Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  The artist, Billie Hawker, the son of a poor farmer, fell in love with Grace Fanhall, a rich heiress, when she paid a visit to the village where his parents lived. It was in the “stage” that he met her. With his artist’s equipment, he was to pay a summer visit to his father’s farm; and she, with her sister-in-law and her brother’s children, was to spend some months of summer weather at the Hemlock Inn. As his eyes lighted on her, “a wave of astonishment whirled into his hair.” No sooner was he seated than his humiliation began. The driver, whose “tone to his passengers was always a yell,” identified him. “He glanced furtively down the stage. She was apparently deep in talk with the mother of the children. When he reached home, the door of the lighted kitchen was opened, and Hawker ‘‘ saw his two sisters shading their eyes and peering down the yellow stream.” “The girls clamoured sentences at him.” “‘ Saw your illustrations in the May number of Perkinson’s,’” said his father, “and then added, quite weakly, ‘Pretty good.’” When he opened his bedroom window, “on the black brow of the mountain, he could see two long rows of twinkling dots, which marked the position of Hemlock Inn.’’ At this hostelry was a writing man, Hollanden by name. “‘Say, Hawker,’ he said suddenly, ‘why don’t you marry Miss Fanhall?’” And in an experimental spirit of Puckish amity he devoted himself to inflaming and irritating the passion of his friend.

  “Hollanden saw a dramatic situation in the distance, and with a bright smile he studied it.

  “‘Say!’ he exclaimed, ‘suppose she should not go to the picnic to-morrow. She said this morning she did not know if she could go. Somebody was expected from New York, I think. Wouldn’t it break you up though — eh?’ . . .

  “‘And rivals too! The woods must be crowded with them. A girl like that, you know! And then all that money! Say, your rivals must number enough to make a brigade of militia.’ . . .

  “Hawker seemed overcome with a deep dislike of himself. . . .

  “‘Confound you for a meddling, gabbling idiot!’ cried Hawker suddenly.

  “Hollanden replied:

  “‘What did you do with that violet she dropped at the side of the tennis-court yesterday?’”

  That was the first violet. The second was a free gift.

  “Hawker turned to the girl:

  “‘ I — I — I shall miss you dreadfully.’

  “She turned to look at him, and smiled.

  “‘ Shall you?’ she said, in a low voice.

  “Yes,’ he said.

  “Thereafter he stood before her awkwardly, and in silence. She scrutinised the boards of the floor. Suddenly she drew a violet from a cluster of them upon her gown, and thrust it out to him.” . , .

  Here is another colloquy between this quaint couple:

  “‘You are very unreasonable. If I were you — an heiress’

  “The girl flushed, and turned upon him angrily.

  “‘ Well!’ he glowered back at her. ‘You are, you know. You can’t deny it.’

  “She looked at the red-stained crags. At last she said:

  “‘You seemed really contemptuous.’

  “‘Well, I assure you that I do not feel contemptuous. On the contrary, I am filled with admiration. Thank Heaven, I am a man of the world! Whenever I meet heiresses I always have the deepest admiration.’

  “As he said this, he wore a brave hang-dog expression.”

  This was the rock upon which he split. He followed her back to New York, hoping nothing; for, in spite of the pains the girl had taken to disabuse his mind — she had even accepted a lift in his father’s ox-waggon — he was entirely possessed with the notion that “general poverty” was a fatal disqualification. Then follows a series of episodes, representing the Latin Quarter life of New York, the organic connexion of which with the story at large is slight. But Mr. Crane has a method of his own, and his work is to be judged by the effectiveness of his results. Also — and for this the author cannot fairly be held responsible — they unpleasantly remind one of a far too immortal work: for there is in the group of Billie Hawker’s chums — besides his brother artists, Wrinkless, Grief, and Penny — an engaging model, Florinda by name (by nickname Splutter), who is extremely attached to him. These friends and this adoring damsel watch Billie’s out-goings and in-comings; and their grotesque comments and sham reticence are a novel and piquant medium of information.

  Even the gift of the third violet — so strongly is his prejudice against himself entrenched — he interprets into an insolent triumphing over the hopelessness of his passion. Very delicately the inarticulate crisis of mutual intelligence arrives, and “later she told him that he was perfectly ridiculous.”

  Mr. Crane’s dialogue, 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 he1 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.

  From: The Critic, June 26, 1897, No. 801, p.438

  The Third Violet by Stephen Crane. (The Critic, June 26, 1897)

  The Reviewer would infinitely prefer not to say that Mr. Stephen Crane is not living up to the level of his early achievement. The remark is so easy, so obvious, and has been made about young men of talent so often before, that persons of discrimination are naturally a little weary of the phrase. Unfortunately, however, “The Third Violet” leaves absolutely nothing else to be said. As everybody now knows, Mr. Crane once wrote a book which was remarkable for its penetrating psychology, its tremendously vivid descriptions, and a subtle suggestion of symbolism which made itself felt in the reader’s impression that here was not only bold description of fighting with shot and shell, but a presentment as well of those other battles which the soul fights with viewless weapons. Of these excellences Mr. Crane has divested his work with a thoroughness that seems almost intentional, and yet it is inconceivable that even for an experiment in inanity a writer should be willing to follow up a book like “The Red Badge” with such a vacuous trifle as’ The Third Violet.”

  The author not only shows no grasp of character, but omits to present any characters to grasp. The hero is a pallid shade called Hawker, who is understood to be an artist. Going up to his old home in the mountains one summer, he comes across another shade denominated Grace Fanhall. She has “distance in her eyes” and asks him where she will find the stage for Hemlock Inn. They meet at frequent intervals thereafter, and Hawker does not paint as much as he had expected to do. The girl drops a violet one day, and the young man picks it up. Another man comes up from New York, and Hawker resents his presence. Miss Fanhall returns to the city after freely bestowing another violet upon her admirer. He calls upon her in her home to tell her that he can never forget her nor the violets, but that he is going to leave town in order to forget himself. She promptly gives him a third violet, and he says “What?” The book contains, also, some irrelevant pages in which a number of impecunious young artists figure. We hea
r more of their impecuniousness than of their art. Their poverty, in fact, is so profound that it has infected their speech, which is ineffably scanty and slangy, barely sufficing to communicate the most primitive ideas. It may, of course, be a point of honor with the young artists of New York to approximate sign-language as closely as possible, but the writer who would reproduce them in literature should remember that he is bound to supply in description the details to fill out a picture which the meagre dialogue barely serves to outline.

  This is a fair resume of the contents of the book. It will be perceived that the author has practically left the entire novel to the reader’s imagination. Naturally the reader’s imagination goes on strike, demanding less work and more profit, and the reader asks himself what Mr. Crane means by presenting to him characters which are as crude symbols of human nature as the figures savages draw with charred sticks. An artist in letters might deliberately choose to efface the individuality of his characters in a story of this kind for two reasons. He might wish to paint an idyl of first love in the colors of the spring, and to make of it such a delicate and tender thing that any strong note of individuality would disarrange his values; or he might wish to make a sketch of young passion in lines so bold and strong that all the other lines must perforce be faint by contrast. “Paul and Virginia” is the classical example of the first of these experiments, and “Summer in Arcady” a contemporary instance of the second. But Mr. Crane is not seeking either of these effects, and he leaves us wholly in the dark as to what he does wish to achieve. He has blotted out individuality without offering any legitimate artistic substitute You can have “Hamlet “with Hamlet left out, perhaps, but you cannot omit the entire cast, the stage and the manager, and claim that you are presenting a play. Maeterlinck says that he is not sure that a “static theatre” is out of the question, and he has gone some distance toward proving its possibility. However this may be, Mr. Crane has not yet proved that a novel can exist when the author neglects all consideration of characters, action and environment, and we venture to believe that he will never do so.

  There are traces here and there in the book of the spectacular splendor of the author’s first style, but they are only the ragged shreds of what once promised to be a garment of glory, eccentric in cut perhaps, but richly iridescent in effect. Taking the book as a whole, the author has prepared for those who would gladly be his admirers as many kinds of disappointment as 200 pages can possibly contain.

  From: The Book Buyer, May 1898, V. XVI, No.4, p.352-353

  The Book Buyer, May 1898

  In taking up Mr. Crane’s new volume of short stories, one should be in pink condition to enjoy the purring of bullets and hurtling of shells — when they do not blip into the sea, and to listen to the whiroo of a shark’s fin and the chug-chug-chug of the filibusters’ engines. The sky will be an arch of stolid sapphire, the white-lipped sea will change from slate to emerald streaked with amber lights and besprent with brown mats of seaweed, while the chief engineer watches with care .his red-painted mysteries. Besides the Cuban and the Greek, there will be a fat, green Mexican, and a drunken gambler chanting Apache scalp-music, and amid the mesquit and the cactus we will glimpse crimson scrapes, whose wearers breathe treachery and cowardice. Yes, like all Mr. Crane’s writings, The Open Boat, and Other Tales of Adventure is nothing if not high-keyed and chromatic. So, too, are Marie Cerelli and Emma Brooke, the difference being that the latter soar and flutter skyward, with not so much as a kite-string to connect them with earth. The person who can take them seriously is herself either very young or very melodramatic, I should say — or perhaps even should not. But Mr. Crane has his feet on the ground. He psychologizes no less than pictures, as in the sentence. “Richardson was too frightened himself to do anything but hate this man for his fear.” The little ironies of life which he depicts so stoically and relentlessly are a sort of inverted reality, if not the real thing, to almost every one who has “lived! He is master of his sensations, and a symbolist in communicating them. He gives a tragic event its true setting in a world of apathy. Nature is nonchalant, and dancers dance, while filibusters drown, and only a little girl on the hotel piazza hears the voice of wind and breakers, as also it is a little girl who asks the fugitive Greek, “Are you a man?” Thus Mr. Crane’s drama is a drama of character.

  It would be very easy to call him to account for slovenliness of composition, for excess of luridness, for being attracted to themes inherently coarse, and to enumerate the slang which narrator and cowboys use. But for every wrong word I find a right word or phrase, for every far-fetched simile one that rivets itself in mind, and granting the author’s right to choose his own themes, few there are who can handle such as Mr. Crane has chosen, especially in the Mexican sketches, with equally good taste. “The Open Boat,” relating “the experience of four men from the sunk steamer ‘Commodore/” should rank very high among short stories. It suggests that every one of Mr. Crane’s stories might have been as well told had he, like Maupassant, gone to school for a decade to some Flaubert before publishing.

  There are two ways of getting the public ear — that of doing what others have done with an added freshness of touch and observation, as has Mr. Davis, and that of doing something different. Mr. Crane’s choice of the latter way is apparently an easy one. If he could profit by example, as well as follow his original bent, his development would be commensurate only with his outlook upon life. But, unhappily, the man who is determined to be himself, in America at least, is the last man to learn from others. So it is that one finds Mr. Crane persisting in puerilities and vaguenesses, and even grammatical errors, which detract from the literary value of much of his work. (Doubleday & McClure Co.)

  From: The Outlook, V. 1, No.14, May 7, 1898, p.437

  MR. STEPHEN CRANE’S NEW BOOK — The Outlook, V. 1, No.14, May 7, 1898

  The Open Boat, and Other Stories.” By Stephen Crane. London: Wm. Heinemann. 6:.

  Some years ago Mr. Crane wrote a little book called “The Red Badge of Courage,” which may stand as the finest delineation of modern warfare, comparable only to Tolstoi’s “Peace and ‘War” and “Sevastopol.” But the great Russian’s point of view is that of a man disillusioned and entirely without hope in this world; stoically courageous if you will, but pessimistic always. He is a glass vessel of a sad even hue, which is continually replenished with the water of truth. But “nothing is, but thinking makes it so.” And Mr. Crane, with a vision as keen, though of narrower range, an intuition as extraordinary, and a courage as complete as his Russian forerunner, accepts the universe with a sort of sardonic cheerfulness. The Russian divines upon the veiled countenance of destiny a profound and sinister intention, an implacable austerity; and, to point another modern, typical instance, M. Marcel Schwob beholds, with a nightmare vision, the monstrous disfeatures of a leper behind a mask of gold. But the hand of destiny has spread in the sight of Mr. Crane a feast of interests so manifold and surprising that, perhaps, he does not greatly concern himself with the eternal face behind the veil.

  “What is truth?” said jesting Pilate. We need not pause for an answer; let us rather call to mind how that the observer and the Man is neither a mirror nor a phonograph; and the objective point of view, upon which the French, with the fatuous dogmatism which is a characteristic of that amiable nation, have sometimes insisted, can have no real existence.

  So Mr. Crane, not untinctured with the Great American Spirit, sure of himself, sure of his method, takes a piece of life in his hand, saying, “Come, listen to me, and this dusty clot of confusion shall become suddenly luminous, and shall thrill you with a certain emotion.”

  In “The Open Boat” Mr. Crane has given us the realism of shipwreck, as the late Charles Dickens, in the “Wreck of the Golden Mary,” gave us the romance. The author is always more interested in the manner in which a given event comes to pass than in the event itself. He is ever intensely preoccupied with the psychology of circumstance. And it is this preoccupation which both
secures to him the mastery of the can”, the short story proper, and denies him success in the relation of a story whose interest lies in its appropriate culmination. For the amt: is an impression pure and simple, whose existence depends upon the selection and presentation of detail. Other stories, be they long or short — it is immaterial so they be complete — depend for their interest upon the solution of a problem. Hence it is that in “ The Wise Men “ and the “ Five White Mice,” wherein we care nothing for the problem’s solution, and wherein the presentment does not greatly interest; and in “Flanagan,” where there ought to be a problem to solve, and is not, the artist has failed of his effect. And hence it is that in “Horses,” where (for once) the problem is presented along with a wonderful piece of psychology, and in “Death and the Child,” and in all of Part II., the “Midnight Sketches,” he has achieved admirable success.

  In “Death and the Child” Mr. Crane touches the epic. Beginning with the picture of a headlong flight (“it was a freshet that might sear the face of the tall, quiet mountain; it might draw a livid line across the lands, this downpour of fear with a thousand homes adrift in the current”), it goes on to the presentment of battle and the invasion of overmastering fear, and ends with the wonderful vision of cowardice confronted with the child—” the primitive courage, the sovereign child, the brother of the mountains, the sky and the sea.”