George monteiro stephen crane the contemporary reviews american critical archives 2009

First published 2009 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Ca

S T E P H E N C R A N E

A M E R I C A N C R I T I C A L A R C H I V E S 1 7

Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews

g e n e r a l e d i t o r :M Thomas Inge, Randolph-Macon College

1 Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Joel Myerson

2 Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by James W Tuttleton,Kristin O Lauer, and Margaret P Murray

3 Ellen Glasgow: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Dorothy M Scura

4 Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by John L Idol, Jr.and Buford Jones

5 William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by M Thomas Inge

6 Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins andHershel Parker

7 Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Kevin J Hayes

8 John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Joseph R McElrath, Jr.,Jesse S Crisler, and Susan Shillinglaw

9 Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Kenneth M Price

10 Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Letitia Dace

11 Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Louis Budd

12 Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Margaret Anne O’Connor

13 Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Beverly Lyon Clark

14 T S Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker

15 Eudora Welty: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Pearl S McHaney

16 Flannery O’Connor: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by R Neil Scott andIrwin H Streight

Stephen Crane

The Contemporary Reviews

Edited by George Monteiro

Brown University

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S ˜ao Paulo, Delhi

Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521382656

c

 Cambridge University Press 2009

This publication is in copyright Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,

no reproduction of any part may take place without the written

permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2009

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Stephen Crane : the contemporary reviews / edited by George Monteiro.

p cm – (American critical archives ; 17)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-521-38265-6

1 Crane, Stephen, 1871–1900 – Criticism and interpretation I Monteiro, George.

II Title III Series.

Daniel G Hoffman

R W Stallman John Berryman

Series editor’s preface page viii

Introduction ixAcknowledgments xxvi

The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American

Series editor’s preface

The American Critical Archives series documents a part of a writer’s career that

is usually difficult to examine, that is, the immediate response to each work as

it was made public on the part of reviewers in contemporary newspapers andjournals Although it would not be feasible to reprint every review, each volume

in the series reprints a selection of reviews designed to provide the reader with

a proportionate sense of the critical response, whether it was positive, negative,

or mixed Checklists of other known reviews are also included to complete thedocumentary record and allow access for those who wish to do further readingand research

The editor of each volume has provided an introduction that surveys thecareer of the author in the context of the contemporary critical response Ide-ally, the introduction will inform the reader in brief of what is to be learned by

a reading of the full volume The reader then can go as deeply as necessary interms of the kind of information desired—be it about a single work, a period

in the author’s life, or the author’s entire career The intent is to provide quickand easy access to the material for students, scholars, librarians, and generalreaders

When completed, the American Critical Archives should constitute a prehensive history of critical practice in America, and in some cases England,

com-as the writers’ careers were in progress The volumes open a window on thepatterns and forces that have shaped the history of American writing and thereputations of the writers These are primary documents in the literary andcultural life of the nation

M Thomas Inge

In the 1890s, no one took Stephen Crane lightly or casually From the starthis work sparked controversy, renewed with every publication he crowdedinto the single decade of his career There was great and noisy disagree-ment over the merits of his journalism, his first novel, his poetry, his earlystories and sketches—in short, everything he wrote Those who championedhim no less than those who attacked him worked hard at describing thatwriting, characterizing it or fixing it into categories It was praised and itwas ridiculed He was personally reviled and occasionally honored The evi-dence is in the reviews Even his early death did not modify the situation, atleast not immediately, though the poet Wallace Stevens thought he detectedchange

On June 5, 1900, the twenty-eight-year-old Stephen Crane died in weiler, Baden, where his wife, Cora, had taken him in the final days of hisillness During the long journey to his interment in Elizabeth, New Jersey, theyoung writer was memorialized at the Central Metropolitan Temple in New

Baden-York The New York Tribune man who reported on the funeral service filed

a modest, non-committal and rather perfunctory account of the service Onlyseventy-two years later, when a selection of the unidentified reporter’s letterswas published, did the world learn that Wallace Stevens had covered the funeralservice for Crane, a fellow-poet only three years his senior Here is what Stevensset down in his journal:

This morning I went to the funeral of Stephen Crane at the CentralMetropolitan Temple on Seventh Avenue near Fourteenth Street The church

is a small one and was about [a] third full Most of the people were of thelower classes and had dropped in apparently to pass away the time Therewas a sprinkling of men and women who looked literary, but they were

a wretched, rag, tag, and bob-tail I recognized John Kendrick Bangs Thewhole thing was frightful The prayers were perfunctory, the choir worsethan perfunctory with the exception of its hymn “Nearer My God To Thee”which is the only appropriate hymn for funerals I ever heard The address

was absurd The man kept me tittering from the time he began till the time

he ended He spoke of Gladstone+ Goethe Then—on the line of prematuredeath—he dragged in Shelley; and speaking of the dead man’s later work hereferred to Hawthorne Finally came the Judgement day—all this with mostdelicate, sweet, and bursal gestures—when the earth and the sea shall give

up their dead A few of the figures to appear that day flashed through myhead—and poor Crane looked ridiculous among them But he lived a brave,aspiring, hard-working life Certainly he deserved something better than thisabsolutely common-place, bare, silly service I have just come from As thehearse rattled up the street over the cobbles, in the stifling heat of the sun,with not a single person paying the least attention to it and with only four

or five carriages behind it at a distance I realized much that I had doubtinglysuspected before—There are few hero-worshippers

∗ ∗ ∗Therefore, few heroes.1

It is tempting to see in Stevens’s reaction to the poor showing in every aspect ofCrane’s New York funeral service an emblematic foreshadowing of what would

in a few short years become of the living Crane’s literary reputation—one ofsuch neglect such that, just a few years later, in 1914, prompted the brilliantEnglish critic Edward Garnett to deplore the American critic’s “grudging, inad-equate recognition of the most original genius it has produced in story-telling.”2

Garnett was ready therefore when Thomas Beer appeared before him in 1923with an appeal for support in his request for an interview with Joseph Conrad,and when Conrad agreed to write an introduction for Beer’s book, Garnettwrote to Conrad, on March 19, 1923:

I am glad that you are going to do that chapter on Crane And part of it Ithink you should devote to Crane’s style—it’s perfection at its finest I havetried to rub into those blasted Americans that Crane was a master & do youknow that my essay on Crane in “Friday Nights” was rejected in turn by thehalf a dozen American quarterlies I tried You are in position to say thingsemphatically If you look up my paper you will see I have touched concisely

on his best work & his quality.3

1Letters of Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens, ed (New York: Knopf, 1972), p 41.

2“Some Remarks on American and English Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly, 114 (December 1914), 747–756; reprinted in Edward Garnett, Friday Nights (New York: Knopf, 1922) I quote from

the latter, pp 248–249.

3Letter to Joseph Conrad, March 19, 1923, in A Portrait in Letters: Correspondence to and

about Conrad, J H Stape and Owen Knowles, eds (Amsterdam and New York: Editions

Rodopi, 1996), pp 206–207.

Yet even four years after the appearance in 1923 of Beer’s study, with Conrad’s

“commonplace” introduction (as it was called by the critic Ernest Boyd4),Garnett was still convinced that Crane had never been given his just due “Cranewas a genius,” he wrote to his young prot´eg´e H E Bates, “& do you knowsince the day he died he has been shockingly ‘put on the back shelf.’ Nobodycares a damn.”5 Apparently in Garnett’s view neither the Beer volume noreven the publication over the years 1925–1927 of the twelve volume collectionbrought out by Knopf in an edition of 750 copies had made much difference

in Crane’s fortunes with the American reader, reviewer or critic

Yet, to return to Wallace Stevens’s reaction to the service for Crane, it seemsnotable to me that the young reporter and fledgling poet ends his journal entrynot by focusing on Crane’s achievement as a writer but as some sort of heroicfigure Crane, a professional writer—reporter as well as author of fiction and(what must have had great appeal to Stevens, whose own work occasionallyechoes Crane’s) as poet—had achieved fame and notoriety His name was notonly prominent in the journals of large circulation but even more frequentlypresent in the newspapers where his comings and goings were chronicled noless than his scrapes with the New York police His heroism in Cuba during theSpanish–American War had set him apart from his fellow reporters, his fellow-

writer and war correspondent Richard Harding Davis decided in Harper’s

is only necessary to imagine how other writers would have handled it, toappreciate that it could not have been better done His story of the marine

at Guantanamo, who stood on the crest of the hill to “wigwag” to the ships, and so exposed himself to the fire of the entire Spanish force, is alsoparticularly interesting, as it illustrates that in his devotion to duty, and also

war-in his readwar-iness at the excitwar-ing moments of life, Crane is quite as much of

a soldier as the man whose courage he described He tells how the marinestood erect, staring through the dusk with half-closed eyes, and with his lips

4 “Readers and Writers,” Independent, 114 (June 6, 1925), p 645 Eric Solomon, however, describes Conrad’s introduction as “powerful”—Stephen Crane in England: A Portrait of the

Artist ([Columbus]: Ohio State University Press, 1964), p 39.

5 Letter to H E Bates, February 2, 1927, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University

of Texas, Austin, Texas Quoted with consent.

moving as he counted the answers from the war-ships, while innumerablebullets splashed the sand about him But it never occurs to Crane that to sit

at the man’s feet, as he did, close enough to watch his lips move and to beable to make mental notes for a later tribute to the marine’s scorn of fear,was equally deserving of praise.6

That by the time of his death Crane’s celebrity, fame, and literary fortune

on either side of the Atlantic was already in decline (as suggested by the noteStevens strikes at the close of his journal entry) was not immediately noticeable

in the public arena of books, reviewers, and publishers If the London Times

obituary concludes that Crane’s “early death removes from the ranks of letters

a man of real ability, from whom not only the public, but his fellow-craftsmen,expected a good deal,”7there were still more books to come After all, in the

summer of 1900 there were new Crane books about to appear Bowery Tales (a combined edition of George’s Mother and Maggie), Whilomville Stories, and Wounds in the Rain were published in the days and weeks following Crane’s death, while Great Battles of the World (a collection of historical essays researched by Kate Lyons, the novelist Harold Frederic’s wife) and Last

Words (a collection of fugitive pieces, stories, and sketches) were to appear in

1902 To cap all this was the talk about the unfinished novel The O’Ruddy

and who would bring it to conclusion Eventually the task would be taken upand completed by Crane’s friend the historical novelist Robert Barr Indeed,

most reviewers of The O’Ruddy, which did not appear until 1903, bent over

backwards to praise the book, even though, as most of them agreed, it wasnot in Crane’s customary line Crane’s “Irish” pieces”—“At Clancy’s Wake,”

published in Truth in 1893, for example—which might have given critics a head’s-up on how to take The O’Ruddy, were buried away in newspapers and other periodicals, and Maggie and George’s Mother were much too seriously

taken (ignoring their spots of unmistakable comedy) to offer a clue to Crane’shumor as evidenced in a satirical account of the genial escapades of a “King ofthe Irelands,” as Crane’s hero was dubbed by one reviewer, following a hint inthe novel itself.8

Early on Crane showed signs of interest in writing His first known ary” piece, “Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle,” dates from 1885 when he wasfourteen The boy’s talent was soon recognized and put to profitable use byhis brother, Jonathan Townley Crane, Jr., a reporter from the Jersey shore

“liter-6Richard Harding Davis, “Our War Correspondents in Cuba and Puerto Rico,” Harper’s

Maga-zine, 98 (May 1899), p 941.

7“Mr Stephen Crane,” London Times (June 6, 1900), p 8.

8“King of the Irelands,” New York Times (November 21, 1903), p BR8 See also Stephen Crane and Robert Barr, The O’Ruddy, in The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen

Crane, Fredson Bowers et al., eds., vol IV (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971),

p 20.

during the summer months Young Stephen assisted him with copy furnished

to New York newspapers After a short stint at Lafayette College, followed by

a year at Syracuse University, Crane seems to have decided upon a career as areporter–writer who kept imagining his way out and away from facts as an end

in themselves It is not known just exactly when he decided, while still writingpieces on various themes and subjects, most of them datelined Hartwood, NewYork, to write a novel about the Bowery and its inhabitants In 1893, at theage of twenty-two, he published at his own expense and (mysteriously) under

a pseudonym—Johnston Smith—his first piece of extended fiction, Maggie: A

Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York) He could hardly give it away, let

alone sell it But it did come to the attention of Hamlin Garland and WilliamDean Howells, who became champions of the precocious work of this new-comer to what was called (by Crane himself) this “beautiful war” for realism.9

In an interview published in the Philadelphia Press on April 15, 1894, Howells

is quoted on Crane: “He has written one novel so far—Maggie, I think that as

a study of East Side life in New York Maggie is a wonderful book There is so

much realism of a certain kind in it that we might not like to have it lying onour parlor tables, but I hope that the time will come when any book can safely

tell the truth as completely as Maggie does.”10In the next year Howells once

again tried to call attention to Crane’s achievement in Maggie In his “Life and Letters” column in Harper’s Weekly, he wrote:

I referred last week to the work done in “tough” New York dialect by theauthor of the Chimmie Fadden stories, but this had been anticipated by Mr

Stephen Crane in a story called Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, which was

printed some years ago, but could not be said to have been published, sowholly did it fail of recognition There was reason for this in its grim, not

to say grimy truth, and in the impossibility to cultured ears of a parlancewhose texture is so largely profanity All its conscience and all its art couldnot save it, and it will probably remain unknown, but it embodied perhapsthe best tough dialect which has yet found its way into print.11

But “in June 1895, no one could know that by Christmas The Red Badge of

Courage, published in the fall, would have made the author famous,” writes

Edwin Cady.12Preceding that outbreak of fame, however, was another

impor-tant Crane publication A version of The Red Badge of Courage was

syndi-cated to newspapers around the country When the novel was published by

9Letter to Lily Brandon Munroe, [March–April 1894], in The Correspondence of Stephen Crane,

Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, eds vol I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988),

p 63.

10Edward Marshall, “A Great American Writer,” Philadelphia Press (April 15, 1894), p 27.

11William Dean Howells, “Life and Letters,” Harper’s Weekly, 39 (June 8, 1895), p 533.

12W D Howells as Critic, Edwin H Cady, ed (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1973), p 232.

D Appleton in the autumn of 1895, possibly due to the book’s success in thenewspapers, the cuts that had been made to meet journalistic requirement wererestored along with some revisions in matters of detail and style.

Between the syndication of the shortened version of The Red Badge of

Courage and its book publication in full form, Crane took a flier at publishing

his verse, “lines,” as he called his poems Published by the Boston firm Copelandand Day, “among the first of American publishers to issue works of literarymerit in an attractive format,” write Ames W Williams and Vincent Starrett.13

The presentation of the poems, all words in capitals, along with the design ofthe cover and title-page, was, to many reviewers, an open invitation for ridicule,not only of the book as an artifact, but of Crane’s often puzzling poems, whichsounded like no other poetry they were familiar with but which “looked” likethe verse then being published by the English-language decadents abroad.The book found no more than a small handful of sympathetic reviewers,

some of them writing, significantly, due to the initial success of The Red Badge

of Courage in late 1895.

It was his Civil War novel, of course, that put Stephen Crane on the literarymap both in the United States and Great Britain Although there would be alasting controversy in the journals and newspapers over whether it was theEnglish reviewer who first recognized the greatness of Crane’s novel and thusspurred the American press to take notice or it was the American reviewerwho had noted its importance and worth right off, it is clear from the evidencenow gathered that the favorable reviews of the novel followed close upon thebook’s publication, first in the United States at the end of September 1895and then in Great Britain two months later There were other controversialmatters One of them revolved around the discovery that the book was notbased on Crane’s personal experience of the Civil War, which had ended sixyears before he was born That Crane had imagined his boy’s tale broughthim both praise and scorn The scorn took what has become its storied form

in an attack by Alexander C McClurg, a Civil War volunteer who had risenfrom Private to Brigadier General, who impugned Crane’s presentation of theprivate soldier’s temperament and psychology as being in any way represen-tative of those soldiers engaged in battles that he had experienced “Nowhereare seen the quiet, manly, self-respecting, and patriotic men, influenced by thehighest sense of duty, who in reality fought our battles,” complains McClurg

In short, the book is “a mere work of diseased imagination.”14 Moreover,Crane’s ignorance in matters relating to warfare, he argued, extended to thefalsity of his style; and he listed examples of solecisms and the absurdity of hislanguage and imagery Others, of course, came to Crane’s defense, including

13 Ames W Williams and Vincent Starrett, Stephen Crane: A Bibliography (Glendale, California:

J Valentine, 1948), p 16.

14 A[lexander] C McClurg, “The Red Badge of Hysteria,” Dial, 20 (April 16, 1896), pp 227–228.

military officers The controversy seems not to have hurt the book’s popularity

or its sales The Red Badge of Courage proved to be Crane’s one great popular,

financial, and critical success during his lifetime; and it remains so to this day,with some of its strongest adherents among writers William Faulkner said, “It

is the only good war story I know.”15 Ernest Hemingway would later call it

“that great boy’s dream of war that was to be truer to how war is than anywar the boy who wrote it would ever live to see It is one of the finest books

of our literature It is all as much of one piece as a great poem is.”16William

Saroyan did not stop with The Red Badge of Courage The culmination of a

character sketch is the advice: “Say kid, read Stephen Crane’s Red Badge ofCourage You’ll like it Read anything of Crane’s!”17

Hoping to cash in on the attention he was getting for his war novel, Crane

reached agreements with his publisher Appleton to reissue Maggie: A Girl of the

Streets, but with changes, at least one key excision, and significant re-writing,

mainly for stylistic reasons, and with a different publisher Edward Arnold to

publish George’s Mother, a second Bowery novel about two figures—a young

man and his mother—living in the same tenement house as Maggie Johnson

and her family Publication of George’s Mother preceded that of Maggie by

a matter of days, such that reviewers sometimes considered the two bookstogether Both the applauders and detractors of these novels agreed that Cranewas definitely a realist (for having chosen to offer a somber portrait of how

“the other half lives”—to borrow the phrase made famous by Jacob Riis in hissociological study of that title) But they disagreed over whether or not suchbooks should be written Those who opposed Crane’s ventures in this area ofsocial realism, opting to dismiss them as works of realism, did not acknowledgethat Crane’s literary realism went beyond the reproduction of details and stocksituations, that his characters had thoughts and feelings beneath their superficial

impressions Behind Maggie and George’s Mother was the same impulse that led him to write The Red Badge of Courage “I wonder that some of those

fellows,” he said, writing in the “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” series

in the Century Magazine, “don’t tell how they felt in those scraps They spout enough of what they did, but they’re as emotionless as rocks.”18 His own

narrative would supply what was left out in those accounts George’s Mother and Maggie, along with The Red Badge of Courage, were also Crane’s de facto

answer to the widespread general complaints about literary realism in his time

“If ‘Realism’ is only half of life as the body is only part of the Man,” wrote

15Letter to Bennett Cerf, Christmas 1932, in Selected Letters of William Faulkner, Joseph Blotner,

ed (New York: Random House, 1977), p 69.

16Ernest Hemingway, Introduction to Men at War (New York: Berkeley, 1958), p 10.

17William Saroyan, “Portrait of a Bum,” Overland Monthly, 86 (December 1928), p 424.

18Corwin Knapp Linson, “Little Stories of ‘Steve’ Crane,” Saturday Evening Post, 175 (April 11,

1903), p 19.

the New York Tribune at the beginning the decade, “how can a book or a play

presenting only the outside of things be true to nature and life?”

It is easy to picture a lean and slippered pantaloon hobbling along thecrowded street; then on the paper one may see his bent back, the wrinkles

in his leathery cheeks, the faded rustiness of his once black coat, the cracks

in his dirty linen, the knotted veins, the enlarged knuckles of his old hands.But it takes a Balzac to show the tragedy in the man’s soul—not by pasting

a label on the man’s breast, but by making his soul live before you.19

Crane was not always credited with bringing out the soul of his Bowerydenizens But to do so was his intention, if we are to credit the now famil-

iar dedicatory message he wrote in several copies of the 1893 Maggie: “this

book tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world andfrequently shapes lives regardless If one proves that theory, one makes room

in Heaven for all sorts of souls, notably an occasional street girl, who are notconfidently expected to be there by many excellent people.”20

Still eager to strike while the iron was hot, Appletons brought out a smallcollection of Crane’s war stories, as the subtitle has it (echoing the subtitle of

The Red Badge of Courage) of “Episodes of the American Civil War.” Brought

out in London as well, as had all of Crane’s books following The Red Badge of

Courage, The Little Regiment attracted considerable attention, especially for a

grouping of merely half a dozen tales, with most of the reviewers applaudingCrane as an accomplished writer of war stories The publication of this bookhelped to solidify (petrify, in some cases) the notion that Crane was at his best

as a writer of war stories This prejudice was helped along when it was noted

that the composition of both George’s Mother and Maggie had preceded the writing of The Red Badge of Courage, though the recognition of that fact might

just as well have indicated to them that Crane, a professional writer, wouldnot allow himself to accept such a limitation

It was in this professional spirit, one imagines, that he next undertook adifferent subject: the bohemian art world of New York, something he knewmuch about at first hand He was certainly aware of George du Maurier’s

Trilby (1894), a novel on the “artist and model” theme that had recently been

a sensation of enormous proportion on both sides of the Atlantic, and realizedthat he could bring his own quite different talent to bear on the New Yorkworld of painting His novel would not follow du Maurier’s Svengali theme butwould pursue the twists and turns of a wry love story Published simultaneously

in both the United States and England in mid-spring 1897, The Third Violet

evoked a wide range of responses, ranging from the negative criticism of the

19 “Literary Notes,” New York Tribune (July 19, 1891), p 14.

20 Quoted in Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of

Stephen Crane 1871–1900 (New York: G K Hall, 1994), p 89.

Critic—“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 avacuous trifle”21—to the extravagantly positive reaction—“a remarkable piece

of purely literary craft; as a study in handling and technical originality it issomething unprecedented.”22Needless to say, The Third Violet did not come

close to bringing Crane anything resembling du Maurier’s popular success with

Trilby.

In 1898, eleven months after the publication of The Third Violet, Doubleday

& McClure brought out the American edition of The Open Boat and Other

Tales of Adventure, which, along with the title story, included the stories “A

Man and Some Others,” “One Dash—Horses,” “Flanagan and His Short ibustering Adventure,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” “The Wise Men,”

Fil-“Death and the Child,” and “The Five White Mice.” The British edition, lished at just about the same time, was a more substantial volume, containingall the stories printed in the American edition now presented under the rubric

pub-“Minor Conflicts” as well as a second section titled “Midnight Sketches,” taining “An Experiment in Misery,” “The Men in the Storm,” “The Duel thatwas not Fought,” “An Ominous Baby,” “A Great Mistake,” “An Eloquence

con-of Grief,” “The Auction,” “The Pace con-of Youth,” and “A Detail.”

Many of the reviews focused on “The Open Boat,” tacking on a mere tion of the titles of the remaining stories to the end of their reviews (“The oth-ers have the virtues of plot and character to an unusual degree,” summarized

men-the Criterion “They concern Greeks, Mexicans, children and cowboys.”23)Attracted by the fact that Crane’s story was based on its author’s own after-shipwreck experience, shared with three other survivors in rough seas tryingand failing to make it to shore, reviewers in the main had nothing but praise forCrane’s story There was a strong tendency, too, to grant Crane preeminence asthe writer whose forte was to depict powerful, unpleasant emotions (whether

in war, slums, or shipwrecks) This was Crane’s “own lurid province.”24Thiswas important not only because it implied a more accepting, broader, view ofCrane’s work, but also because it tied in with the controversy over whether toclassify him as a “realist” or “impressionist”; that is, many critics were able totolerate (and even commend) his unconventional lack of plot, incident, char-acter development by emphasizing that he writes of emotions—he specializes

in the psychology of minds under stress, and as such has every right to eschew

plot, etc While Conrad was still describing Crane as “the only impressionist and only an impressionist,” the reviewers were looking on Crane as a sort

21Critic, 27 (June 26, 1897), p 438.

22“Chelifer” [Rupert Hughes], “The Bookery,” Godey’s Magazine, 135 (September 1897),

p 331.

23“A New Book by Stephen Crane,” Criterion, 17 (April 23, 1898), p 25.

24“Stephen Crane’s Stories,” New York Press (May 1, 1898), p 29.

of realistic impressionist, or impressionistic realist.25 Only twenty years laterdid Conrad acknowledge publicly that Crane’s “impressionism of phrase wentreally deeper than the surface.”26 Elbert Hubbard of the Philistine spoke for

not a few when he described “The Open Boat” as the “sternest, creepiest bit

of realism ever penned.”27

In 1899 Crane published three books In mid-spring appeared War is Kind, followed by Active Service in the fall and The Monster and Other Stories in December War is Kind, a second collection of poems, was brought out by

Frederick A Stokes in New York It was not published in London Rathermodishly designed, illustrated by Will Bradley, and selling for the gaudy price

of $2.50—some reviewers considered this a rip-off, given the blank space onthe pages, the Beardsleyesque illustrations, and the misleading title—the bookfound, at best, a mixed reception

The title poem’s earlier publication, in the February 1896 Bookman, had

evoked interested responses on both sides of the Atlantic Jeannette L Gilder,

writing in the New York World, found the lines “quite remarkable for the

thought in them, but they are not poetry,” at least “not poetry as Tennysonunderstood it, for instance.”28 In London they were noted as “‘lines’ by

Mr Crane, which, while they are not poetry, are strong and original.”29

Although there were a few serious reviews of War is Kind—some favorable,

some hostile—for the most part, the reviews seemed to lie in some vast grayarea full of ridicule, parody, flippancy

Like War is Kind, Active Service added nothing to Crane’s literary reputation

overall The longest of Crane’s novels, it draws in part on Crane’s experiencecovering the Greco–Turkish conflict in the spring of 1897 But Crane hadarrived at the war scene late and because he was also ill part of the time,

he had witnessed no real action Anticipating the possibility that potentialbuyers of the book would mistake it for a reporter’s account of the war, the

American edition of Active Service carried the explanatory subtitle “A Novel”

on the title page This tag would also defuse any possible disappointment thatCrane, despite now having witnessed warfare at first hand, had not produced

a “real” account of warfare No such label, presumably because it was deemedunnecessary, appears in copies of the British edition

What the premier American war novelist had produced was not a war novel

as such but, curiously, a conventional love story played out against the meager

25 Letter to Edward Garnett, December 5, 1897, Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol I: 1861–

1897, Frederick R Karl and Laurence Davies, eds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1983), p 416.

26 Joseph Conrad, “Stephen Crane: A Note Without Dates,” Bookman, 50 (February 1920),

p 530.

27 Elbert Hubbard, Philistine, 11 (September 1900), p 123.

28 Jeannette L Gilder, New York World (February 23, 1896), p 18.

29 “Mr Stephen Crane,” Sketch, 13 (March 18, 1896), p 338.

color the foreign locale had to yield The best that reviewers could say of Active

Service, in the words of the Independent, was that it was “a pleasing little story

for an idle hour.”30Detractors pointed out that despite its title and the singlered saber illustrating its front and back covers the book was not about war,that the love story line was not original, and that the novel was devoid of thepenetrating psychology that characterized the best of Crane’s previous works

As the Outlook put it, “we demand that his own peculiar gift, his clairvoyance,

in laying bare the psychology of men’s blind emotions should flash on us dramas

of real significance.”31Writing shortly after Crane’s death, H G Wells offered

a plausible explanation for Crane’s failure with this novel: “Much more surely

is ‘On Active Service’ [sic] an effort [than The Third Violet], and in places a

painful effort, to fit his peculiar gift to the uncongenial conditions of popularacceptance It is the least capable and least satisfactory of all Crane’s work.”32

In December 1899 Harper & Brothers published The Monster and Other

Stories, containing, besides the title story, “The Blue Hotel” and “His New

Mittens.” Notably, when the book was republished in 1901, eight monthsafter Crane’s death, it was so enlarged by the inclusion of an additional fourstories—“Twelve O’clock,” “Moonlight on the Snow,” “Manacled,” and “AnIllusion in Red and White”—that it must be considered a separate publication

(as I do in this collection), not merely a reprint As they did with the Open Boat

collection, reviewers of this volume (especially in the shorter, first edition) werewont to focus on the title story Generally favorable, the two most commonviews of “The Monster” were that it was a psychological study of hysteria andfear or that it was a detailed study of American rural life A few critics (notably

of church-affiliated periodicals) saw it as an investigation of ethics, specifically,the question as to what limits might reasonably exist in the brother’s-keeperapproach to life These readings tended to see Dr Trescott, who saves HenryJohnson’s life, as, thematically, the tale’s central character, not, as is customary,the heroic black man “The Monster” alone would have been sufficient to

establish Crane’s literary reputation, concluded the Spectator “If Mr Crane

had never written anything else,” it said, “he would have earned the right ofremembrance by this story alone.”33But the story also had its detractors Theycomplained that there was no satisfactory resolution to the doctor’s plight,that the elaborate description (of the fire, for example) was pointless, that the

subject was violent or horrible Even as it praises Crane’s artistry, the Chicago

Evening Post calls the story “a small and odious work of art.”34

30The Independent, 51 (December 7, 1899), p 3300.

31“Mr Stephen Crane in Action,” Outlook, 4 (December 16, 1899), p 657.

32H G Wells, “Stephen Crane: From an English Standpoint,” North American Review, 171

(August 15, 1900), p 240.

33“Novels of the Week,” Spectator, 86 (February 16, 1901), p 244.

34Chicago Evening Post (December 18, 1899), p 5.

“The Blue Hotel” and “His New Mittens” drew much less attention than

“The Monster.” They were dismissed entirely by some “Of the three stories

that it [the 1899 Monster and Other Stories] contains, the last is childishly ineffective and the second incoherently so” said the Churchman.35 But the

Boston Evening Transcript thought otherwise The other two stories were as

effective as the title story “This wonderful artist again gives us three sketcheswhich palpitate with life,” it begins:

in the first Negro traits, childhood, a village fire and the gossip and incident

of a narrow community In the second a Nebraska scrap In the third, thetragedy of a boy’s mittens Stephen Crane’s words fall like the adjustments

of a magnificent and complicated mechanism.36

Occasionally there were suggestions that Crane’s work in this volume was

derivative “The Monster” had its source in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle

Tom’s Cabin, it was suggested, and “The Blue Hotel” in Bret Harte’s Bound at Eagle’s Cora Crane offered the information that, in the latter

Snow-instance, the story was “one of Mr Crane’s own experiences when he wentWest for the Batchelor Syndicate of New York.”37This explanation stands as

a sort of confirmation before the fact for Thomas Beer’s “invented” account ofCrane’s behavior as witness to a fight similar to the one depicted in “The BlueHotel.”

In the period of scarcely three months after Crane’s death on June 5, 1900there appeared three books with his name on the title-page William Heinemann

reissued Maggie: A Child of the Streets (its British title) and George’s Mother as

a single volume bearing the title Bowery Tales, Harper & Brothers published

Whilomville Stories (in New York as well as London), and Frederick A Stokes

in New York and Methuen & Co in London brought out Wounds in the Rain Heinemann’s edition of Bowery Tales, the only edition ever published, was

barely noticed, if the paucity of reviews so far uncovered is any indication It is

interesting that the existence of Bowery Tales enabled two well-known British

writers to discover at a later date Crane’s so-called slum novels In a journalentry dated March 6, 1910, Arnold Bennett writes: “Lately I have been reading

Stephen Crane’s Bowery Tales, which was quite readable, and excellent even,

in parts,”38while H E Bates, in a letter to Edward Garnett in 1927, writes:

“My week-end was blessed with a second volume of Crane which I picked up

cheap in London—Maggie & George’s Mother Its [sic] impossible to say how

they impressed me Blast the people that won’t touch him.”39

35 Churchman, 80 (December 23, 1899), p 791.

36 “Stephen Crane’s Stories,” Boston Evening Transcript (January 10, 1900), p 10.

37 “The Literary Week,” Academy, 60 (March 2, 1901), p 177.

38 The Journal of Arnold Bennett (New York: Literary Guild, 1933), p 370.

39 Letter to Edward Garnett, January 26, 1927, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas Quoted with consent.

Whilomville Stories, a collection of stories from Harper’s Magazine, is clearly

a cycle of inter-related stories If The Red Badge of Courage took a Huck

Finn-like boy to war, this late book delves into the mysteries, joys, and cruelties ofchildren in a Tom Sawyer world, especially as it appears in the Phelps farm

episodes of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Reviewers expressed some

disagreement over whether it was an adult book about children or a children’sbook If the latter it was pointed out that Crane’s language was too difficultfor them John D Barry, who had followed Crane’s career from the days of

the 1893 Maggie, explained Crane’s failure in this book as one of language.

At the time of his death he was acquiring from the world the education

he had missed in his brief experience at college Among other things, hewas learning new words, fine words, the words that most writers know andnever use He snatched at them as a child snatches at bits of flashing jewelry,and he stuck them into his stories with a splendid disregard of their fitness

Whilomville Stories, one of his latest books, instead of being written in the

simple language suitable to the child-life described, is full of such words;they fairly stick out of the page If Mr Crane had lived a few years longer,

he would undoubtedly have stored those words in his memory, kept themshut up there, and returned to plain speech.40

In the Nation Annie Logan, who seldom if ever had a good word to say about

Crane’s writing, contended that Crane’s entire literary reputation “might justly

be annihilated by Whilomville Stories.”41 While the American Ecclesiastical

Review blasted Crane’s stories, including the Peter Newell drawings that

The Churchman, on the other hand, acknowledging the loss that Crane’s death

brought to all “lovers of strenuous fiction and photographic realism,” found

Whilomville Stories to be “as true to life as any that Mr Crane ever wrote,”

but with a difference “It has a winning sympathy, a touch of nature that werecall but rarely in his former work.”43

40John D Barry, “A Note on Stephen Crane,” Bookman, 13 (April 1901), p 148.

41Annie R M Logan, “Recent Novels,” Nation, 72 (February 28, 1901), p 182.

42“Recent Popular Books,” American Ecclesiastical Review, 23 (September 1900), pp 335–336.

43“Recent Fiction,” Churchman, 82 (September 29, 1900), p 385.

On the whole the reviews of Whilomville Stories were favorable, many

com-menting on the humor in the stories, something that was not always considered

to be a part of Crane’s temperament in other writings According to the

Out-look, “Mr Crane, from his first great popular success until his recent sad death,

did no literary work more thoroughly and truly artistic than is found in theseslight and simple sketches of child life If they are not hilariously humorous,they are whimsically droll.”44The London Times, perhaps, offers a median in

its typically measured praise:

In these [stories] he appears in an attractive light, which does infinite credit

to his versatility We hardly recognize the author of “The Red Badge ofCourage” in the playful humourist who identifies himself so happily withthe moods, the chatter, and the childish fancies of small boys and girls Hehas done for Whilomville what Mr Barrie did for Thrums, and the onetownship is as quaint and old-world as the other.45

The publication of Whilomville Stories was followed almost immediately by the appearance of Wounds in the Rain in September It seems apparent that

Crane himself put both manuscripts together Attesting to this is the date Craneassigns to his dedication of the war book—April 1900

Wounds in the Rain collects stories and sketches Crane wrote during and

shortly after the end of the Spanish–American War Based on his own vations and experiences, these hard-earned pieces were evidence that Crane’searlier dependence on largely imagined impressions was giving way to a closerbonding of his imagination to the facts of war overall as well as to the mundane,

obser-if sometimes heroic, actuality of warfare

Inevitably there were comparisons with The Red Badge of Courage, which

had become the benchmark for Crane’s own war writings Most reviewersdecided that the two works were of comparable excellence “‘Wounds inthe Rain’ is a book that should stand on the shelf beside the ‘Red Badge

of Courage,’” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle;46while in London the Sketch

considered the two works to be “almost identical in style, in scope, in point ofview, in hard surface brilliancy.”47Crane’s accomplishment in Wounds in the

Rain was a corroboration of what he had earlier imagined In Crane’s

“pub-lished work,” asserted the New York Herald, “the thing that strikes you is

the fact that he discovered himself from the first His ‘Red Badge of Courage’was a prediction of this latest book What Crane the dreamer had imagined,Crane the war correspondent realized The stories in this book, written after

he had known war, strikingly corroborated what he had fancied that war must

44 Outlook, 66 (September 8, 1900), p 133.

45 “Recent Novels,” London Times (April 2, 1901), p 13.

46 Brooklyn Daily Eagle (October 20, 1900), p 4.

47 O O., “The Literary Lounger,” Sketch, 32 (October 24, 1900), p 32.

be.” After singling out “‘War Memories,’ revealing in flashes of lightning all

of the battle episodes which he had witnessed in Cuba,” he comes to what he

considers Crane’s major achievement in Wounds in the Rain to be.

Despite its abandonment of the epic mood, there is a true epic as epicsmust be written to-day He never exaggerates, rather he underrates, yet

he produces an effect which no exaggeration could reach These Americansoldiers, with their reticence, their calmness, their careless jests in the face

of deadly peril, are far more splendid and imposing than if they had sought

to assume the heroic attitude, or if their historian had flung around them anatmosphere of conscious heroism.48

The New York Times picked up on Crane’s handling of “heroism” in war.

After quoting from the last story in the volume, “The Second Generation,”the review concludes: “There is no pomp of war in what Mr Stephen Cranewrites You see the horrors of it, lightened here and there by heroism, and it isthe matter-of-fact heroism which is most to the author’s liking.”49

Great Battles of the World, first published in Philadelphia by J B Lippincott

in early 1901, was a collection of articles on notable historical battles that ran

initially in Lippincott’s Magazine As a note prefacing the volume indicates, “It

was agreed that the battles should be the choice of the author, and he chosethem for their picturesque and theatric qualities, not alone for their decisiveness.What he could best assimilate from history was its grandeur and passion andthe first of action These he loved, and hence the group of glorious battles whichforms this volume.”50 Not all reviewers were satisfied with Crane’s choices.Critics expressed confusion at the author’s choice of “great” battles In fact,the choice may have been affected by the fact that the research for the essay,and perhaps some of the writing itself, was done by Kate Lyons

There was the rare example of the extravagant review This was Crane’s

“last and most remarkable book”51 or his “most important work,”52 but atbest, when it did occur, praise for the volume was subdued Early on, moreover,critics began admitting that the book would do nothing for Crane’s literary rep-utation and that, all told, it was disappointing J B Kerfoot’s disappointmentwas such that he thought it “a pity that the dignity of publication should have

48“The Soft Side and the Hard Side,” New York Herald (October 20, 1900), p 12.

49“War Stories by Stephen Crane,” New York Times (November 10, 1900), p 767.

50Harrison S Morris, “Note,” Great Battles of the World (Philadelphia: J B Lippincott, 1901),

been conferred upon papers so little worthy of standing as the last word oftheir author.”53

But it was only Crane’s “latest” word Cora Crane saw to that While

waiting for Robert Barr to bring The O’Ruddy to conclusion, she saw a new collection of Crane’s work through the press Last Words appeared on the

spring list 1902 of the London publisher Digby, Long, & Company A gathering

of previously published pieces—scattered fugitives, varying in subject matterand genre, cobbled together for publication—it offered few examples of whatmight be called Crane’s final work Most of the reviewers managed to findsomething favorable to say, but there was not much enthusiasm shown for

this posthumous publication The one glaring exception was the Publishers’

Circular, which ventured that in this volume one found Crane “almost at his

very best.”54

Crane’s long-awaited Irish novel The O’Ruddy was finally published by

Frederick A Stokes in New York at the end of 1903, and in London byMethuen during the summer of 1904 To attract readers among America’sIrish population, perhaps, copies in the New York edition—but not in theBritish edition—featured a small shamrock just below the title on the book’sspine

Given the facts that The O’Ruddy was like no other book written by Crane

and that another writer—Robert Barr—had completed Crane’s unfinishedmanuscript, it is not surprising that many reviewers focused on the question ofjust how much Barr had contributed to the book If almost everyone praisedBarr’s skill in “joining” his and Crane’s work, there were a few who thoughtthat the beginning and ending of the book were quite different, with the begin-ning superior to the ending.55The Academy reflected the general attitude when

it suggested, perhaps jokingly, that “it would form a nice subject for a petition for critics to separate Mr Barr’s share of the work from the late Mr.Stephen Crane’s.”56

com-Reviewers also had difficulty in deciding where to place The O’Ruddy in the

Crane canon Virtually no one made comparisons with Crane’s other work.The comparisons were to the works of Charles Lever and Thackeray, seeing,

in the latter instance, similarities between Crane’s hero and Barry Lyndon

Earlier markers of Crane criticism are absent from reviews of The O’Ruddy,

such as “versatility,” “power,” “vivid,” “original,” and, notably, “truth,”

“impressionism,” and “realism.” As it was decided in the Times Literary

Sup-plement, the book is “a capital bit of fictitious autobiography, though perhaps

53 J B Kerfoot, “Latest Books,” Life, 37 (January 10, 1901), p 26.

54 Publishers’ Circular, 76 (May 17, 1902), p 578.

55 See “Briefer Notices,” Public Opinion, 35 (December 24, 1903), p 824, and “Books of the Week,” Indianapolis Journal (January 4, 1904), p 3.

56 “Fiction,” Academy, 67 (August 6, 1904), p 99.

‘verisimilitude’ and ‘realism’ are words too high and serious for it.”57 Thewords that were used were usually intended to classify the work: “farce,”

“burlesque,” “satire,” “rhodomontade,” “extravaganza,” or “fairy story forgrown-ups.”58 In the same spirit, the Athenaeum called it an example of the

many “Irish novels of intrigue and adventure,” lacking only “a better name

to be quite a masterpiece of its kind.”59 In short, the consensus was that

The O’Ruddy was light fare, amusing and full of good fun The Manchester Guardian, always an enthusiastic supporter of Crane’s work, wondered “why

so fine and powerful a writer should play such a trick with his reputation.”60

The pieces gathered here are presented chronologically within the title gories, which are also arranged chronologically by date of first publication.Items that deal substantially with more than one Crane title—after all hecrammed a great deal into the years following 1895—are placed among thereviews of the last Crane title treated in such pieces Most of the pieces have beenselected because (1) they provide perceptive commentary on Crane’s work, or(2) they express clearly and often strongly an important point of view regarding

cate-Crane’s achievement I have also kept in mind that with the publication of The

Red Badge of Courage in 1895 Crane became a trans-Atlantic celebrity.

Because very few of the reviewers of the Maggie: A Girl of the Streets issued

in 1896 were familiar with the first edition of the book, published in 1893under the pseudonym “Johnston Smith” and with no publisher indicated, andsince the Appleton edition in 1896 is heavily revised, especially to eliminatepotentially objectionable language, as well as one particularly grotesque figure,

I have chosen, for the purpose of this collection, to list the 1893 and 1896editions separately, as if they were different books

57“Fiction,” Times Literary Supplement (July 29, 1904), p 237.

58“Literature,” Independent, 56 (February 4, 1904), 273; Standard, 51 (February 6, 1904),

p 690; William Morton Payne, “Recent Fiction,” Dial, 36 (February 16, 1904), p 121; “King

of the Irelands,” New York Times (November 21, 1903), p BR8; “Novels,” Saturday Review,

98 (August 6, 1904), p 177; and “Fiction,” Academy, 67 (August 6, 1904), p 99.

59“New Novels,” Athenaeum (August 13, 1904), p 200.

60“New Novels,” Manchester Guardian (July 27, 1904), p 6.

To Philip R Eppard, Neil K Fitzgerald, Stanton B Garner, Susan Geary,Brenda Murphy, Hershel Parker, Alice Hall Petry and Linda J Taylor, I amgrateful for valuable assistance at various times in my quest for reviews ofCrane’s work and in their preparation for publication

I have benefited much from the services provided by many libraries, cially the John Hay Library and Rockefeller Library, Brown University, Prov-idence, Rhode Island; New York Public Library; Butler Library, ColumbiaUniversity, New York; Homer Babbidge Library and Dodd Research Center,University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut; Widener Library, Harvard Uni-versity, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University,New Haven, Connecticut; Library of Congress, Washington, D C.; and City

espe-of Chicago Central Library and Center for Research, Chicago, Illinois

My thanks, too, to Thomas M Inge, who long ago recruited me for thisproject and who from time to time nudged me quietly and patiently to complete

my manuscript

Anyone with more than a casual interest in the life and works of Stephen

Crane has profited from Ames W Williams and Vincent Starrett’s Stephen

Crane: A Bibliography (1948), R W Stallman’s Stephen Crane: A Critical Bibliography (1972), Richard M Weatherford’s Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage (1973), and Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino’s The Crane Log:

A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane 1871–1900 (1993) I am no exception.

MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS(A STORY OF NEW YORK)

by Johnston Smith (1893)

“A Remarkable Book.”

Port Jervis Union, March

3, 1893, p 3

The Union has been favored with a copy of

a recently published novel entitled,

“Mag-gie, a Girl of the Streets,” by Stephen

Crane of New York city The writer is

a son of the late Rev J T Crane and a

brother of Judge Wm H Crane, which

facts, apart from the merits of the

publi-cation, will invest it with a certain degree

of local interest

The plot is laid in the slums and dives

of the great metropolis and the

charac-ters depicted are all, without exception,

creatures of the slums The evident object

of the writer is to show the tremendous

influence of environment on the human

character and destiny Maggie, the

hero-ine, or central figure of the tale, grows up

under surroundings which repress all good

impulses, stunt the moral growth and

ren-der it inevitable that she should become

what she eventually did, a creature of the

streets The pathos of her sad story will be

deeply felt by all susceptible persons who

read the book

The slum life of New York city is

treated with the frank fidelity of the

real-ist, and while the unco guid [sic] and ultra

pious may be shocked by the freedom of

his descriptions and the language in which

the dialogues are carried on, sensible

peo-ple will read the book in the spirit in which

it was written and will derive therefrom

the moral lesson which it is the author’s

aim to inculcate

The literary merits of the work are

con-siderable

The author, although scarcely yet out

of his teens, is the master of a

vigor-ous style and uses the English language

with precision, force and fluency He hashumor, originality and a wonderful power

of depicting life as he sees it He has apositive genius for description and greatskill in the analysis of human characterand motive

The dialect of the New York slums,which is reproduced in this volume withabsolute accuracy, is, we take it, some-thing new in literature It is certainly aslegitimate a subject of literary and artis-tic treatment as the dialect of the Geor-gia negro or Tennessee mountaineer andeven more interesting to the average NewYorker

The volume before us is a very cleverand most creditable achievement for soyoung a man and we congratulate theauthor most heartily on the success of hisfirst attempt at book making

John D Barry Letter to Stephen Crane March

no light whatever to your shade I knowone might say that the truth was black andthat you tried to describe it just as it was;

but, one ought always to bear in mind that

literature is an art, that effect, the effect

upon the reader, must always be kept in

view by the artist and as soon as that effect

approaches the morbid, the unhealthful,

the art becomes diseased It is the taint in

the peach I really believe that the lesson

of your story is good, but I believe, too,

that you have driven that lesson too hard

There must be moderation even in

well-doing; excess of enthusiasm in reform is

apt to be dangerous The mere brooding

upon evil conditions, especially those

con-cerned with the relation of the sexes, is

the most dangerous and the most

senti-mental of all brooding, and I don’t think

that it often moves to action, to actual

reform work This, it seems to me, is just

the kind of brooding your book inspires

I presume you want to make people think

about the horrible things you describe But

of what avail is their thought unless it

leads them to work? It would be better

for them not to think about these things

at all—if thinking ends as it began, for in

itself it is unpleasant and in its tendency

unhealthful

Hamlin Garland “An

Ambitious French Novel

and a Modest American

Story.” Arena 8 (June

1893), pp xi–xii

This is of more interest to me, both

because it is the work of a young man,

and also because it is a work of

aston-ishingly good style It deals with poverty

and vice and crime also, but it does so,

not out of curiosity, not out of

salacious-ness, but because of a distinct art impulse,

the desire to utter in truthful phrase a tain rebellious cry It is the voice of theslums It is not written by a dilettante; it

cer-is written by one who has lived the life.The young author, Stephen Crane, is anative of the city, and has grown up inthe very scenes he describes His book isthe most truthful and unhackneyed study

of the slums I have yet read, fragmentthough it is It is pictorial, graphic, terri-ble in its directness It has no conventionalphrases It gives the dialect of the slums as

I have never before seen it written—crisp,direct, terse It is another locality findingvoice

It is important because it voicesthe blind rebellion of Rum Alley andDevil’s Row It creates the atmosphere

of the jungles, where vice festers andcrime passes gloomily by, where outlawedhuman nature rebels against God andman

The story fails of rounded ness It is only a fragment It is typicalonly of the worst elements of the alley.The author should delineate the familiesliving on the next street, who live lives ofheroic purity and hopeless hardship.The dictum is amazingly simple andfine for so young a writer Some of thewords illuminate like flashes of light Mr.Crane is only twenty-one years of age,and yet he has met and grappled withthe actualities of the street in almostunequalled grace and strength With such

complete-a technique complete-alrecomplete-ady complete-at commcomplete-and, with life mainly before him, Stephen Crane is

to be henceforth reckoned with gie” should be put beside “Van Bib-ber”; to see the extremes of New York

“Mag-as stated by two young men Mr Crane

need not fear comparisons so far as

tech-nique goes, and Mr Davis will need to

step forward right briskly or he may beovertaken by a man who impresses thereader with a sense of almost unlimitedresource

Edward Marshall “A

Great American Writer.”

Philadelphia Press, April

15, 1894, p 27

[Quotes William Dean Howells:]

There is another whom I have great

hopes of His name is Stephen Crane,

and he is very young, but he promises

splendid things He has written one

novel so far—Maggie I think that as

a study of East Side life in New York

Maggie is a wonderful book There is so

much realism of a certain kind in it that

we might not like to have it lying on our

parlor tables, but I hope that the time

will come when any book can safely tell

the truth as completely as Maggie does.

Stephen Crane, the young writer whom

Mr Howells praises in such an unusual

manner, is still in the very early twenties

and wrote Maggie several years ago The

little book, which is sold by the Arena

Company of Boston, is the story of the

life and death of a girl of the tenements It

aims at exact truth in painting an

unpleas-ant side of life, and approaches nearer to

realizing it than any other book written by

an American ever has

“Stephen Crane’s

‘Maggie.’” New York

Press, April 15, 1894,

part 3, p 2

“Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,” Stephen

Crane’s book, to which Mr W D

How-ells pays such an astonishing tribute in theinterview published in another part of thispaper, is a study of tenement house life

in this city It tells two stories—those of abrother and sister It begins in this way[Quotes from “A very little boy stood

on a heap of gravel” to “the fight hadchanged to a blasphemous chatter.”]After this the boy’s father comes andtakes him home They meet Maggie, then

10 years old, on the way The home life

of this tenement house family is painted inthis way:

[Quotes “Finally the processionplunged into one of the grewsomedoorways” to “Eh, Gawd, child, what

is it dis time? Is yer fader beatin’ yermudder, or yer mudder beatin’ yerfader?”]

Such is the environment which Mr Cranegives the brother and Maggie It is from

it that she goes out to become “a girl

of the streets.” He tells his story—or,rather, makes his study—with mercilessaccuracy There is unquestionably truth in

it, the kind of truth that no American hasever had the courage (or is it bravado?)

to put between book covers before It

is a question if such brutalities arewholly acceptable in literature Perhaps, as

Mr Howells says they will be before long.Perhaps there will always be certain phases

of our life which we will not want to havewoven with entire realism into our readingmatter

This writer, however, deserves praisefor one thing, surely He has not failed totouch vice in his book where he has found

it in real life; but he has not gilded it Hehas painted it as it is; he has not made

it clandestinely attractive In this he risesfar above such other Americans—EdgarFawcett and Edgar Saltus, notably—ashave endeavoured to gain recognition insomewhat similar fields

Throughout the book the quaint and

graphic descriptive powers of the young

author are shown as strongly as in the

portions quoted Whether or not we can

be entertained by the book, it certainly

must command our respect “Maggie”

is published by the Arena Company of

Boston

It is interesting to note that in next

Sunday’s Press Mr Crane will describe

the experience of a student of human

nature among the tramps in Bowery

lodg-ing houses, under the headlodg-ing of “An

Experiment in Misery.” This will be

fol-lowed the next week by the same

stu-dent’s observations among people of the

other social extreme—“An Experiment in

In the interesting interview with Mr

William D Howells, published in “The

Press” last Sunday, there appeared a word

of unusual commendation from Mr

How-ells for the work of an author whom he

called Stephen Crane It is unusual because

Mr Howells, since his commendation of

Mr Howe and his story, “A Story of a

Country Town,” has been careful of his

favoring criticism Of course, the praise of

Mr Howells for Mr Crane caused quick

interest to be awakened in the

personal-ity of that author Howells praised him

for his realism, approaching, as he told a

friend, even that of Tolstoi He had found

it in a little book descriptive of a certain

phase of miserable life in New York city, abook certainly that no one except its pub-lisher and perhaps a score of others hadever seen

The realism of Mr Crane as it is done

in that book is certainly cold, awful, tal realism, and it reveals a power whichwhen the author has learned of experienceand has disciplined his artistic sense maygive us something that may be compared

bru-to Tolsbru-toi with respect bru-to art as well asrealism But it is possible to tell a story

of realism quite as suggestive and not soshocking as that one told in Mr Crane’sbook, and it is a realism in which he had

an unconscious part

Stephen Crane was not long ago in

a certain office in New York where thetools are those of literature and jour-nalism The cases upon the walls con-tain dusty and dog-eared manuscripts Thedesks were littered in charming confusionwith proof slips, sheets of copy daubedhere and there with the carelessly thrown,unwiped pen Cigarette stubs were on thefloor and a dismal bell over an editor’sdesk jingled with the peremptory reso-nance of a call from the composing roombeyond

Stephen Crane stood in the middle ofthat room as odd and plaintive appear-ing a specimen of eager humanity as hasever been there He seemed to have with-ered so that all the vitality of his bodywas concentrated in his head He was aslender, sad-eyed slip of a youth, lookingaround the room with yearning glances

of his eyes as though he would like tofind a place where he could deposit themanuscript He looked like one who hadbeen fed for months on crackers and milk,

as very likely was the fact since he hadstarved himself in order to get togethermoney enough to publish at his ownexpense, every publisher having rejected

it, the very book which Mr Howells haspraised

At last turning to a man of authority

who sat before a desk and who did not

even look up when Crane spoke to him,

the youth said in a voice in which there

was the note of despair: “Well, I am going

to chuck the whole thing,” and he pulled

a listless hand out of his pocket and let it

deliver an impulsive gesture, as though he

was casting something away from him

“What do you mean by that?” said the

busy man

“Oh, I have worked two years, living

with tramps in the tenements on the East

Side so that I could get to know those

peo-ple as they are, and what is the use? In all

that time I have received only $25 for my

work I can’t starve even to carry on this

work, and I’m going home to my brother

in New Jersey and perhaps learn the boot

and shoe trade.”

“I am sorry,” said the busy man, and

then Crane wheeled about and walked

away with the set of a man in whose blood

there was not a particle of the vitality

which comes from good beef or mutton

He went out and strolled down

Broad-way, far more miserable than any of the

sorry creatures whom he has been

study-ing because he was conscious of his

mis-ery He had failed in an ambition, whereas

they had no ambition

A friendly hand was laid upon his

shoulder and he started as though it

was the clutch of a policeman Then he

saw that there was greeting in the touch

and the smile

“Crane,” said his friend, “what do you

think? William D Howells has read your

book, and he says it’s great.”

“Eh?” said the youth, and it seemed to

the friend as though a sort of blur came

over his eyes

“I say that Howells has read your book,

and he compares you with Tolstoi, and he

is going to say so in print.” It came upon

that half-starved youth with such sudden

force that he received it like a blow If

he had been told that Howells had demned the book he might have heaved asigh He seemed dazed He looked aroundlike a man who did not know where

con-he was He gulped something down histhroat, grinned like a woman in hysterics,and then went off to take up his vocationagain

The story must have impressed ells only because of the brutal force ofthe blunt description which the authorrevealed It is faithful; no newspaper man

How-in New York, no one who is familiar withthe life of the tenements, can deny theaccuracy of the picture, but it is awful,just as life there is awful And the won-der is that having gone so far in his real-ism Crane did not dare to go—as Tol-stoi did and as Victor Hugo once did

in his “Les Mis´erables”—clear over theline Quite as realistic pictures, however,have been occasionally painted by some ofthe reporters for the newspapers, but theyhave done it without any sense of art orvocation—but simply as an incident in thereporting of some great tragedy or otherimportant happening in those parts of thecity

Crane, however, had another triumphrecently There was a gathering at aresort of high culture at which wereseveral authors who had promised toread from their unpublished manuscripts.Mrs Burnett was one; Gilbert Parker wasanother, and perhaps there were six orseven more One of those readers, turn-ing from his own “uncut leaves,” took

up another manuscript It contained eral poems which were not poems bythe laws of prosedy, having no metri-cal arrangement, but being of exquisiterhythmic quality, something perhaps ofthe character and construction which dis-tinguished the poems of Walt Whitman.The reading of these poems by Mr John T.Barry created something of excitement andinterest

But probably the strongest piece of slum

writing we have is “Maggie,” by Mr

Stephen Crane, which was published some

years ago with a pen-name for the writer

and no name at all for the publishers

But merit will out, and the unclaimed

foundling attracted no little attention,

though by no means as much as it deserves

The keenness of the wit, the minuteness

of the observation, and the bitterness of

the cynicism resemble Morrison’s work

The foredoomed fall of a well-meaning girl

reared in an environment of drunkenness

and grime is told with great humanity and

fearless art, and there is a fine use of trast in the conclusion of the work, wherethe brutal mother in drunken sentimen-tality is persuaded with difficulty to “for-give” the dead girl whom she compelled

con-to a harsh fate by the barren cruelty ofhome-life

Checklist of Additional Reviews

New York Recorder 1894? Scrapbooks,

Stephen Crane Collection, ColumbiaUniversity

E J Edwards “Uncut Leaves,” AmericanPress Association Release May 1,1894

William Dean Howells “Life and

Letters.” Harper’s Weekly 39 (June 8,

1895), p 533

“Stephen Crane’s ‘Maggie.’” New York

Commercial Advertiser, April 11,

1896, p 17

THE BLACK RIDERS AND OTHER LINES

Boston: Copeland & Day 1895

“Writers and Books.”

New York Recorder,

March 25, 1894, p 6

Mr Stephen Crane, whose first novel,

“Maggie,” won high praise from

promi-nent authors last year, and whose second

story was mentioned in The Recorder a

few weeks ago, has written a volume of

poems which will probably create

con-siderable discussion when it is published

The poems are uncompromisingly

realis-tic, and in their composition the author

has ignored the laws of form He is only

22 years of age and intensely devoted to

realism

Harry Thurston Peck.

“Some Recent Volumes

of Verse.” Bookman 1

(May 1895), p 254

Mr Stephen Crane is the Aubrey

Beard-sley of poetry When one first takes up

his little book of verse and notes the

quite too Beardsleyesque splash of black

upon its staring white boards, and then

on opening it discovers that the “lines”

are printed wholly in capitals, and that

they are unrhymed and destitute of what

most poets regard as rhythm, the general

impression is of a writer who is bidding for

renown wholly on the basis of his

eccen-tricity But just as Mr Beardsley with all

his absurdities is none the less a master of

black and white, so Mr Crane is a true

poet whose verse, long after the

eccentric-ity of its form has worn off, fascinates us

and forbids us to lay the volume downuntil the last line has been read Even inthe most fantastic of his conceits there arereadily to be found a thought and a mean-ing In fact, if Walt Whitman had beencaught young and subjected to æstheticinfluences, it is likely that he would havemellowed his barbaric yawp to some suchnote as that which sounds in the poemsthat are now before us A few examples of

Mr Crane’s manner may serve at once as

an illustration and as a diversion to thosewho have not yet made his acquaintance

Mr Crane will perhaps pardon us if weneglect to display his lines in the capitalletters that he appears to love

The following is a fair specimen of Mr.Crane’s treatment of things religious—or

as one might more truly say, of thingsdogmatic:

Two or three angelsCame near to the earth

They saw a fat church

Little black streams of peopleCame and went in continually.And the angels were puzzled

To know why the people went thus,And why they stayed so long within.Here is a good instance of his allegoricalway of giving new expression to philo-sophic truths or truisms:

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;Round and round they sped

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man

“It is futile,” I said,

“You can never—”

“You lie,” he cried,And ran on

Very few of his poems sound the note oflove; and when they do, there is alwayssomething gloomy or unhappy either inthe main thought or in the accompanyingsuggestions This short poem is sufficientlytypical of the rest:

Should the wide world roll away,

Leaving black terror,

Limitless night,

Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand

Would be to me essential,

If thou and thy white arms were there,

And the fall to doom a long way

Here is an example of his weirdness:

Many red devils ran from my heart,

And out upon the page

They were so tiny

The pen could mash them,

And many struggled in the ink

It was strange to write in this red muck

Of things from my heart

On the whole, Mr Crane’s work has

traces of Entartung, but he is by no

means a decadent, but rather a bold—

sometimes too bold—original, and

pow-erful writer of eccentric verse,

skepti-cal, pessimistic, often cynical; and one

who stimulates thought because he

him-self thinks It is no exaggeration to say

that the small volume that bears his name

is the most notable contribution to

liter-ature to which the present year has given

Mr Stephen Crane is an extremely young

man who writes beautiful prose, when he

is content to do so, and who has

writ-ten and published, through Copeland &

Day of Boston, a strange book, which is

neither prose nor verse, but a series of

Maeterlinckian convulsions of symbolism,

printed all in capital letters and mercifully

condensed within limits of commendablebrevity The following extract will givesome idea both of Mr Crane’s literarymethod and of the appearance upon theprinted page of the selections printed in

“The Black Riders, and Other Lines”:MANY RED DEVILS RAN FROM

MY HEARTAND OUT UPON THE PAGE,THEY WERE SO TINYTHE PEN COULD MASH THEM.AND MANY STRUGGLED IN THEINK

IT WAS STRANGE

TO WRITE IN THIS RED MUCK

OF THINGS FROM MY HEART.Symbolism, and mainly the symbolic utter-ance of gloomy, cynical, pessimistic imag-inings, is Mr Crane’s literary incubus Hesays:

“If I should cast off this tattered coatand go free into the mighty sky; if I shouldfind nothing there but a vast blue echoless,ignorant—what then?”

Printed thus as a paragraph of nary prose, this is a rather unprepossessingstatement of agnostic doubts The authorcan be far more ridiculous when he tries

The Maeterlinckian formula is most

notable in Mr Crane’s “I Stood Musing

in a Black World.” His agnosticism finds

several utterances like: “Blustering god,

stamping across the sky with loud

swag-ger, I fear you not,” whereof the

antistro-phe is: “Withal, there is one of whom I

fear; I fear to see grief upon that face

Per-chance, friend, he is not your god If so,

spit upon him By it you will do no

pro-fanity But I—ah, sooner would I die than

see tears in those eyes of my soul.”

Of conformity, Crane has a slighting

opinion “‘Think as I think,’ said a man,

‘or you are abominably wicked; you are a

toad,’ and after I had thought of it, I said,

‘I will be a toad.’”

Of course, this is affectation, but all

writing of words upon paper is apt to

con-tain some grain of this The real question

is, after all, whether Mr Crane’s method

is artistic and worth while And I don’t

think it is To the general reader—and

each one of us is an element in that great

composite—the book is simply nonsense

Yet that is not the fault of the

symbolis-tic fable form, which is as old as Aesop

and the most enduringly popular of all

forms Probably Mr Crane doesn’t really

wish to be popular He is an American

Decadent

“Note, Comment and

Forecast.” Boston Daily

Advertiser, May 9, 1895,

p 5

Copeland & Day, Boston, have just

brought out a notable little volume of

verse by Stephen Crane, entitled “The

Black Riders and Other Lines.” There are

67 of these poems No 45 is:—

Tradition, thou art for sucklingchildren,

Thou art the enlivening milk forbabes:

But no meat for men is in thee.Then—

But, alas, we are all babes

No 41 runs in this wise:—

Love walked alone,The rocks cut her tender feet

And the brambles tore her fair limbs.There came a companion to her.But, alas, he was no help,For his name was heart’s pain.These lines of Mr Crane’s are pessimistic,

we had almost said atheistic There is inthem a tone of sneering cynicism, but there

is seen in them, too, the genius of thepoet

Daily Inter Ocean, May

“Leaves of Grass” were luminous in parison Poetic Lunacy would be a bettername for the book