“But of Mr. Crane’s other manner, in which, on the whole, he is at his best, is not this excellent?
Now Gates had a singular adventure on the second morning after his arrival at Atlanta to take his post as a major in the 37th.
He was in his tent, writing, when suddenly the flap was flung away and a tall young private stepped inside.
“Well, Maje,” said the newcomer, genially, “how goes it?”
The major’s head flashed up, but he spoke without heat.
“Come to attention and salute.”
“Huh!” said the private.
“Come to attention and salute.”
The private looked at him in resentful amazement, and then inquired:
“Ye ain’t mad, are ye? Ain’t nothin’ to get huffy about, is there?”
“I –. Come to attention and salute.”
“Well,” drawled the private, as he stared, “seein1 as ye are so darn perticular, I don’t care if I do — if it’ll make yer meals set on yer stick any better.”
Drawing a long breath and grinning ironically, he lazily pulled his heels together and saluted with a flourish.
“There,” he said, with a return to his earlier genial manner. “How’s that suit ye, Maje?”
There was a silence which to an impartial observer would have seemed pregnant with dynamite and bloody death. Then the major cleared his throat and coldly said:
“And now, what is your business?”
“Who — me?” asked the private. “Oh, I just sorter dropped in.” With a deeper meaning he added: “Sorter dropped in in a friendly way, thinkin’ ye was mebbe a different kind of a feller from what ye be.”
The inference was clearly marked.
It was now Gates’s turn to stare, and stare he unfeignedly did.
“Go back to your quarters,” he said at length.
The volunteer became very angry.
“Oh, ye needn’t be so up-in-th’-air, need ye? Don’t know’s I’m dead anxious to inflict my company on yer since I’ve had a good look at ye. There may be men in this here battalion what’s had just as much edjewcation as you have, and I’m damned if they ain’t got better manners. Good-mornin’,” he said, with dignity; and, passing out of the tent, he flung the flap back in place with an air of slamming it as if it had been a door.
“Mr. Crane wrote little that is, in its own way, better than that. The pity is that of all kinds of work which he did we shall see nothing new again.”
From: Overland Monthly, V. XXVIII, No. 164, August 1896, p.235
The Red Badge of Courage. (Overland Monthly, V. XXVIII, No. 164, August 1896)
For one I fail to find the charm of the much lauded ‘Red Badge of Courage. To me it is nothing more than a hysterical, badly written account of somebody’s conception of a battle from a private point of view. Privates and Officers may all act as though they were tipsy during an engagement, they may all swear and scream, use bad grammar and rush about as though they were headless, but I doubt it. What is more to the point the G. A. R’s of my circle laugh at it. The book may be a classic, an equal to Tolstoi’s and Zola’s war pictures. It has so been designated. It may also be trash.
From: Hamilton Literary Magazine, New Series, V. I, No. 1, June 1896, p.41
Hamilton Literary Magazine, New Series, V. I, No. 1, June 1896
In the Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane has given us a kind of literary poster. This is the poster age and our mental vision is pleased with the array of contrasting colors and the rude strength of the design. The book is vivid and exciting. It holds the attention so that one pays no heed to crudities and extreme color effects, which might seem ludicrous to his calmer judgment.
It is the story of a raw recruit, “The Youth,” and his gradual transformation into a brave soldier. He is refreshingly natural and runs away, just as any ordinary man might. But he “lives to fight another day,” and finally shows true courage. The scene is the civil war, the place chiefly amid the smoke of battle. It is no geographical novel and is scarcely more definite than this.
From: Life, V. XXVII, No. 688, March 5, 1896, p.176-177
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR.
The writer in an English review who recently advanced a biological argument for the imminence of war, founded on a certain fever of the blood and nerves that seems to be infecting all nations at the present time and driving men ahead to inevitable conflict, could buttress his reasoning with the tons of novels of fighting and bloodshed that are now being read. The “woman problem” has become a pale and unsubstantial phantom in fiction ; and one may be glad that it has been shelved even if it took a baptism of blood to do it. Americans can rejoice that while England sent us the pestilence of the new-woman novel and play, we have furnished England with the most potent antidote for the poison yet found in Stephen Crane’s surprisingly vivid story “The Red Badge of Courage.” English critics have boomed it with a unanimity that seems almost inspired, and now that the book is beginning to be read in its native land they are making their accustomed remarks about Americans not knowing their own best books until they have been revealed to them by Englishmen. They have forgotten that Stevenson’s first big popular success was American, and that “Trilby” languished for nearly a year in England after its tremendous popularity here.
The happy accident of a big literary success is not confined to any country. It has been Mr. Crane’s good fortune to have for his English publisher an astute young man who knows the ropes in literary London, and who also owns an ably edited review in which “The Red Badge of Courage” is honored with a leading article.
***
The best thing about the present success of the book is that it is not undeserved. It is written with wonderful power and, what is better, with an admirable reserve. In every chapter you are made to feel that the author has stopped short of the familiar device of melodrama—”piling on the agony.” The realism, the horror, the madness of war are painted, but when the author has plunged in the dagger he does not twist it around superfluously. That is an unusual bit of restraint for a young writer, and Mr. Crane is young.
The Universal Peace Society might circulate this novel as a tract, and we recommend that the first copy be presented to Senator Lodge, and the second (judiciously marked with a red pencil) to Senator Morgan. After Congress has been supplied, a few copies could be well placed in Harvard — although the wise words of James C. Carter at the Harvard and Princeton dinners ought to have made the peace evangelization of the great eastern universities unnecessary.
No brave man or no coward can read this story through and feel that war is a blessing to the individual or to the race. The psychology of war as here presented is that no man is a good soldier until the savage instincts that still cling to him from the beasts and barbarians, from which he has been evolved by centuries of effort, have been aroused in the presence of actual conflict. A battle as pictured by Mr. Crane is the reversion to barbarism of a hundred thousand men by force of their association for that one object. The patriotic idea that was back of the civil war is not lost sight of; it is revealed as the one justification of the awful sacrifice. But Mr. Crane throws no glamour about the actualities of war itself. For the two days of the fight the decent young hero from a prosperous northern farm becomes a savage. You see the tiger slowly awake in him, and the man of affection, unselfishness, and gentle feeling disappears in the smoke of battle.
Droch.
From: The Academy, No. 1524, July 20, 1901, p. 53
Great Battles of the World by Stephen Crane
The late Stephen Crane’s surprising analysis of the passion of war, in his Red Badge of Courage, and other stories, led an American editor to commission him to write the descriptions of certain historic contests. This book is the result. It is not Mr. Crane at his best; indeed, it is hardly Mr. Crane at all. The writing has spirit, and a very fair general impression of the character of each battle is imparted, because Mr. Crane was a good journalist who could execute orders; b
ut his peculiar quality, his psychological intensity, is lacking; nor, in fact, could it well be present, in accordance with the historical scheme of the work.
From: The Critic, V. XXXVIII, No. 1, January 1901, p.88
Crane: Wounds in the Rain by Stephen Crane
Stokes, $1.50. Great Battles of the World. By Stephen Crane. Lippincott, $1.50.
Two of Stephen Crane’s posthumous volumes reach us simultaneously. The former is a collection of short stories relating to the American campaign in the “fest Indies. The author was a newspaper correspondent in Cuba in I898, and his record of personal experiences is as vivid as the record of imaginary experiences in “The Red Badge of Courage.” They could not well be more so. Indeed, Mr. Crane’s war stories, written after he had been through two campaigns, strongly confirm the story of a battle written before he had ever smelt gunpowder. That story pictured the thing as ‘the writer fancied it would have seemed to him if he had seen it, and what he wrote afterwards showed that he had judged rightly of the way it would have impressed him. “The Red Badge” was the story of a temperament, and the temperament was Crane’s. “Wounds in the Rain” is the work of a born storyteller. It is one thing to imagine how one would have felt and acted in a certain battle, or to tell what one actually felt and did under fire; but it is a very different thing from either of these to give an historical account of battles which have been repeatedly described by eye-witnesses and later historians, with whose works the world is familiar. The author is constrained by the knowledge that his fancy must render a rigid account of itself, that he will be detected in the slightest departure from the well-known facts in each case. Hence no one should be surprised at finding his “ Great Battles of the World “ very unlike Mr. Crane’s other war books, and less significant than his fictitious battle-pieces. The accounts of Bunker Hill, Vittoria, New Orleans, etc., are well enough in their way, but there is nothing notable about them. Any experienced storyteller could have written them, whereas no one but Crane could have written “The Red Badge.”
From: The Literary Digest, V. XV, No. 8, June 19, 1897, p.218
STEPHEN CRANE’S NEW STORY.
The English reviewers claim to have been the first to discover Mr. Stephen Crane, and they are by no means ashamed, as yet, of their discovery. While the only notices we have, up to this writing, seen of Mr. Crane’s latest book, “The Third Violet.” in American journals, including one by R. H. Stoddard, dismiss it in a decidedly contemptuous fashion. The Athenaeum and The Academy, of London, find in it ample reason to repeat their affirmations concerning the author’s genius and to place him in the front rank of English and American writers.
Here, for instance, is the way the review in the New York Home Journal closes:
“It is impossible to see the argument for writing books of this character. This young author, however, has unquestionably more than an average ability. The mystery remains that he should direct it into such channels. There is not a word to be said in favor of ‘The Third Violet,’ whose reason, even for its name, does not appear till we reach the last page.”
And here is the way the London Academy closes a review of considerable length:
“Mr. Crane’s dialog, so far at least as it has sentiment for an element, depends for its charm upon the absolute assurance of its fitness for the purpose and the people. In the same way the brilliant rays he throws from moment to moment upon the insensible environment of his characters are a joy, not as bearing any mystic or symbolical relation to the narrative in which they occur; the sky is not clouded when his hero’s prospects are overcast, nor do the clouds pour out water when his heroine weeps: they are effective because inanimate nature is pictured with just such flashes of observation as the senses will still busily register while the intellect. So far as it is the servant of the will, is concentrated wholly upon a different matter. Human fates and passions thus are shown in their due proportion, in their right relation — none the less all-important to their patients because, to all appearance, nugatory in the general process.
“By this latest product of his genius our impression of Mr. Crane is confirmed: that for psychological insight, for dramatic ‘intensity, and for potency of phrase he is already in the front rank of English and American writers of fiction; and that he possesses a certain separate quality which places him apart. It is a short story and a slender; but taking it in conjunction with what he has previously given us, there remains, in our judgment, no room for doubt.”
The Athenaeum, the most scholarly of the English reviews, is equally as much delighted:
“As we began to read Mr. S. Crane’s novel ‘The Third Violet’ we thought it was outside the list of his works of genius, and an attempt at a new departure into which less brain-power had been put. It makes little demand upon the reader, and flows almost as smoothly as the ‘Dolly Dialogs.’ But before the middle of this American love-story was reached we found reason to change our view, and to recognize a. vividness of portraiture which puts ‘The Third Violet’ on a high level — higher, we think, than Mr. Crane’s very different ‘Maggie,’ tho perhaps lower than ‘The Little Regiment,’ which is also very different. In his present book Mr. Crane is more the rival of Mr. Henry James than of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. But he is intensely American, which can hardly be said of Mr. Henry James, and it is possible that if he continues in his present line of writing he may be the author who will introduce the United States to the ordinary English world. We have never come across a book that brought certain sections of American society so perfectly before the reader as does .The Third Violet,’ which introduces us to a farming family, to the boarders at a summer hotel, and to the young artists of New York. The picture is an extremely pleasant one, and its truth appeals to the English reader, so that the effect of the book is to draw him nearer to his American cousins. ‘The Third Violet’ incidentally contains the best dog that we have come across in modern fiction. Mr. Crane’s dialog is excellent, and it is dialog of a type for which neither ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ nor his later books had prepared us. For example, a reference to China, before an artist hero, produces the reflection: ‘There are innumerable tobacco-jars in China. . . . Moreover, there is no perspective. You don’t have to walk two miles to see a friend.’ Some understanding will really have to be come to between us and the Americans, and our colonists in Australia and elsewhere, as to the English language. If they are going to produce writers who are so certain to be read throughout the English world as Mr. Stephen Crane, our people will have to learn the meaning of many American phrases.”
The book is about an artist, Billie Hawker, who on returning for a visit to the farm of his father, a poor and uncultivated man, meets Grace Fanhall, a rich heiress, who comes to the village at the same time to summer at the Hemlock Inn. They fall in love with each other, but Hawker can not persuade himself that he has any chance whatever to win the rich heiress. Even her attempts to encourage him are misinterpreted, and they return to New York without his being able to overcome his self-distrust. The story follows them to New York, where the gift of the third violet leads to mutual understanding.
From: The Nation, V. 63, No. 1618, July 2, 1896, p. 15
The Nation, V. 63, No. 1618, July 2, 1896
The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War. — Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. By Stephen Crane. D. Appleton & Co. — George’s Mother: By Stephen Crane. London and New York: Edward Arnold. 1896.
Mr. Stephen Crane is said never to have seen a battle; but his first book, ‘The Red Badge of Courage,’ is made up of the account of one. The success of the story, however, is due, not merely to what Mr. Crane knows of battle-fields, but to what he knows of the human heart. He describes the adventures of a private — a raw recruit — in one of those long engagements, so common in our civil war, and indeed in all modern wars, in which the field of battle is too extensive for those in one part of it to know what is going on elsewhere, and where often a regiment remains in ignorance for some time w
hether it is victorious or defeated, where the nature of the country prevents hand-to-hand fighting, and a coup d’oeil of the whole scene is out of the question. In such an action Mr. Crane’s hero plays an active part. It is what goes on in his mind that we hear of, and his experience is in part so exactly what old soldiers tell young soldiers to expect that Mr. Crane might easily have got it at second-hand. The hero is at first mortally afraid that he is going to be afraid, he then does his duty well enough, but later is seized with a panic and runs away, only to come out a hero again in the end. His panic and flight are managed well; the accidental wound which he luckily gets in running, helps him to a reputation for bravery before he has earned it. When he fights in the end, he fights like a devil, he saves the regimental flag, he is insane with the passion of battle; he is baptized into the brotherhood of those who have been to hell and returned alive. The book is undeniably clever; its vice is over-emphasis. Mr. Crane has not learnt the secret that carnage is itself eloquent, and does not need epithets to make it so. What is a “crimson roar”? Do soldiers hear crimson roars, or do they hear simply roars? If this way of getting expression out of language is allowable, why not extend it to the other senses, and have not only crimson sounds, but purple smells, prehensile views, adhesive music? Color In language is just now a fashionable affectation; Mr. Crane’s originality does not lie in falling into it. ‘George’s Mother’ is the story of a degenerate drunkard who breaks his mother’s heart; ‘Maggie’ is a story of the Bowery, in the “dialect” of “Chimmie Fadden.”
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 210
