University of Virginia Library

ENGLISH VIEWS OF STEPHEN CRANE.

THE late Mr. Stephen Crane was, as is well known, much more of a prophet in England than in his own country, and during his latter years he found it pleasant to make his home in a land where his work met with such warm appreciation. Since his death, the English critical journals have with little or no exception expressed a high judgment of his literary abilities. The Academy (June 9) says:

"'The Red Badge of Courage' was published when he was twenty-five. This study of the psychological side of war, of its effect on a private soldier, justly won for him immediate recognition. Critics of all schools united in praise of that remarkable book, and the more wonderful did the performance appear when it became known that he had never seen a battle, that the whole was evolved from his imagination, fed by a long and minute study of military history. It is said that when he returned from the Graeco-Turkish war he remarked to a friend: 'The Red Badge is all right.' It was all right.

"The same swift and unerring characterization, the same keen vision into the springs of motives, the same vivid phrasing, marked 'George's Mother.' Here, as in most of his other stories, and in all his episodes, the environment grows round the characters. He takes them at some period of emotional or physical stress, and, working from within outward, with quick, firm touches, vivifies them into life. Nowhere is this more evident than in the short sketches and studies that were, probably, after 'The Red Badge of Courage,' the real expression of his genius. His longer novels, tho not wanting in passages that show him at his best, suggest that in time he would have returned to the earlier instinct that prompted him to work upon a small canvas.

"As a writer he was very modern. He troubled himself little about style or literary art. But—rare gift—he saw for himself, and, like Mr. Steevens, he knew in a flash just what was essential to bring the picture vividly to the reader. His books are full of images and similes that not only fulfil their purpose of the moment, but live in the memory afterward. A super-refined literary taste might object to some of his phrases—to such a sentence as this, for example: 'By the very last star of truth, it is easier to steal eggs from under a hen than it was to change seats in the dingey,' to his colloquialisms, to the slang with which he peppers the talk of his men—but that was the man who looked at things with his own eyes, and was unafraid of his prepossessions. His gift of presenting the critical or dramatic moments in the lives of men and women was supreme. We could give a hundred examples."

Referring to "The Red Badge of Courage," The Westminster Gazette (June 5) says:

"The whole work was the outcome of an intensely vivid imagination joined with exhaustive study of all available documents and expressed as to its literary form in language which, if occasionally over-labored, was for the most part picturesque and powerful to the last degree. Mr. Crane's indebtedness to Kipling was not difficult to detect, while Bret Harte and Mark Twain were other writers suggested by certain qualities of his work. Perhaps we may reproduce in this connection what was said in this journal concerning another example of Mr. Stephen Crane's work—the volume of sketches and studies, to wit, entitled 'The Open Boat.' Mr. Crane, it was observed, is chiefly concerned to study character at special moments of stress and emotion, to depict a scene as it flashed on his imagination, regardless of anything that came before or anything that is to follow after. The men in 'The Open Boat,' who through a livelong night are in momentary terror of being swamped, all the while seeing themselves and each other with that peculiar intensity of vision which accompanies an acute crisis, could not be more poignantly described. This is descriptive narrative of the highest order. Or again, to pass to something less acute, the scenes in Mexico City, the race between Old Pop and Freddie, the kid from New York and the kid from San Francisco, with a hundred minute yet decisive touches, catching just the salient points of the crowd, and the landscape, and the blazing sun, are vividly colored and intensely real. The details are minute, yet extraordinarily well selected. You can scarcely find a wasted stroke or a random stroke in the whole volume."

Several of the English journals note the resemblance between Stephen Crane's career and that of the late G. W. Steevens, who was born in the same year. Says Literature (June 9):

"Like Steevens he was a man of letters who became a war correspondent from love of adventure and the desire to be in touch with the vivid realities of life; like Steevens he has died young, without having accomplished the best work of which those who knew him well believed him to be capable, as the result of maladies contracted while campaigning—tho not, like Steevens, in a beleaguered city. During the Cuban war he suffered first from malarial and then from yellow fever. His two illnesses permanently weakened his constitution. He was taken for rest and change to Badenweiler, in the Black Forest, but, even in that invigorating air, could not recover. The book by which he will be remembered is, without doubt, 'The Red Badge of Courage,' introduced to English readers by Mr. Heinemann. It describes a battle, identified by military historians with the battle of Chancellorsville, and is a marvelous study of the psychology of the soldier—the more marvellous when one remembers that, when he wrote the book, the author had never seen a war, and was only about five-and-twenty years of age. 'Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,' a book describing slum life in New York, also attracted a good deal of attention from the critics if not from the general public; but it was too full of the lurid realism in which very young men delight, to win favor with those who hold, with Aristotle, that το αισχρον—the merely ugly—is out of place in works of art."