There is another title in this book that strikes me as decidedly characteristic—”An Experiment in Misery.” The sketch is of a young man who finds himself at night in City Hall Park with only a few coppers in his pocket and who looks about for another outcast to share his poverty; “he finds a man “whose wondrous seediness promised that he would have a knowledge of cheap lodging-houses.” and together they go off in search of the joint where cots are to be had for seven cents. The seedy brother, the fetid lodging-house, the coffee at dawn, these comprise the whole tale. But the sketch is evidently autobiographical, and if I say that the title is characteristic I mean simply that Crane’s life was itself an experiment in misery — except that to him it was not misery. He had none of the desire to “see life” which is felt by those who have no natural capacity for it. Avid of sensations, on the other hand, he was always ready to risk not merely discomfort but even his very existence in order to know “how it felt.” Thus at the battle of Guantanamo, in the Spanish War, he climbed over the earthwork and exposed himself to the most vicious fire of the enemy — all, as the legend has it, without a suggestion of bravado. “The Open Boat,” in this volume, is, I believe, the result of a similar “experiment,” and so are a number of the other sketches. Crane’s ruling passion was curiosity, and this passion of the artist overruled the normal instincts of the man.
To be occupied exclusively with one’s sensations is, no doubt, a very youthful frame of mind. Crane was a “naturalist,” but he was not a mere naturalist if by that term one means nothing more than a scrupulous reporter of the facts of life. His poems and his brief novels sufficiently show that he had his own philosophy, his own point of view. Just when the sketches in this new volume were written, whether early or late, the editor does not say: but here too it is not life that speaks to us but the voice of a very gallant interpreter. Stephen Crane’s notes are the notes of irony and pity, which Anatole France has recommended as most worthy of the humane spirit; and while pity is to be found elsewhere in our fiction, in such novels as “Jennie Gerhardt,” for instance, the combination of the two is in him unique. “An Experiment in Misery” is full of this irony and this pity and so are the war sketches, particularly “The Upturned Face”; and as for “The Open Boat,” it is precisely the irony and the pity in it that make this grey little tale one of the minor masterpieces of our latter-day literature. The possession of these qualities indeed constituted the very special promise of Stephen Crane — a slight figure only because his years were so few.
From: The Saturday Review, V. 81, No. 2098, January 11, 1896, p.44-45
IN THE SCHOOL OF BATTLE: THE MAKING OF A SOLDIER. (The Saturday Review, V. 81, No. 2098, January 11, 1896)
“The Red Badge of Courage.” By Stephen Crane. London: Heinemann. 1896.
At a time like the present, when England, isolated by the jealousy and assailed by the threats of powerful rivals, is rising to the situation, and showing that the heart of the nation is as sound after the long Victorian peace as it was in the days of the Armada, that the desperate if lawless enterprise of Jameson and Willoughby is as near to the general heart of the people as were the not very dissimilar enterprises of the old Elizabethan captains, a want, which has long existed, makes itself felt with increased intensity — the want of some book that shall satisfy the well-nigh universal desire to know the inmost truths of the experiences which actual battle alone bestows on the men engaged in it.
The want finds the book as the opportunity finds the man: Mr. Stephen Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage” really supplies the want more completely, and therefore more satisfactorily, than any other book with which we are acquainted. Tolstoi, in his “War and Peace” and his sketches of Sebastopol, has given, with extraordinary depth of insight and extraordinary artistic skill, the effect of battle on the ordinary man, whether cultured officer or simple and rough soldier; but he takes no one man through the long series of experiences and impressions which Mr. Crane describes in its effects on young Henry Fleming, a raw recruit who first saw service in the last American Civil War. While the impressions of fighting, and especially of wounds and death, on an individual soldier have been painted with marvellously vivid touches by Tolstoi, the impressions of battle on a body of men, a regiment, have been also realized and represented with characteristic vigour by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in such admirable work as “The Drums of the Fore and Aft.” With less imagination, but with an accumulated mass of studied knowledge altogether too laboured, M. Zola in “La Debacle” has done some excellent literary work, but work not so convincing as Kipling’s, and work certainly far inferior to Mr. Stephen Crane’s, whose picture of the effect of actual fighting on a raw regiment is simply unapproached in intimate knowledge and sustained imaginative strength. This we say without forgetting Merimee’s celebrated account of the taking of the redoubt. The writing of the French stylist is, no doubt, much superior in its uniform excellence; but Mr. Crane, in the supreme moments of the fight, is possessed by the fiery breath of battle, as a Pythian priestess by the breath of the God, and finds an inspired utterance that will reach the universal heart of man. Courage in facing wounds and death is the special characteristic of man among the animals, of man who sees into the future, and has therefore much to deter him that affects him alone. Indeed, man, looking at the past, might almost be described as the fighting animal; and Mr. Crane’s extraordinary book will appeal strongly to the insatiable desire, latent or developed, to know the psychology of war — how the sights and sounds, the terrible details of the drama of battle, affect the senses and the soul of man. Whether Mr. Crane has had personal experience of the scenes he depicts we cannot say from external evidence; but the extremely vivid touches of detail convince us that he has. Certainly, if his book were altogether a work of the imagination, unbased on personal experience, his realism would be nothing short of a miracle. Unquestionably his knowledge, as we believe acquired in war, has been assimilated and has become a part of himself. At the heated crises of the battle he has the war fever — the Berserk fury in his veins, he lives in the scenes he depicts, he drinks to the dregs the bitter cup of defeat and the bitter cup of fear and shame with his characters no less completely than he thrills with their frantic rage when repulsed by the enemy, and their frantic joy when they charge home.
“The Red Badge of Courage “ — a name which means, we may perhaps explain, a wound received in open fight with the enemy — is the narrative of two processes: the process by which a raw youth develops into a tried and trustworthy soldier, and the process by which a regiment that has never been under fire develops into a finished and formidable fighting machine. Henry Fleming, the youth who is the protagonist of this thrillingly realistic drama of war, has for deuteragonist Wilson, the loud young boaster. Wilson, however, comes only occasionally into the series of pictures of fighting, and of the impressions that fighting produces on the hypersensitive nerves of the chief character. Fleming, a neurotic lad, constitutionally weak and intensely egotistic, fanciful and easily excited, enlists in the Northern Army, and finds himself a raw recruit in a new regiment, derisively greeted by veteran regiments as “fresh fish.” Nights of morbid introspection afflict the youth with the intolerable question, Will he funk when the fighting comes? Thus he continues to question and torture himself till his feelings are raised to the nth power of sensitiveness. At last, after many false alarms and fruitless preparations, the real battle approaches, and whatever confidence in himself remained oozes away from the lonely lad. “He lay down in the grass. The blades pressed tenderly against his cheek. The liquid stillness of the night enveloping him made him feel vast pity for himself. ... He wished without reserve that he was at home again.” He talked with his comrades, but found no sign of similar weakness. He felt himself inferior to them: an outcast. Then, in the grey dawn, after such a night of fear, they start hastily for the front. “He felt carried along by a mob. The sun spread disclosing rays, and one by one regiments burst into view like armed men just born from the ear
th. The youth perceived that the time had come. He was about to be measured. For a moment he felt in the face of his great trial like a babe, and the flesh over his heart seemed very thin.” He looked round him, but there was no escape from the regiment. “He was in a moving box.” The experiences of the battle are led up to with masterly skill. First he is fascinated by the skirmishers, whom he sees running hither and thither, “firing at the landscape.” Then comes one of Mr. Crane’s vivid poetical conceptions: the advancing line encounters a dead soldier. “He lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes had been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if death had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends. The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it.” An unreasoning dread swept over the young recruit; the forest everywhere seemed to hide the enemy, and might any moment bristle with rifle-barrels. He lagged at last, with tragic glances at the sky; only to bring down on himself the young lieutenant of his company with loud reproaches for skulking. The new regiment took its ground in a fringe of wood. Shells came screaming over. “Bullets began to whistle among the branches and hiss at the trees. Twigs and leaves came sailing down. It was as if a thousand axes, wee and invisible, were being wielded.” Then the tide of battle moved toward them, and out of the grey smoke came the yells of the combatants, and then a mob of beaten men rushed past, careless of the grim jokes hurled at them. “The battle reflection that shone for an instant on their faces on the mad current made the youth feel” that he would have gladly escaped if he could. “The sight of this stampede exercised a flood-like force that seemed able to drag sticks and stones and men from the ground.” At last, “Here they come! Here they come! Gunlocks clicked. Across the smoke-infested fields came a brown swarm of running men who were giving shrill yells. A flag tilted forward sped near the front.”
The man at the youth’s elbow was mumbling, as if to himself, “Oh! we’re in for it now; oh! we’re in for it now.” The youth fired a wild first shot, and immediately began to work at his weapon automatically. He lost concern for himself, and felt that something of which he was a part was in a crisis. “He felt the subtle battle-brotherhood more potent even than the cause for which they were fighting.” “Following this came a red rage. He had a mad feeling against his rifle, which could only be used against one life at a time.” The description goes on, full of vivid realistic touches, of which we can only give a fragment or two. “The steel ramrods clanked and clanged with incessant din as the men pounded them furiously into the hot rifle barrels.” The “men dropped here and there like bundles.” One man “grunted suddenly as if he had been struck by a club in the stomach. He sat down and gazed ruefully. In his eyes there was mute indefinite reproach.” The first attack was repulsed. The youth had stood his ground and was in an ecstasy of self-satisfaction. The supreme trial, he thought, was over. Suddenly from the ranks rose the astonished cry, “Here they come again!” and a fresh attack developed. The men groaned and began to grumble. On came the rebel attack. “Reeling with exhaustion, the youth began to overestimate the strength of the assailants. They must be machines of steel.” “He seemed to shut his eyes and wait to be gobbled.” Then “a man near him ran with howls — a lad whose face had borne an expression of exalted courage — was in an instant smitten abject. He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit.” The youth saw their flight — yelled — swung about — and sped to the rear in great leaps. “He ran like a blind man. Two or three times he fell down. Once he knocked his shoulder so heavily against a tree that he went headlong.”
The fugitive, after a time, comes upon a procession of wounded men, limping and staggering to the rear. The wounded men fraternize with him, supposing him to be wounded also. The growth of shame that begins with a brotherly question, “Where yeh hit, ol’ boy?” is as good as any part of this long psychological study. “At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He wished he too had a wound, a red badge of courage.” There was a spectral soldier at his side, whose eyes were fixed in a stare into the unknown; he suddenly recognized his old comrade, Jan Conklin, the tall soldier. The gradual dying on his legs of the tall soldier is described with extraordinary vividness. The soldier, with the instinct of the animal wounded unto death, wishes to creep off and be alone. His comrades, anxious to help him, insist on following him. He suddenly slips away and leaves them. “Leave me be, can’t ye? Leave me be for a moment,” is his entreaty, and they follow at a distance. They watch his death, as wonderfully described as a death in Tolstoi’. “Well, he was reg’lar jim-dandy fer nerve, wa’nt he?” says the tattered soldier in a little awestruck voice. “I never seen a man do like that before.” Presently, the incoherent talk of the wounded man is made to reflect with a Sophoclean irony on the runaway youth. The night bivouac in the forest after the battle is finely described. The weary men lying round the fires, under the forest roof; the break in the trees, through which a space of starry sky is seen. At dawn the motionless mass of bodies, thick spread on the ground, look in the grey light as if the place were a charnel-house.
The fighting of the new regiment, a forlorn hope, proceeds with a breathless speed of narrative that emulates the actual rush of the battle-worn and desperate men, among whom there is no flinching or fear now, any more than there is in the sensitive youth, who, having had his battle baptism, is soon to bear the colours, wrenched from the iron grip of the dead colour-sergeant. “As the regiment swung from its position out into a cleared space, the woods and thickets before it awakened. Yellow flames leaped towards it from many directions. . . . The song of the bullets was in the air, and shells snarled in the tree-tops. One tumbled directly in the middle of a hurrying group and exploded in crimson fury. There was an instant’s spectacle of a man, almost over it, throwing up his hands to shield his eyes. Other men, punctured by bullets, fell in grotesque agonies.” The regiment stopped for breath, and as it saw the gaps the bullets were making in the ranks, faltered and hesitated. The lieutenant worked them forward painfully with volleys of oaths. They halted behind some trees. Then the lieutenant, with the two young soldiers, made a last effort. They led the regiment, bawling “Come on! come on!” “The flag, obedient to these appeals, bended its glittering form and swept toward them. The men wavered in indecision for a moment, and then, with a long wailful cry, the dilapidated regiment surged forward and began its new journey. Over the field went the scurrying mass. It was a handful of men splattered into the faces of the enemy. Towards it instantly sprang the yellow tongues. A vast quantity of blue smoke hung before them. A mighty banging made ears valueless. The youth ran like a madman to reach the woods before a bullet could discover him. He ducked his head low like a football-player. In his haste his eyes almost closed, and the scene was a wild blur. Pulsating saliva stood at the corners of his mouth.” At last the men began to trickle back. In vain the youth carrying the colours aided the lieutenant to rally them. The battered and bruised regiment slowly makes its way back, only to be condemned by the general who had ordered the charge.
Then comes a capital account of the young soldier’s reward. Several men hurry up with good news to the hero of the book:—” Th’ colonel met your lieutenant right by us. ‘Who was the lad that carried the flag?’ he ses; an’ th’ lieutenant he speaks up right away: ‘That’s Flemin’, an’ he’s a jimhickey,’he ses right away. ‘He’s a good un’,’ ses th’ colonel. ‘You bet!’ ses th’ lieutenant. ‘He and a feller named Wilson was at th’ head ‘a th’ charge, an’ howlin’ like Injins all the time,’ he ses. ‘My sakes!’ ses th’ colonel. ‘Well, well, well, those two babies’” — and the heart of
the young soldier swelled with happiness and with affection for the colonel and the youthful lieutenant.
And then, after other desperate charges, the army is withdrawn across the river — nothing apparently accomplished by all their struggles and all their sufferings, and the book closes with a few words on the moral effect of the heavy fighting on the youth. “He found that he could look backward on the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them. With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive, but of steady and strong blood. . . . He had been to touch the great death, and found that after all it was but the great death. He was a man.” The book is crowded with vivid passages and striking descriptions, often expressed in original and picturesque diction. “A mass of wet grass marched upon rustled like silk”; “A dense wall of smoke settled slowly down. It was furiously slit and slashed by the knife-like fire from the rifles”; Bullets “spanged”; “Bullets buffed into men”; “ His dead body lying torn and gluttering upon the field.” One is not inclined to criticize the giver of such a book; but it will be observed that when the Berserk inspiration is not upon him, Mr. Crane writes as badly as, when his imagination is heated, he writes well — e.g. “Too, the clothes seemed new.”
From: The Literary News, V. XXI, No.9, September 1900, p.273
Whilomville Stories.
Stephen Crane’s “Whilomville Stories” are put forth by the Harpers in a handsome edition, which seems almost to be a memorial one, with a frontispiece portrait (too photographic and “nicified”) of Crane, and in excellent type and paper — and, of course, with Newell’s pictures, which are in his best vein, and which are outwardly the most attractive feature of the volume. Crane is just now much in fashion, the “Red Badge” being out in a new edition, and the as yet unpublished romance — as yet unfinished, too — much talked about.
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 202
