Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  Of “The Open Boat,” the Criterion says: “So searching is the psychology of the narrative, so vivid is the description of the sea, which is represented, not as Hugo pictures it, as a monster fiend, clutching at man for a prey, but as an utterly indifferent power; and so striking are the phrases which be jewel this story that it must take its place among the short-prose classics of our language. It is completely American in its tone, and completely individual in its treatment.”

  From: The Bookman, V. II, No.3, November 1895, p.217-220

  NEW BOOKS. THE NOVELS OF TWO JOURNALISTS.

  The question whether journalism helps or hinders a writer to create literature has recently been discussed by the local press with fresh interest, and the discussion is likely to continue for a long time, inasmuch as the controversialists seek to reach general conclusions where no general conclusion can be reached. Meantime, two novels from newspaper men of New York furnish a contribution to the revival of the subject, whether or not they be accepted as proof on the one side or the other. The authors, Mr. Stephen Crane and Mr. Edward W. Townsend, are both engaged-in active journalism, and in the work which first distinguishes them from the army of anonymous writers there is a degree of resemblance. Each in his first work of fiction deals with the slums, finding the light of his art in the shadows of the under-world which his profession forced him to penetrate. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Mr. Crane’s first expression of the deep feeling of life thus imbibed is among the saddest books in our language. Mr. Townsend, writing from the same standpoint, touches these terrible problems with alleviating humour, thus increasing rather than lessening the conviction of his sympathy and earnestness. Smiles at “Chimmie Fadden’s” extravagances serve to make more acute the pathos of his early life, as the readiest laughter lies always closest to the quickest tears. So far the literary careers of the two journalists may be said to have run on somewhat parallel lines; but in their new books they part company widely, one taking a different theme and the other a different manner. It is a far cry from the field in which Mr. Crane first appeared to The Red Badge of Courage, his last book — so very far indeed that he seems to have lost himself as well as his reader. Mr. Townsend still holds to the Bowery as the central scene of his new novel, A Daughter of the Tenements, but his manner is essentially different. It is a serious work, wanting the whimsical fun that made his first book delightful and the inimitable slang that made it unique. Nor is it distinctively local as his previous work was; the Battery is not its boundary, and the characters are not all products of Mulberry Bend. Its scope is as wide as the continent, stretching from New York to San Francisco, touching high as well as low life, and reaching from one generation to another. There is a rush in the movement of the story that sweeps one along almost compensating for the lack of the finer literary quality, which might have made the current smoother without lessening its force.

  Having a good strong story to tell, Mr. Townsend has told it through some three hundred pages much as he would have set it down with his pencil in columns. And, although such writing can scarcely be called literature, it has a value and gives, in this case certainly, an impression of reality that better work sometimes fails to convey. This effect is difficult to define, but it is somewhat like listening to the simple telling of an actual human experience. In the sympathetic atmosphere, thus unconsciously created, the characterisation is also well affected in some equally unaccountable manner, for there is little description and scarcely an attempt at analysis. The character of Teresa the dancer is perhaps most completely realised. The opening scene, in which she first appears, is also distinct; the flurry of departure behind the scene after the play is over; the fall of Teresa on the stairs, and her cry — not for her own suffering, but for her baby. That is the keynote of the story: the mother-love that would gather the earth and heaven under the feet of the child, that suffers and sacrifices and slaves and sins if need be. The type is rare, but it exists — a terrible, beautiful, fierce, divine thing. Teresa impersonates it; enduring her husband’s cruelty, though indifferent to him, for the sake of the child; caring little for his final desertion, since he leaves her the child. This is the character which dominates the story, contrary assumably to the author’s intention. His heroine, Teresa’s daughter, never becomes, even after reaching womanhood, more than the vaguest lay-figure, useful to hang socialistic theories upon. Fortunately there are a number of these to be thus disposed of. In the first chapter, when the dancer cries out in terror lest she be robbed of her baby, the Society which takes the children of the poor from them by force is boldly attacked. The child is protected against the Society by political influence, and in showing how so mighty a force is invoked to care for such an atom of obscure humanity the author makes interesting revelation of a certain element in tenement life which the upper world generally little suspects. This is the close, controlling connection between politics and the private lives, the homes of the masses. The force is felt in other parts of the story, and may be said indeed to pervade it as the ruling power over the destinies of most of the characters. This ward “Boss,” whom these benighted beings of the slums perhaps never see, thus becomes their Providence. It is he who gives his Irish tool strength to take the baby from the police and to keep it till its mother is well. It is he who gives his Italian tool such business prosperity that the latter thinks of settling in life and taking Teresa regardless of the runaway husband — for a common-law wife. It is he who through his Irish tool subsequently settles the vexed question of this common-law marriage — from the Bowery point of view. No question, however, is vexed or of any importance to the dancer except in so far as it touches the welfare of the child, and the conditions upon which she consents to marry the Italian all look solely to that. These terms as she enumerates them throw an appalling light on the lives of the tenements. They must never, she stipulates, live in less than two rooms, one of which must be her daughter’s; they must never take lodgers, notwithstanding they have two rooms. The child must never be bound to a sweater; she must go to school until she is fourteen; a dollar a week must be put in the bank to send her to Italy to learn dancing. The Italian cries out in amazement, if the child be a princess and he a millionaire that such unheard-of demands are made. But a man in love with a pretty woman always consents to the unreasonable, and the young mother has her way. Day and night the child is never allowed out of her sight. To bring her up as a lady is the sole object of the mother’s existence. To reach this aim, she lays hold of every helpful influence, and there is a pathetic picture of her search for a charity school where the child may be taught by “real ladies,” whom she can hope to reach in no other way, and thus learn their manners. As the girl learns she grows, blooming into premature womanhood, like a large, dark, red rose. The teacher, realising the peril that the girl’s beauty adds to her situation, tries to lift her above it, by making her a teacher like herself. But the mother resists with a mixture of gratitude, jealousy, and suspicion. The girl is to be a great dancer — what could be greater than that? True, the way is not quite clear: the vision of Italy has faded; who can save a dollar a week in Mulberry Bend? But there are masters in New York, and again, by means of the powerful political lever, a place is found for the girl in the ballet. It is all one to her whether she teach, or dance, or do nothing so long as the Irishman’s handsome son is near. When she makes a formal and successful debut, and lovers galore appear, this innocent love affair assumes a new and tragic aspect. The work itself, in fact, suddenly changes here, and the simplicity, which redeemed the earlier part of the story, disappears. A false, artificial manner, running at once into sensationalism, takes its place. All the common elements of the lurid melodrama are forthwith invoked. The villain abducts the heroine; the hero rescues her; the mother attempts to assassinate the villain; mysterious papers, found in the sole of a Chinaman’s shoe, give the villain his deserts; a great fortune from the runaway husband and father makes the final happy denoument.

  A work more unlike the foreg
oing than The Red Badge of Courage it is scarcely possible to imagine. Whereas Mr. Townsend’s is all story, Mr. Crane’s is no story at all. The latter may perhaps be best described as a study in morbid emotions and distorted external impressions. The short, sharp sentences hurled without sequence give one the feeling of being pelted from different angles by hail — hail that is hot. The reader, longs to plead like Tony Lumpkin, that the author will “not keep dinging it, dinging it into one so.” The few scattered bits of description are like stereopticon views, insecurely put on the canvas. And yet there is on the reader’s part a distinct recognition of power — misspent perhaps — but still power of an unusual kind. As if further to confuse his intense work, Mr. Crane has given it a double meaning — always a dangerous and usually a fatal method in literature. The young soldier, starting out-to face his first trial by fire, may be either an individual or man universal; the battle may be either the Battle of the Wilderness or the Battle of Life. There “is’ virtually “but” one figure, and his sensations and observations during the conflict fill the volume with thoughts and images as unreal as a feverish dream. The first distant firing he stands without flinching, brave with the courage of inexperience. It is as the strife comes closer that he feels a rising doubt of his own strength. It is when it closes upon him that the agony of fear falls.

  “The youth perceived that the time had come. He was about to be measured. The flesh over his heart felt very thin. He was in a moving box. There were iron laws of tradition and law on four sides. All he knew was that if he fell down those coming behind would tread on him. . . . He had not enlisted of his own free will . . . And now they were leading him out to be slaughtered. Following this came a red rage.”

  Sullenly, desperately he forges to the front, because it is easier to face the foe than the scorn of a coward. All about him men older, stronger, and wiser are faltering, failing, and falling, as they always are in the battle of the spirit and the flesh, and a sudden, divine sympathy fills him. “He felt the subtle battle brotherhood. It was a fraternity born of the smoke and the danger of death.” With this recognition of the universality of suffering comes a certain calmness of endurance.

  “He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive, but a sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man. So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed. He came from hot ploughshares to prospects of clover tranquillity, and it was as if hot ploughshares were not. Scars faded to flower.”

  These extracts serve to show that whatever the influence journalism may or may not have had upon Mr. Crane’s literary training, he does not write like a journalist when he undertakes literature. It is in truth rather awful to imagine what an old newspaper editor would do with these pages if he wished to give the author a memorable lesson in what not to do, or, as Dickens says: “how not to do it.” A literary editor, on the contrary, would perhaps smile on the same pages as he never would on those of Mr. Townsend’s; so that the wisdom of life in this case, as in all others, consists in addressing one’s message to the mind that needs it. As for these two volumes, the root of literature seems to lie in Mr. Crane’s; but the root seems to be terribly buried, and much in need of being assisted into sunlight and a natural, normal growth.

  N. H. B.

  From: The Dial, V. XX, No. 236, April 16, 1896, p.227-228

  THE RED BADGE OF HYSTERIA. (To the Editor of The Dial.)

  Must we come to judge of books only by what the newspapers have said of them, and must we abandon all the old standards of criticism? Can a book and an author, utterly without merit, be puffed into success by entirely undeserved praise, even if that praise come from English periodicals?

  One must ask these questions after he has been seduced into reading a book recently reprinted in this country entitled “The Red Badge of Courage, an Episode of the American Civil War.” The chorus of praise in the English papers has been very extravagant, but it is noticeable that so far, at least, the American papers have said very little about the merits or demerits of the book itself. They simply allude to the noise made over it abroad, and therefore treat its author as a coming factor in our literature. Even The Dial’s very acute and usually very discerning critic of contemporary fiction (Mr. Payne) treats the book and the author (in your issue of Feb. 1) in very much this way — that is, as a book and an author to be reckoned with, not because of any good which he himself finds in them, but because they have been so much talked about.

  The book has very recently been reprinted in America, and would seem to be an American book, on an American theme, and by an American author, yet originally issued in England. If it is really an American production one must suppose it to have been promptly and properly rejected by any American publishers to whom it may have been submitted, and afterward more naturally taken up by an English publisher.

  It is only too well known that English writers have had a very low opinion of American soldiers, and have always, as a rule, assumed to ridicule them. “Blackwood’s Magazine” is quoted by a recent writer as saying during the War: “We cannot even pretend to keep our countenance when the exploits of the Grand Army of the Potomac are filling all Europe with inextinguishable laughter,” and adds “ we know not whether to pity most the officers who lead such men, or the men who are led by such officers” (Vol. 90, pp. 395-6). And again, in January, 1862: “ Englishmen are unable to see anything peculiarly tragical in the fact that half a million of men have been brought together in arms to hurl big words at each other across a river” (Vol. 91, p. 118). Again, in April, 1862, “Blackwood” tells us that Americans “do not demand our respect because of their achievements in art, or in literature, or in science, or philosophy. They can make no pretence to the no less real, though less beneficent, reputation of having proved themselves a great military power” (Vol. 91, p. 534). And in October, 1861, “Blackwood “ said exultantly: “The venerable Lincoln, the respectable Seward, the raving editors, the gibbering mob, and the swift-footed warriors of Bull’s Run, are no malicious tricks of fortune, played off on an unwary nation, but are all of them the legitimate offspring of the Great Republic,” and is “glad that the end of the Union seems more likely to be ridiculous than terrible” (Vol. 90, p. 396).

  We all know with what bitterness and spitefulness the “Saturday Review” always treats Americans; and with what special vindictiveness it reviews any book upon our late struggle written from the Northern standpoint. And so it is with all British periodicals and all British writers. They are so puffed up with vain-glory over their own soldiers who seldom meet men of their own strength, but are used in every part of the world for attacking and butchering defenseless savages, who happen to possess some property that Englishmen covet, that they cannot believe that there can be among any peoples well-disciplined soldiers as gallant and courageous as their own.

  Under such circumstances we cannot doubt that “The Red Badge of Courage “ would be just such a book as the English would grow enthusiastic over, and we cannot wonder that the redoubtable “Saturday Review “ greeted it with the highest encomiums, and declared it the actual experiences of a veteran of our War, when it was really the vain imaginings of a young man born long since that war, a piece of intended realism based entirely on unreality. The book is a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies. The hero of the book (if such he can be called—”the youth” the author styles him) is an ignorant and stupid country lad, who, without a spark of patriotic feeling, or even of soldierly ambition, has enlisted in the army from no definite motive that the reader can discover, unless it be because other boys are doing so; and the whole book, in which there is absolutely no story, is occupied with giving what are supposed to be his emotions and his actions in the first two days of battle. His poor weak intellect, if indeed he has any, seems to be at once and entirely overthrown by the
din and movement of the field, and he acts throughout like a madman. Under the influence of mere excitement, for he does not even appear to be frightened, he first rushes madly to the rear in a crazy panic, and afterward plunges forward to the rescue of the colors under exactly the same influences. In neither case has reason or any intelligent motive any influence on his action. He is throughout an idiot or a maniac, and betrays no trace of the reasoning being. No thrill of patriotic devotion to cause or country ever moves his breast, and not even an emotion of manly courage. Even a wound which he finally gets comes from a comrade who strikes him on the head with his musket to get rid of him; and this is the only “Red Badge of Courage” (!) which we discover in the book. A number of other characters come in to fill out the two hundred and thirty-three pages of the book, — such as “the loud soldier,” “the tall soldier,” “ the tattered soldier,” etc., but not one of them betrays any more sense, self-possession, or courage than does “the youth.” On the field all is chaos and confusion. “The young lieutenant,” “the mounted officer,” even “the general,” are all utterly demented beings, raving and talking alike in an unintelligible and hitherto unheard-of jargon, rushing about in a very delirium of madness. No intelligent orders are given; no intelligent movements are made. There is no evidence of drill, none of discipline. There is a constant, senseless, and profane babbling going on, such as one could hear nowhere but in a madhouse. Nowhere are seen the quiet, manly, self-respecting, and patriotic men, influenced by the highest sense of duty, who in reality fought our battles.