Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  “In the desert

  I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

  Who, squatting upon the ground,

  Held his heart in his hands,

  And ate of it.

  I said, ‘Is it good, friend?’

  ‘It is bitter — bitter,’ he answered:

  ‘But I like it

  Because it is bitter,

  And because it is my heart.’”

  Throughout the little book, nevertheless, there is some eating of other viands, for the sweet is mixed with the bitter. Just another parable we must transcribe, since it is thoroughly typical of Mr. Crane’s performances, and will serve as an excellent “sixthly and lastly” for any critic who has spoken his mind: —

  “Once there was a man, —

  Oh, so wise!

  In all drink

  He detected the bitter,

  And in all touch

  He found the sting.

  At last he cried thus:

  ‘There is nothing, —

  No life,

  No joy,

  No pain,

  There is nothing save opinion,

  And opinion be damned.’”

  From: The Spectator, No. 3,850, April 12, 1902, p.558

  LAST WORDS - The Spectator, No. 3,850, April 12, 1902

  This collection of stories and sketches, which presumably represents the last gleanings- from the work of an author who died a couple of years ago, Las been made without much regard for the fame of the writer, and with no indication whatever as to whether the contents are genuinely posthumous or have already appeared in print. The nature of the book might have seemed to call for a memoir, or at least a preface, but neither is forthcoming. — It seems to be the fashion nowadays only to prefix memoirs to the works of living authors. — But making all reservations for these deficiencies in selection and editing, Last Words contains enough that is characteristic and representative of Stephen Crane to interest that section of the reading public to which his peculiar genius appeals. We cannot believe it to be a large section, either here or in America. He was perhaps too crudely American to be fully appreciated in America, while his angularity, his choice of subject, and above all, his unconventional methods of expression, repelled and affronted the average English reader. For example, the average man will only be disconcerted by encountering in the middle of a story of essentially comic complexion such a sentence as the following:—” The sea became uneasy and heaved painfully, like a lost bosom, when little forgotten heart-bells try to chime with a pure sound. The voyagers cringed at magnified foam on distant wave crests. A moon came and looked at them.” This is from an account, mainly ludicrous, of the drifting out to sea of two bathers on a raft. One cannot imagine the author of Three Men in a Boat indulging in the “pathetic fallacy.” And that prompts us to note a remarkable fact about Mr. Crane; though practically a semi-literate author, singularly unencumbered with culture, guilty of constant inaccuracies of grammar, construction, and even spelling, his works are a regular mine of all the figures and tricks of speech which grammarians delight to classify and illustrate. In a word, the happy daring of ignorance prompted him to express himself in an original and highly picturesque manner. He was not crushed with reminiscence or reading, or depressed by the fear of plagiarising those qui nostra ante nos dixerunt, and so it came about that when he had anything to say he said it in his own way. With the necessary alterations his appreciation of Irish wit may be applied to his own style: “For amid his wrongs and his rights and his failures — his colossal failures — the Irishman retains this delicate blade for his enemies, for his friends, for himself, the ancestral dagger of fast sharp speaking from fast sharp seeing — an inheritance which could move the world.” “Fast sharp speaking from fast sharp seeing,” that seems to us to express admirably the peculiar equipment of Stephen Crane. He had the power of vision to the extent of clairvoyance, — for his earlier war pictures were based on no personal experience in the fighting line, and to this gift of vision he added the further gift of a terse and vivid style. He never wrote a long sentence in his life, but he could compress a flood of colour into two lines, — e.g., when speaking of the saturnine dignity of fishermen he says: “Those who go with nets upon the reeling sea grow still with the mystery and solemnity of the trade.” Then Mr. Crane also had a thorough appreciation of the sovereign fact that style often depends quite as much on the ability to dispense with adjectives as on that of their appropriate employment. He can at times adopt a truly eloquent baldness. When the belated bathers are conversing by night in the cabin of their rescuer’s schooner, he describes how they were interrupted “by a pair of legs that appeared among the stars. The captain came down the ladder. He brought a coffee pot from the sky.” Again, he was never at a loss for illuminative images. His impecunious New York artists smoke tobacco of which he says that it “smelled like burning mummies.” The captain of the schooner had a “bronze face and solitary whiskers,” and Mr. Crane’s windows in a London hotel “overlooked simply a great sea of night in which were swimming little gas fishes.”

  The pages of this volume which will probably appeal most to English readers are those which record Mr. Crane’s London impressions. It has been said by a great modern painter of Goya that he painted human beings as though he saw them for the first time, and one is sometimes reminded of this suggestive estimate of the Spanish painter’s method by the originality and freshness of Mr. Crane’s point of view. Like the Oriental Prince who visited us some years back, he was chiefly struck by the drilling of the vehicles by the policemen. For the rest he was impressed by horses who could skate, and by the “unbridled strategy” of the British advertiser. As he puts it —

  “I went by train to see a friend in the country, and after passing through a patent mucilage, some hams, a South African Investment Company, a Parisian millinery firm, and a comic journal, I alighted at a new and original kind of corset. On my return journey the road almost continuously ran through soap.”

  These impressions — which we commend to the attention of Mr. Richardson Evans and his excellent Society for combating the excesses of advertisement — hardly come within the province of a critic of fiction, and the same remark applies to the rather disappointing Irish Notes and sundry specimens of descriptive journalism, in which Mr. Crane is not seen at his best. The episodes in the life of sundry struggling artists in New York are vividly done, and the fancifully named “Spitzbergen Tales” — presumably based on the author’s experience as a war correspondent in Cuba — have something of the poignancy of Mr. Crane’s earlier studies in the psychology of the fighting line. That Mr. Crane had it in him to write a historical romance is, we think, sufficiently shown by the fragment of imaginary autobiography dealing with the War of Independence. Lastly, we may note a highly humorous narrative of the efforts of a little American counter-jumper, amid the frequent interruptions of his customers, to read a highly sensational French novel, and his indignation at the disappointing denouement. Tested by the standard of achievement attained in The Bed Badge of Courage and The Open Boat, this miscellaneous collection is decidedly disappointing. But there are at least half-a-dozen things in it which emphasise the regret inspired by the premature removal of this richly endowed, if undisciplined, genius.

  From: The New Review, No. 80, January 1896, p.30-40

  A REMARKABLE BOOK

  All men are aware of antagonism and desire, or at the least are conscious, even in the nursery, that their hearts are the destined theatres of these emotions; all have felt or heard of their violence; all know that, unlike other emotions, these must often be translated into the glittering drama of decisive speech and deed; all, in short, expect to be lovers, and peer at the possibility of fighting. And yet how hard it is for the tried to compare notes, for the untried to anticipate experience! Love and war have been the themes of song and story in every language since the beginning of the world, lovemaking and fighting the supreme romances of most men and most nations; but any one man
knows little enough of either beyond the remembered record of his own chances and achievements, and knows still less whither to turn in order to learn more. We resent this ignorance as a slur on our manhood, and snatch at every chance of dispelling it. And at first, in the scientific “climate” of our time, we are disposed to ask for documents: for love-letters, and letters written from the field of battle. These we imagine, if collected and classified, might supply the evidence for an induction. But, on second thoughts, we remember that such love-letters as have been published are, for the most part, not nearer to life than romantic literature, but further removed from it by many stages: that they are feeble echoes of conventional art — not immediate reflections, but blurred impressions of used plates carelessly copied from meretricious paintings. And so it is with the evidence at first hand upon war. The letters and journals of soldiers and subordinate officers in the field are often of a more pathetic interest than most love-letters; but to the searcher after truth they are still disappointing, for they deal almost exclusively with matters beyond the possibilities of the writer’s acquaintance. They are all of surmises — of what dear ones are doing at home, or of the enemy’s intentions and the general’s plans for outwitting him: they reflect the writer’s love and professional ambition, but hardly ever the new things he has heard and seen and felt. And when they attempt these things they sink to the level of the love-letters, and become mere repetitions of accepted forms.

  I can remember one letter from an English private, describing an engagement in which some eighty men were killed and wounded out of a force of eight thousand: he wrote of comrades in his own battalion “falling like sheep,” and gave no clue to the country in which he served. It might have been in Siberia or the Sahara, against savages or civilised troops; you could glean nothing except that he had listened to patriotic songs in music halls at home. Perhaps the most intimate love-letters and battle-letters never get printed at all. But, as it is, you cannot generalise from collections of documents as you can from collections of ferns and beetles: there is not, and there never can be, a science of the perceptions and emotions which thrill young lovers and recruits. The modern soldier is a little less laconic than his mediaeval forbear. Indeed he could hardly surpass the tantalising reserve of, say, Thomas Denyes, a gentleman who fights at Towton, and sums up the carnage of thirty-eight thousand men in a single sentence:—”Oure Soveraign Lord hath wonne the feld.” But it is astonishing to note how little even the modern soldier manages to say. He receives rude and swift answers in the field to the questions that haunted his boyish dreams, but he keeps the secret with masonic self-possession.

  Marbot’s Memoirs and, in a lesser degree, Tomkinson’s Diary of a Cavalry Officer are both admirable as personal accounts of the Peninsular Campaign, but the warfare they describe is almost as obsolete as that of the Roses, and, even if it were not so, they scarcely attempt the recreation of intense moments by the revelation of their imprint on the minds that endured them. And, on the score of art and of reticence, one is glad that they do not. Their authors were gallant soldiers waging war in fact, and not artists reproducing it in fiction. They satisfy the special curiosity of men interested in strategy and tactics, not the universal curiosity of Man the potential Combatant. He is fascinated by the picturesque and emotional aspects of battle, and the experts tell him little of either. To gratify that curiosity you must turn from the Soldier to the Artist, who is trained both to see and tell, or inspired, even without seeing, to divine what things have been and must be. Some may rebel against accepting his evidence, since it is impossible to prove the truth of his report. But it is equally impossible to prove the beauty of his accomplishment. Yet both are patent to every one capable of accepting truth or beauty, and by a surer warrant than any chance coincidence of individual experience and taste.

  Mr. Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage (London: Heinemann), is a great artist, with something new to say, and consequently, with a new way of saying it. His theme, indeed, is an old one, but old themes re-handled anew in the light of novel experience, are the stuff out of which masterpieces are made, and in The Red Badge of Courage Mr. Crane has surely contrived a masterpiece. He writes of war — the ominous and alluring possibility for every man, since the heir of all the ages has won and must keep his inheritance by secular combat. The conditions of the age-long contention have changed and will change, but its certainty is coeval with progress: so long as there are things worth fighting for fighting will last, and the fashion of fighting will change under the reciprocal stresses of rival inventions. Hence its double interest of abiding necessity and ceaseless variation. Of all these variations the most marked has followed, within the memory of most of us, upon the adoption of long-range weapons of precision, and continues to develop, under our eyes, with the development of rapidity in firing. And yet, with the exception of Zola’s la Debacle, no considerable attempt has been made to pourtray war under its new conditions. The old stories are less trustworthy than ever as guides to the experiences which a man may expect in battle and to the emotions which those experiences are likely to arouse. No doubt the prime factors in the personal problem — the chances of death and mutilation — continue to be about the same. In these respects it matters little whether you are pierced by a bullet at two thousand yards or stabbed at hands’ play with a dagger. We know that the most appalling death-rolls of recent campaigns have been more than equalled in ancient warfare; and, apart from history, it is clear that, unless one side runs away, neither can win save by the infliction of decisive losses. But although these personal risks continue to be essentially the same, the picturesque and emotional aspects of war are completely altered by every change in the shape and circumstance of imminent death. And these are the fit materials for literature — the things which even dull men remember with the undying imagination of poets, but which, for lack of the writer’s art, they cannot communicate. The sights flashed indelibly on the retina of the eye; the sounds that after long silences suddenly cypher; the stenches that sicken in after-life at any chance allusion to decay; or, stirred by these, the storms of passions that force yells of defiance out of inarticulate clowns; the winds of fear that sweep by night along prostrate ranks, with the acceleration of trains and the noise as of a whole town waking from nightmare with stertorous, indrawn gasps — these colossal facts of the senses and the soul are the only colours in which the very image of war can be painted. Mr. Crane has composed his palette with these colours, and has painted a picture that challenges comparison with the most vivid scenes of Tolstoi’s la Guerre et la Paix or of Zola’s la Debacle. This is unstinted praise, but I feel bound to give it after reading the book twice and comparing it with Zola’s Sédan and Tolstoi’s account of Rostow’s squadron for the first time under fire. Indeed, I think that Mr. Crane’s picture of war is more complete than Tolstoi’s, more true than Zola’s. Rostow’s sensations are conveyed by Tolstoi with touches more subtile than any to be found even in his Sebastopol, but they make but a brief passage in a long book, much else of which is devoted to the theory that Napoleon and his marshals were mere waifs on a tide of humanity or to the analysis of divers characters exposed to civilian experiences. Zola, on the other hand, compiles an accurate catalogue of almost all that is terrible and nauseating in war; but it is his own catalogue of facts made in cold blood, and not the procession of flashing images shot through the senses into one brain and fluctuating there with its rhythm of exaltation and fatigue. La Debacle gives the whole truth, the truth of science, as it is observed by a shrewd intellect, but not the truth of experience as it is felt in fragments magnified or diminished in accordance with the patient’s mood. The terrible things in war are not always terrible; the nauseating things do not always sicken. On the contrary, it is even these which sometimes lift the soul to heights from which they become invisible. And, again, at other times, it is the little miseries of most ignoble insignificance which fret through the last fibres of endurance.

  Mr. Cran
e, for his distinction, has hit on a new device, or at least on one which has never been used before with such consistency and effect. In order to show the features of modern war, he takes a subject — a youth with a peculiar temperament, capable of exaltation and yet morbidly sensitive. Then he traces the successive impressions made on such a temperament, from minute to minute, during two days of heavy fighting. He stages the drama of war, so to speak, within the mind of one man, and then admits you as to a theatre. You may, if you please, object that this youth is unlike most other young men who serve in the ranks, and that the same events would have impressed the average man differently; but you are convinced that this man’s soul is truly drawn, and that the impressions made in it are faithfully rendered. The youth’s temperament is merely the medium which the artist has chosen: that it is exceptionally plastic makes but for the deeper incision of his work. It follows from Mr. Crane’s method that he creates by his art even such a first-hand report of war as we seek in vain among the journals and letters of soldiers. But the book is not written in the form of an autobiography: the author narrates. He is therefore at liberty to give scenery and action, down to the slightest gestures and outward signs of inward elation or suffering, and he does this with the vigour and terseness of a master. Had he put his descriptions of scenery and his atmospheric effects, or his reports of overheard conversations, into the mouth of his youth, their very excellence would have belied all likelihood. Yet in all his descriptions and all his reports he confines himself only to such things as that youth heard and saw, and, of these, only to such as influenced his emotions. By this compromise he combines the strength and truth of a monodrama with the directness and colour of the best narrative prose. The monodrama suffices for the lyrical emotion of Tennyson’s Maud; but in Browning’s Martin Relf you feel the constraint of a form which in his Ring and the Book entails repetition often intolerable.