University of Virginia Library

Stephen Crane

WHATEVER is deeply thought is well written, in the view of M. Remy de Gourmont. The observation has an aerial beauty. From its outlook one instinctively casts a revisiting glance of speculation at well written places in expression one had lost awhile, to find how deeply thought they are.

In this speculative glance, not long since, I chanced to be arrested by the memory of Stephen Crane. Endowed with a genius for direct expression, he was able in his short existence to present a surprising number of penetrating ascertainments of American life, with a high degree of clarity and power.

One encounters occasionally a popular conception of Stephen Crane as the author of one or two slight prose tales, and a few lines of grotesque verse—a writer of fragmentary achievement, with a talent of distinct originality, but somewhat narrow. The conception has come into being, doubtless from our widespread custom of asking concerning each subsequent work of an author whether it is just like his first book, and of ignoring the subsequent work if it is not. With many authors this is the only means we have of supporting a certain, correct, traditional attitude of consistent disappointment in their efforts. The prevalence of the attitude is attested by the celebrated response of a veteran editor of Punch to a friend's remark that Punch wasn't as good as it used to be: "No, it never was."

To interested readers of Stephen Crane's work, no impression of it could be further than the fabular

repute we have mentioned from the facts of his productive career as a writer. Before his death in his thirtieth year, Stephen Crane had published eleven books. While none of these is a large book, it is true, they are for the most part of remarkable concentration and substance, and of a marked variety in subject, in kind, in tone, and in treatment—historical essays, special articles, poetry and fiction; among these publications there are perhaps forty short stories, and five very dissimilar brief novels, ranging from the sustained tragedy of "Maggie" to mockery's lightest touch in "The Third Violet."

"The line of Sesshu," says a critic of Japanese line-drawing, "vibrates with the nervous force of the artist's hand." With the exception of "Active Service," a work composed, as one understands, in illness, and two or three of the Mexican tales, which are rather standardized and weakly handled, the description might characterize all these contributive pieces of fiction.

The world of misery, the world of poverty, the very presence of exploiting meanness, of the impulse to pride oneself on using human beings and casting them aside, rises in the tale of "Maggie." A story of the "poor among the poor," of a warm-hearted, pleasure-loving girl, a stitcher in a collar-factory, who is betrayed and deserted by a barkeeper and remains in poverty through the last despair of unsuccess in her final calling as a street-walker, the novel is all narrated in the first-hand terms of crowded life, the terms of the life of New York tenements, tenement-streets and saloons, selectively rendered, without comment, without shallow judgments, with the searching and complete humor of the desire of truth in our exploitational world, where Maggie's exploiter is himself exploited. Much "happens" in both this book and "George's Mother"—sins, shames, gaieties, injustices. Delicately analytical, the method of the narratives spreads no analysis upon the page. They proceed by a realization of the movement, color, sound, odor, form and contact of their scene and incident, often desperate incident, wrought by struggling characters in their course through the wilds of a random civilization.

One touch of dulness which makes many novels kin, purporting falsely to be realistic, is a lack of unified expression. Relating much about lives, they tell us nothing at all about life. They fail in the power of seizing some one positive, though hitherto undiscriminated, aspect of creation—something as actual and yet as intangible as the look of an individual countenance—and thus miss the nameless fusion which illuminates a realized presentment. It is in this faculty of penetrating social criticism, of a vivid, well-chosen focus of the human circles and aims he presents, that Stephen Crane excels and interests.

We have no more spirited portrait of the mob-meanness of our democracy—the peculiarly American disgrace that shames us among nations—than his short story, "The Monster," a chronicle of the cruelty of the people of an eastern town to a negro maimed in recovering from a fire the child of the town's best doctor. The completely miserable performance of these people; their laudation of poor Henry Johnson; their editorial on his heroism when it is supposed he is dead; and their disapprobation of him after he is saved by Dr. Trescott's skill and returns to live among them, in his disfigurement and idiocy, faceless, and horrible to look upon; their insistence that he be taken out of the town to spare their sensibilities; and their desertion and ruin of the career of Dr. Trescott, his one friend—all this is of the best stuff of tragedy, a living likeness to the wilds of a cowardly tyranny, splendidly and thoroughly understood and told, and of the same piece of appreciation of the minds and motives of men as Kent's blinding.

If the pity and terror of democracy's mob-meanness are vividly revealed by Stephen Crane, so is the inspiration and swing of democracy's impulse to keep in line.

On the morning of July 2nd, I sat on San Juan hill and watched Lawton's division come up. I was absolutely sheltered, but still where I could look into the faces of men who were trotting up under fire. There wasn't a high heroic face among them. They were all men intent on business. That was all. It may seem to you that I am trying to make everything a squalor. That would be wrong. I feel that things were of the sublime. They were not of our shallow and preposterous fictions. They stood out in a simply majestic commonplace. It was the behavior of men on the street. It was the behavior of men. In one way, each man was just pegging along at the heels of still another man who— It was that in the flat and obvious way. In another way it was pageantry, the pageantry of the accomplishment of naked duty. One cannot speak of it—the spectacle of the common man serenely doing his work, his appointed work. It is the one thing in the universe which makes one fling expression to the winds and be satisfied to simply feel.

This passage from a special article in "War Memories" is quoted not only as an instance of Stephen Crane's manner in giving the reader the peculiar special light on the countenance of the situation he describes, but as an example of the extraordinary directness of that manner.

"Direct treatment of subject." In the last few years we have heard the phrase much used by the Imagists. Stephen Crane's two slender volumes of verse, "The Black Riders" and "War Is Kind,"

have just now a timely interest from their achievement in a certain art of poetic expression regarded by numbers of persons— though certainly not, one believes, by the Imagists themselves—as only recently attempted. As both Stephen Crane and most of the Imagists are American poets it is curious to compare their likeness and divergence on this special point—"direct treatment of subject"—which is, according to Mr. Richard Aldington, the Imagists' first tenet.

To my own perception, with all deference to the Imagists' seriousness of purpose, and with a liking for their poetry though by no means an abject worship of it, this power of direct treatment in which Stephen Crane's verses excel is an art absent even from the aim of most of the poems the Imagists themselves regard as their most distinctive work—poems such as "After Ch'u Youan," "Acon, (after Joannes Baptista Amaltheus)" and "To Atthis (after the mss. of Sappho now in Berlin.)"

With the same brevity, exactitude and simplicity of outline which characterize Stephen Crane's verses, these poems of the Imagists' treat certain situations in existence, by no means in the method of a straightforward, first-hand understanding, but very indirectly, and through the media of the spirit and manner of certain remote, approved civilizations and habits of thought. Their charm, the charm of classic echo or historic fancy, has the scholarly grace and lovely refinement of line of a Wedgwood design. But this treatment of subject, while both simple and precise, is by no means direct. Akin to the Imagists' work in several attractive attributes, in this peculiar quality of an authentic, first-hand vision, Stephen Crane's poems seem to me to evince a far deeper and better conception than the Imagists' of direct expression in poetry.

Here is a love poem:

Here is a characterization:

Who are the men who are creators? Who will express truly the quality of his own knowledge of life; and leave behind a moving image that he has conceived of our own mortal ways—our little ways and large ways, in a fast-changing universe?

Such a creator was Stephen Crane. In his static lines of verse, in the lyric movement of his stories, vibrate unforgettable and authentic moods of the very nature of our country—the smell of the wet turf along the shaded house-walls, the pluming maple-tops, the muteness of neighbor and neighbor, the scorching breath of injustice, the air of wartime memories on cloudy bluff and valley, the wind's will blowing through the soul of youth, death in struggle everywhere, and the strength of love stronger than death, and the failures and the prides of our mortality.

Again you turn, and look again and listen to the sense and spirit of his clear-voiced pages, and perceive you had forgotten how well written they are in remembering how deeply they are thought.