women — he is that man. He loses his identity, forgets self, abandons his own consciousness, and is for the moment the individual who speaks. And whether this individual is man, woman, or child, makes no difference. Sex, age, condition, weigh not in the scale.”
Mr. Hubbard notes that during the latter half of the year 1895 no writing-man in America was so thoroughly hooted and so well abused as Stephen Crane. Turning the leaves of a newspaper scrap-book that is “a symposium of Billingsgate mud-balls, with Crane for a target,” he finds these words used by critics in reference to “The Black Riders,” Crane’s first book of poems: “idiocy,” “drivel, “bombast,” “rot,” “nonsense,” “puerility,” “untruth,” “garbage,” “hamfat,” “funny,” “absurd,” “childish.’ “drunken,” “besotted,” “obscure,” “opium-laden,” “blasphemous, indecent,” “fustian,” “rant,” “bassoon-poetry,” “swellhead stuff,” “bluster,” “balderdash,” “windy,” “turgid,” “stupid,” “pompous,” “gasconade,” “gas-house ballads,” etc., etc. . There are also in this scrap-book upward of a hundred parodies on the poems.
We are told that Mr. Crane is now in his twenty-fifth year; that he is a little under the average height, and is slender and slight in build, weighing scarcely 130 pounds. He is a decided blond; his eyes blue. He is a fine and reckless horseman. Further on Mr. Hubbard quotes Mr. Harold Frederic (in the New York Times) as saying of “The Red Badge of Courage “:
“If there were in existence any books of a similar character, one could start confidently by saying that it was the best of its kind. But it has no fellows. It is a book outside of all classification. So unlike anything else is it, that the temptation rises to deny that it is a book at all. When one searches for comparisons, they can only be found by culling out selected portions from the trunks of masterpieces, and considering these detached fragments, one by one, with reference to the ‘Red Badge,’ which is itself a fragment, and yet is complete. Thus one lifts the best battle-pictures from Tolstoi’s great ‘War and Peace,’ from Balzac’s ‘Chouans,’ from Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables,’ and the forest fight in “93,’ from Prosper Merimée’s assault of the redoubt, from Zola’s ‘La Debacle,’ and ‘Attack on the Mill’ (it is strange enough that equivalents in the literature of our own language do not suggest themselves), and studies them side by side with this tremendously effective battle-painting by the unknown youngster. Positively they are cold and ineffectual beside it. The praise may sound exaggerated but really it is inadequate. These renowned battle descriptions of the big men are made to seem all wrong. The ‘Red Badge’ impels the feeling that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before.”
In conclusion Mr. Hubbard declares that if Stephen Crane never produces another thing, he has done enough to save the fag-end of the century from literary disgrace; “and look you, friends,” he exclaims, “that is no small matter!”
From: A Parody Anthology, by Carolyn Wells, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922, p.363-364 and 366-367
Extract from A Parody Anthology by Carolyn Wells
Excerpted from “The Poets at a House-party”:
(A modern mortal having inadvertently stumbled in upon a house-party of poets given on Mount Olympus, being called upon to justify his presence there by writing a poem, offered a Limerick. Whereupon each poet scoffed, and the mortal, offended, challenged them to do better with the same theme)
The Limerick
A scholarly person named Finck
Went mad in the effort to think
Which were graver misplaced,
To dip pen in his paste,
Or dip his paste-brush in the ink.
(Stephen Crane’s version)
I stood upon a church spire,
A slender, pointed spire,
And I saw
Ranged in solemn row before me,
A paste-pot and an ink-pot.
I held in my either hand
A pen and a brush.
Ay, a pen and a brush.
Now this is the strange part;
I stood upon a church spire,
A slender, pointed spire,
Glad, exultant,
Because
The choice was mine! Ay, mine!
As I stood upon a church spire,
A slender, pointed spire.
From: The Month in Literature, Art and Life, V. I, No. 6, June 1897, p.551-554
Our Correspondents in the East by R-DY-RD K-PL-NG
Brindisi, Italy, April 24. It may be a matter of wonder to some that I am at Brindisi, and not actually at the seat of war; but this war correspondence is a delicate matter, and one not to be entered into lightly. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” I don’t think that I am an angel — yet, nor do I say that other people are fools; but I understand that my contemporaries, Richard Harding Crane and Stephen Davis, are on the battle-field. Now, what sort of account can they write under that condition? Under the unhealthy excitement of the moment, Crane may write ungrammatically, and that is no small detriment to a literary man. And, as I understand that neither Remington nor Gibson is with Davis, how does he expect to do anything pictorial? No, my way is best. Intuition every time.
Have I really roamed the Jungle from one end to the other? Have I lived with the Grey Pack? Because I have pictured monkeys as no man ever did before, does it follow that I am a monkey? Must I be in the war to write of the war? No, of course not. On my way to the cable office I met my old friend Mulvaney and had the following droll conversation with him:—” Marrnin’sorr,’tis a gre’t war. They till me the Toorks have no navy.” “None to speak of,” said I. “Not aven a tug?” “I don’t know that. Why do you ask?” “Will, I oondhershtand that the Grakes is will equipped for war in the matther uv war ships an’ I was wondherin’ whither ’tis because of th’ ould sayin’, ‘Phwrin Grake mates Grake thin comes the tug of war.’ If the Grakes kape on matin’ aich oother
an’ shtop matin’ th’ Toorks—”
I did not let him carry out the analogy, but hurried away laughing, and at the cable office I found this despatch:—”Athens. It is learned here this afternoon that a desperate battle was fought at Mali, yesterday.”
Do you know, this Greek and Turkish business doesn’t appeal to me. Of course, I’d like to see Greece win, for the sake of the old school-books and all that sort of thing, but I’d far rather write about what I’d rather write about than write about something I’d rather not write about. To-morrow I may have more important news to cable, but I want to write some more about Mowgli this afternoon, and so that must be my excuse for stopping now, for that is another story.
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 200
