Mr. Crane discovers his youth, Henry Fleming, in a phase of disillusion. It is some monotonous months since boyish “visions of broken-bladed glory” impelled him to enlist in the Northern Army towards the middle of the” American war. That impulse is admirably given:—”One night as he lay in bed, the winds had carried to him the clangouring of the church bells, as some enthusiast jerked the rope frantically to tell the twisted news of a great battle. This voice of the people rejoicing in the night had made him shiver in a prolonged ecstasy of excitement. Later he had gone down to his mother’s room, and had spoken thus: ‘Ma, I’m going to enlist.’ ‘Henry, don’t you be a fool,’ his mother had replied. She had then covered her face with the quilt. There was an end to the matter for that night.” But the next morning he enlists. He is impatient of the homely injunctions given him in place of the heroic speech he expects in accordance with a tawdry convention, and so departs, with a “vague feeling of relief.” But, looking back from the gate, he sees his mother “kneeling among the potato parings. Her brown face upraised and stained with tears, her spare form quivering.” Since then the army has done “little but sit still and try to keep warm” till he has “grown to regard himself merely as a part of a vast blue demonstration.” In the sick langour of this waiting, he begins to suspect his courage and lies awake by night through hours of morbid introspection. He tries “to prove to himself mathematically that he would not run from a battle “; he constantly leads the conversation round to the problem of courage in order to gauge the confidence of his messmates.
“How do you know you won’t run when the time comes?” asked the youth. “Run?” said the loud one, “run? — of course not!” He laughed. “Well,” continued the youth, “lots of good-a-’nough men have thought they was going to do great things before the fight, but when the time come they skedaddled.” “Oh, that’s all true, I s’pose,” replied the other,” but I’m not going to skedaddle. The man that bets on my running will lose his money, that’s all.” He nodded confidently.
The youth is a “mental outcast” among his comrades, “wrestling with his personal problem,” and sweating as he listens to the muttered scoring of a card game, his eyes fixed on the “red, shivering reflection of a fire.” Every day they drill; every night they watch the red campfires of the enemy on the far shore of a river, eating their hearts out. At last they march:—” In the gloom before the break of the day their uniforms glowed a deep purple blue. From across the river the red eyes were still peering. In the eastern sky there was a yellow patch, like a rug laid for the feet of the coming sun; and against it, black and pattern-like, loomed the gigantic figure of the colonel on a gigantic horse.” The book is full of such vivid impressions, half of sense and half of imagination: — The columns as they marched “were like two serpents crawling from the cavern of night.” But the march, which, in his boyish imagination, should have led forthwith into melodramatic action is but the precursor of other marches. After days of weariness and nights of discomfort, at last, as in life, without preface, and in a lull of the mind’s anxiety, the long-dreaded and long-expected is suddenly and smoothly in process of accomplishment:—” One grey morning he was kicked on the leg by the tall soldier, and then, before he was entirely awake, he found himself running down a wood road in the midst of men who were panting with the first effects of speed. His canteen banged rhythmically upon his thigh, and his haversack bobbed softly. His musket bounced a trifle from his shoulder at each stride and made his cap feel uncertain upon his head.” From this moment, reached on the thirtieth page, the drama races through another hundred and sixty pages to the end of the book, and to read those pages is in itself an experience of breathless, lambent, detonating life. So brilliant and detached are the images evoked that, like illuminated bodies actually seen, they leave their fever-bright phantasms floating before the brain. You may shut the book, but you still see the battle-flags “jerked about madly in the smoke,” or sinking with “dying gestures of despair,” the men “dropping here and there like bundles”; the captain shot dead with “an astonished and sorrowful look as if he thought some friend had done him an ill-turn” ; and the litter of corpses, “twisted in fantastic contortions,” as if “ they had fallen from some great height, dumped out upon the ground from the sky.” The book is full of sensuous impressions that leap out from the picture: of gestures, attitudes, grimaces, that flash into portentous definition, like faces from the climbing clouds of nightmare. It leaves the imagination bounded with a “dense wall of smoke, furiously slit and slashed by the knife-like fire from the rifles.” It leaves, in short, such indelible traces as are left by the actual experience of war. The picture shows grisly shadows and vermilion splashes, but, as in the vast drama it reflects so truly, these features, though insistent, are small in size, and are lost in the immensity of the theatre. The tranquil forest stands around; the “fairy-blue of the sky” is over it all. And, as in the actual experience of war, the impressions which these startling features inflict, though acute, are localised and not too deep: are as it were mere pin-pricks, or, at worst, clean cuts from a lancet in a body thrilled with currents of physical excitement and sopped with anaesthetics of emotion. Here is the author’s description of a forlorn hope: —
As the regiment swung from its position out into a cleared space the woods and thickets before it awakened. Yellow flames leaped toward it from many directions. The line swung straight for a moment. Then the right wing swung forward; it in turn was surpassed by the left. Afterward the centre careered to the front until the regiment was a wedge-shaped mass.... the men, pitching forward insanely, had burst into cheerings, mob-like and barbaric, but tuned in strange keys that can arouse the dullard and the stoic.... There was the delirium that encounters despair and death, and is heedless and blind to odds.... Presently the straining pace ate up the energies of the men. As if by agreement, the leaders began to slacken their speed. The volleys directed against them had a seeming wind-like effect. The regiment snorted and blew. Among some stolid trees it began to falter and hesitate.... The youth had a vague belief that he had run miles, and he thought, in a way, that he was now in some new and unknown land....
The charge withers away, and the lieutenant, the youth, and his friend run forward to rally the regiment.
In front of the colours three men began to bawl, “Come on! Come on!” They danced and gyrated like tortured savages. 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. Toward 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 corner of his mouth. Within him, as he hurled forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag that was near him. It was a creation of beauty and invulnerability. It was a goddess radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture to him. It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the voice of his hopes. Because no harm could come to it he endowed it with power. He kept near, as if it could be a saver of lives, and an imploring cry went from his mind.
This passage directly challenges comparison with Zola’s scene, in which the lieutenant and the old tradition, of an invincible Frenchman over-running the world “between his bottle and his girl,” expire together among the morsels of a bullet-eaten flag. Mr. Crane has probably read la Debacle, and wittingly threw down his glove. One can only say that he is justified of his courage.
Mr. Crane’s method, when dealing with things seen and heard, is akin to Zola’s: he omits nothing and extenuates nothing, save the actual blasphemy and obscenity of a sol
dier’s oaths. These he indicates, sufficiently for any purpose of art, by brief allusions to their vigour and variety. Even Zola has rarely surpassed the appalling realism of Jim Conklin’s death in Chapter X. Indeed, there is little to criticise in Mr. Crane’s observation, except an undue subordination of the shrill cry of bullets to the sharp crashing of rifles. He omits the long chromatic whine defining its invisible arc in the air, and the fretful snatch a few feet from the listener’s head. In addition to this gift of observation, Mr. Crane has at command the imaginative phrase. The firing follows a retreat as with “yellings of eager metallic hounds”; the men at their mechanic loading and firing are like “ fiends jigging heavily in the smoke “; in a lull before the attack “ there passed slowly the intense moments that precede the tempest”; then, after single shots, “the battle roar settled to a rolling thunder, which was a single long explosion.” And, as I have said, when Mr. Crane deals with things felt he gives a truer report than Zola. He postulates his hero’s temperament — a day-dreamer given over to morbid self-analysis who enlists, not from any deep-seated belief in the holiness of fighting for his country, but in hasty pursuit of a vanishing ambition. This choice enables Mr. Crane to double his picturesque advantage with an ethical advantage equally great. Not only is his youth, like the sufferer in The Fall of the House of Usher, super-sensitive to every pin-prick of sensation: he is also a delicate meter of emotion and fancy. In such a nature the waves of feeling take exaggerated curves, and hallucination haunts the brain. Thus, when awaiting the first attack, his mind is thronged with vivid images of a circus he had seen as a boy: it is there in definite detail, even as the Apothecary’s shop usurps Romeo’s mind at the crisis of his fate. And thus also, like Herodotus’ Aristodemus, he vacillates between cowardice and heroism. Nothing could well be more subtile than his self-deception and that sudden enlightenment which leads him to “throw aside his mental pamphlets on the philosophy of the retreated and rules for the guidance of the damned.” His soul is of that kind which, “sick with self-love,” can only be saved “so as by fire “; and it is saved when the battle-bond of brotherhood is born within it, and is found plainly of deeper import than the cause for which he and his comrades fight, even as that cause is loftier than his personal ambition. By his choice of a hero Mr. Crane displays in the same work a pageant of the senses and a tragedy of the soul.
But he does not obtrude his moral. The “tall soldier” and the lieutenant are brave and content throughout, the one by custom as a veteran, the other by constitution as a hero. But the two boys, the youth and his friend, “the loud soldier,” are at first querulous braggarts, but at the last they are transmuted by danger until either might truly say: —
“We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind;
It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned.”
Let no man cast a stone of contempt at these two lads during their earlier weakness until he has fully gauged the jarring discordance of battle. To be jostled on a platform when you have lost your luggage and missed your train on an errand of vital importance gives a truer pre-taste of war than any field-day; yet many a well-disciplined man will denounce the universe upon slighter provocation. It is enough that these two were boys and that they became men.
Yet must it be said that this youth’s emotional experience was singular. In a battle there are a few physical cowards, abjects born with defective circulations, who literally turn blue at the approach of danger, and a few on whom danger acts like the keen, rare atmosphere of snow-clad peaks. But between these extremes come many to whom danger is as strong wine, with the multitude which gladly accepts the “iron laws of tradition” and finds welcome support in “a moving box.” To this youth, as the cool dawn of his first day’s fighting changed by infinitesimal gradations to a feverish noon, the whole evolution pointed to “a trap”; but I have seen another youth under like circumstances toss a pumpkin into the air and spit it on his sword. To this youth the very landscape was filled with “the stealthy approach of death.” You are convinced by the author’s art that it was so to this man. But to others, as the clamour increases, it is as if the serenity of the morning had taken refuge in their brains. This man “stumbles over the stones as he runs breathlessly forward “; another realises for the first time how right it is to be adroit even in running. The movement of his body becomes an art, which is not self-conscious, since its whole intention is to impress others within the limits of a modest decorum. We know that both love and courage teach this mastery over the details of living. You can tell from the way one woman, out of all the myriads, walks down Piccadilly, that she is at last aware of love. And you can tell from the way a man enters a surgery or runs toward a firing-line that he, too, realises how wholly the justification of any one life lies in its perfect adjustment to others. The woman in love, the man in battle, may each say, for their moment, with the artist, “I was made perfect too.” They also are of the few to whom “God whispers in the ear.”
But had Mr. Crane taken an average man he would have written an ordinary story, whereas he has written one which is certain to last. It is glorious to see his youth discover courage in the bed-rock of primeval antagonism after the collapse of his tinsel bravado; it is something higher to see him raise upon that rock the temple of resignation. Mr. Crane, as an artist, achieves by his singleness of purpose a truer and completer picture of war than either Tolstoi, bent also upon proving the insignificance of heroes, or Zola, bent also upon prophesying the regeneration of France. That is much; but it is more that his work of art, when completed, chimes with the universal experience of mankind; that his heroes find in their extreme danger, if not confidence in their leaders and conviction in their cause, at least the conviction that most men do what they can or, at most, what they must. We have few good accounts of battles — many of shipwrecks; and we know that, just as the storm rises, so does the commonplace captain show as a god, and the hysterical passenger as a cheerful heroine.
It is but a further step to recognise all life for a battle and this earth for a vessel lost in space. We may then infer that virtues easy in moments of distress may be useful also in everyday experience.
George Wyndham.
From: The Idler, V. 26, 1904, p.334-336
Excerpted from “The Idlers’ Club,” by Robert Barr
Three “Idler” Books
In the year that is drawing to a close The Idler has given three books to the publishing world, which are: “The Club of Queer Trades,” issued by Harper & Brothers; “The Byways of Empire,” consisting of those clever stories about Carington, the Indian policeman, by Mayne Lindsay, which is put forth by Ward, Lock & Co.; and “The O’Ruddy,” published by Methuen & Co. It will be interesting to read what the critics have to say about Gilbert Chesterton’s “Club of Queer Trades.” Whatever the verdict, I shall still maintain that this book is the one original effort that has been accomplished during 1904. The drawings by Mr. Chesterton may be the one original thing done in art during the past year, but of that I am not so certain. Be this as it may, I advise everyone who possesses any of the last half-dozen numbers of The Idler to sit tight on them, for they will yet be sold for high prices in London auction rooms all along of these Chesterton contributions in pen and pencil.
The rollicking O’Ruddy, who swaggered his way through these pages, proved, when bound in cloth, to be among the six best selling books of the year. I confess I looked forward with apprehension to the reviews of “The O’Ruddy,” for there is quite a justifiable prejudice against the action of a man who finishes another man’s book. I escaped the ordeal, however, by being out of the country when the criticisms of the novel appeared, and so have not read even one of them. When authors are bludgeoned by the Press they usually take refuge in a statement t
hat they do not read what is written of their work. I read all that happens along, but do not go out of my way to seek for trouble. I never belonged to a clipping agency, for, being a Scotchman, I grudge the banging of sixpence for three short items when I can buy a whole newspaper for a penny. The Idler, however, has always subscribed to a clipping bureau, and so, whenever there is a reference in the Press to Dr. Johnson’s “Idler,” or to the play of that name, or to what-you-call-them’s houseboat named “The Idler,” up the river, the magazine gets the benefit of these titbits of news. I am constantly receiving newspaper eulogies of Mrs. Amelia E. Barr, sent in by clipping agencies as an inducement for me to subscribe, but I have always resisted the temptation. I was pleased, however, to learn from my publishers on my return, that the critics had treated me exceedingly well. Even if the verdict had been, “Not guilty, but don’t do it again,” I could give a guarantee to observe the latter clause, because I shall never more attempt to complete what someone else has written.
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 205
