[In the following excerpt, Cady examines representations of violence in the fiction of William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane.]

The currently popular assertion that violence is somehow distinctively or peculiarly American is easy to refute by historical, etiological reference. In the springtime of the Jamestown Colony, for instance, they punished one of the lads by escorting him out into the forest and nailing his hand with a dagger so firmly to a tree that whenever he should decide to come home he would have to use the blade to cut through his hand and free himself. When the Pilgrim Fathers found that Thomas Morton was cultivating love, joy and good Indian relations over at Merry Mount they despatched Miles Standish with his squad of citizen soldiers to put a stop not only to sin but Merry Mount.

Such actions of the national dawn were not, however, in the least “American.” They were European and not even close to the worst acts of physical and psychic repression Europeans regularly practiced upon each other at home and upon other peoples abroad. Colonial atrocities in the area of what was to become the United States were rather average on a European scale. And, of course, there was nothing extraordinary about European cruelty and repression. If anything, they were less refined than those practiced in certain more advanced countries of Asia. Cruelty and repression seemed universal, seemed inescapable in the human condition; they seemed “human.”

What is more interesting than the violence, really, is that there developed strong American variants upon those traditions of antiviolence which had begun to arise from such sources as St. Francis, Erasmus, George Fox, Herbert of Cherbury, and Voltaire. There were, and are, powerful intellectual currents, and sensibilities, and lifestyles set against violence, and set to promote peace and reconciliation, which are at least as “American” as violence. Quakers, Mennonites, the Amish, and other pacifists flocking to the new world, the deist-democrats whose minds and writings dominated the founding of the republic, the utopians springing up in every generation, the romantic idealists—all carried historic testimonies against violence with substantial effects both in this country and beyond.

When one comes to think of it, all of the foregoing is well known. What seems hardly to be known at all is that the disillusioned successors of Whitman and Thoreau, the realists and agnostics who stand in many ways closer to our spiritual condition than the transcendentalists, also spoke to the issue of American violence. Therefore it seems worth while to attend to those aspects of the art of Howells and of Stephen Crane which can be summed up under the rubric of “Violence, Decorum, and Reality.” They speak significantly to our present condition, not shutting their eyes to the facts of human violence but esthetically portraying their vision of the right way to see it and to deal with it, especially in our own minds. They suggest, on the whole, that violence is most dangerous when it becomes a disease of the imagination.

I

Contrary to the opinion formerly expressed by ignorant and inadvertent critics (myself included), it is simply not true that violence is absent from the fiction of Howells. It is definitely, if not frequently, there. But what is finally interesting about the violence in Howells is the decorum with which his total commitment to realism compelled him to treat the violences of human reality. Though for a Howells novel an unusual amount of violence appears in A Hazard of New Fortunes, something, if not enough, has been said about it by critics; and it might be more profitable to look at examples from later work. Here is a scene from a turn of the century novel, The Kentons. It comes right in the middle of the book. A man called Bittridge has been playing fast and loose with the emotions of Judge Kenton's daughter Ellen, has followed the family to New York and assaulted and insulted the elderly Judge because he would not permit Bittridge to see Ellen again. Ladies of the family have written home to report. And so, when Bittridge gets off the train, he is met at the station by the family's eldest son, Richard Kenton:

Bittridge, with his overcoat hanging on his arm, advanced towards [Richard] with the rest, and continued to advance, in a sort of fascination, after his neighbors, with the instinct that something was about to happen, parted on either side of Richard and left the two men confronted. Richard did not speak, but deliberately reached out his left hand, which he caught securely into Bittridge's collar; then he began to beat him with the cowhide wherever he could strike his writhing and twisting shape. Neither uttered a word, and except for the whir of the cowhide in the air, and the rasping sound of its arrest upon the body of Bittridge, the thing was done in perfect silence. The witnesses stood well in the back in a daze, from which they recovered when Richard released Bittridge with a twist of the hand that tore his collar loose and left his cravat dangling, and tossed the frayed cowhide away, and turned and walked homeward. Then one of them picked up Bittridge's hat and set it aslant on his head, and others helped pull his collar together and tie his cravat.

For the few moments that Richard Kenton remained in sight they scarcely found words coherent enough for question and when they did, Bittridge had nothing but confused answers to give to the effect that he did not know what it meant, but he would find out. …

In his own house Richard Kenton lay down awhile, deadly sick, and his wife had to bring him brandy before he could control his nerves sufficiently to speak. Then he told her what he had done, and why, and Mary pulled off his shoes and put a hot-water bottle to his cold feet. It was not exactly the treatment for a champion, but Mary Kenton was not thinking of that, and when Richard said he still felt a little sick at the stomach she wanted him to try a drop of camphor in addition to the brandy.

The important thing is to see how carefully Howells has undercut his violence. It has been honestly presented but ironically undercut and limited. The method bespeaks a felt and philosophic sense of decorum regarding violence.

Another central case in point comes from one of the best but least known of Howells's books. Really his last novel, The Leatherwood God deals with the frontier of his parents' childhood. Historically there had appeared in Leatherwood Creek, Ohio, a prophet in its frontier religious life who convinced some townspeople that he was God—the Leatherwood God. As this scene opens, Joseph Dylks, the Leatherwood God, has failed to bring off a miracle he had proposed to exhibit publicly, and a mob of opponents, “the Hounds,” closes in upon “the Little Flock.” They break into the house:

In a circle of his worshipers, kneeling at his feet, stood Dylks, while they hailed him as their God and entreated his mercy. At the scramble behind them, they sprang up and stood dazed, confronting their enemies.

“We want Dylks! We want the Good Old Man! We want the Lion of Judah! Out of the way, Little Flock!” came in many voices; but when the worshipers yielded, Dylks had vanished.

A moment of awe spread to their adversaries, but in another moment the riot began again. The unbelievers caught the spirit of the worse among them and stormed through the house, searching it everywhere, from the cellar to the garret. A yell rose from them when they found Dylks half way up the chimney of the kitchen. His captors pulled him forward into the light, and held him cowering under the cries of “Kill him!” “Tie him to a tree and whip him!” “Tar and feather him!” “Ride him on a rail!”

“No, don't hurt him!” Redfield commanded. “Take him to a justice of the peace and try him.”

“Yes,” the leader of the Hounds assented. “Take him to Squire Braile. He'll settle with him.”

The Little Flock rallied to the rescue, and some of the Herd joined them. As an independent neutral, Abel Reverdy, whom his wife stirred to action, caught up a stool and joined the defenders.

“Why, you fool,” a leader of the Hounds derided him amiably, “what you want to do with that stool? If the Almighty can't help himself, you think you're goin' to help him?”

Abel was daunted by the reasoning, and even Sally stayed her war cries.

“Well, I guess there's sumpin' in that,” Abel assented, and he lowered his weapon.

The incident distracted his captors and Dylks broke from them, and ran into the yard before the house. He was covered with soot and dust and his clothes were torn; his coat was stripped in tatters, and his long hair hung loose over it.

His prophecies of doom to those who should lay hands upon him had been falsified, but to the literal sense of David Gillespie he had not yet been sufficiently proved an impostor: till he should bring his daughter a strand of the hair which Dylks had proclaimed it death to touch, she would believe in him, and David followed in the crowd straining forward to reach Redfield, who with one of his friends had Dylks under his protection. The old man threw himself upon Dylks and caught a thick strand of his hair, dragging him backward by it. Redfield looked round. He said, “You want that, do you? Well I promised.” He tore it from the scalp, and gave it into David's hand, and David walked back with it into the house where his daughter remained with the wailing and sobbing women-worshipers of the outraged idol.

He flung the lock at her feet. “There's the hair that it was death to touch.” She did not speak; she only looked at it with horror.

“Don't you believe it's his?” her father roared.

“Yes, yes! I know it's his; and now let's go home and pray for him, and for you, father. We've both got the same God, now.”

A bitter retort came to the old man's lips, but the abhorrent look of his daughter stayed his words, and they went into the night together, while the noise of the mob stormed back to them through the darkness, farther and farther away.

II

Violence treated with the foregoing sort of reductive decorum lacks commercial moxie. It is not “entertaining” in any fashion known to be popular. It won't “sell” because it suggests the opposites of superhumanism and escape. It is the violence of serious art, not of the entertainment industry. It was deliberately designed to counter what Howells called “effectism” and “the romanticistic.”

In his Harper's Monthly column called “The Editor's Study” Howells during the winter of 1887-88 approached the peak of his role in the realism War. The November column pounced on a happy saying in The Renaissance in Italy by John Addington Symonds. Speculating on whether art criticism might ever cleanse itself of the corruptions of mere fashionableness, Symonds had glimpsed a Darwinian hope that, in Howells's words,

… in proportion as we gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world, we shall come to comprehend with more instinctive certitude what is simple, natural, and honest. … The perception of the enlightened man will then be the taste of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws of evolution in art and in society, and is able to test the excellence of work in any stage from immaturity to decadence by discerning what there is of truth, sincerity, and natural vigor in it.

Reflection upon Symonds led Howells the next month to a brilliant expression of his own ideal. He summarized Symonds as having said that “what is unpretentious and what is true is enduringly beautiful and good, and nothing else is so.” Then, lightly but carefully, he proceeded to quote Edmund Burke's Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful: ignore art-traditions, never mind critics (they are often foolish):

“The true standard of the artist is in every man's power” already, as Burke says; Michelangelo's “light of the piazza,” the glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light on a statue; Goethe's “boys and blackbirds” have in all ages been the real connoisseurs of berries; but hitherto the mass of common men have been afraid to apply their own simplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of the beautiful.

In fact, Howells was tracking in his sights bigger game than he was willing to startle before he got off his shot. Not so much truly the idealists as the genteel, petrified idealizers; not so much the Old Romantics as the new “romanticists,” the neoromantics (schlockmeister was unfortunately not a word known to Howells) were his quarry. Threatened by realism, the idealizers and romanticists were harking back to the medieval moment when Realist meant Idealist. They threatened to succeed in pasting the labels of infidel, atheist, vulgarian, dullard, and mucker on the realists.

Howells's move to outflank them became a brilliant improvisation on a theme from Taine. “The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of everyday life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy,” Howells complained, “… he is instructed to idealize his personages … in the spirit of wretched pedantry. …” Fulfilling his “mission to represent the petrification of taste,” the wretched pedant would say to a young writer as he would say, given the chance, with the same confidence to a scientist:

‘I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there that you have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it. Now don't waste your time and sin against culture in that way. I've got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it's a type. It's made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it's perfectly indestructible. It isn't very much like a real grasshopper, but it's a great deal nicer, and it's served to represent the notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. You may say that it's artificial. Well, it is artificial: but then it's ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. You'll find the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them. The thing that you are proposing to do is commonplace; but if you say that it isn't commonplace for the very reason that it hasn't been done before, you'll have to admit that it's photographic.’

However much, Howells went on, one might wish “the common, average man” would find the courage to “reject the ideal grasshopper,” he must admit that it will not be at once: “the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic cardboard grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest and natural grasshopper can have a fair field.”

But Howells's perhaps finest critical moment was to be occasioned by the preface to La Hermana San Sulpicio of his friend the Spanish realist Armando Palacio Valdés. Howells began the November 1889 “Editor's Study” by musing about the decline of English fiction since Jane Austen: “With her example before them, why should not English novelists have gone on writing simply, honestly, artistically, ever after?” It is, he confessed, hard to be simple and honest. But he referred the question to Señor Valdés and his new preface. First he quoted Valdés's condemnation of French naturalism, disagreeing in part. “French naturalism is better at its worst than French unnaturalism at its best,” said dry Howells. But then he turned to bring out the Valdés idea that all in nature is equal, and it is the business of the artist to catch, in his spirit, the beautiful effect which springs from true perception. “We may add,” said Howells, “that there is no joy in art except this perception of the meaning of things and its communication; when you have felt it and told it … you have fulfilled the purpose for which you were born an artist.”

Howells crowed approval of the insistence of Valdés that the only sin of the artist is to falsify and imitate. So long as he reports his true experience, all's well: “‘It is entirely false,’” said Howells's translation, “‘that the great romantic, symbolic, or classic poets modified nature; such as they expressed her they felt her; and in this view they are as much realists as ourselves. … Only those falsify her who, without feeling classic wise or romantic wise, set about being classic or romantic, wearisomely reproducing the models of former ages. …’” Agreeing, Howells added that he thought the “pseudo-realists” worst of all, “for they sin against the living; whereas those who continue to celebrate the heroic adventures of Puss in Boots and the hair-breadth escapes of Tom Thumb, under various aliases, only cast disrespect upon the immortals, who have passed beyond these noises.”

For Howells, finally, the most telling point made by Valdés came from his saying, “‘The principal cause of the decadence of contemporary literature is found, in my thinking, in the vice which has been very graphically called effectism, or the itch of awaking at all cost in the reader vivid and violent emotions, which shall do credit to the invention and originality of the writer.’” There, Howells implied, lies our answer. The real culprits are the English critics: “From the point of view of modern English criticism, which likes to be melted, and horrified, and astonished, and blood-curdled, and goose-fleshed, no less than to be ‘chippered up’ in fiction, Señor Valdés were indeed incorrigible.”

In the dominant world of popular taste, Howells agreed, effectism reigns. Like Feuillet or Bulwer or Dumas, “Dickens is full of it.” But if “the effectists who delight genteel people at all the theatres, and in all the romances” will not satisfy Valdés, “what, we ask, will satisfy this extremely difficult Spanish gentleman?” Humanity? “simple, life-like character”? This, Howells remarked, “seems to us the cruelest irony, the most sarcastic affectation of humility. If you had asked that character in fiction be superhuman, or subterhuman, or preterhuman, or intrahuman, and had bidden the novelist go, not to humanity, but the humanities, for the proof of his excellence, it would have been all very easy.”

The secret in the end, then, turns out to be that a perverse criticism has prevented the English from recovering from “the mania of romanticism … because English criticism, in the presence of the Continental masterpieces, has continued provincial and special and personal. …” Jane Austen was great because her honesty made her a realist in effect. “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English novelists and alone worthy to be matched with the great Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists.”

In general, historically the difference between a romantic and a neoromantic was that a romantic seriously believed romantic ideas; he had a genuine romantic faith. A neoromantic, who did not, could not, believe in romanticism, or romantic ideas, still thirsted for romantic effects. His was the error of “effectism.” Some neoromantics were frank. Literature, they believed, existed to provide escape. Romantic effects provide good escape. Therefore it is the business of the writer to provide romantic effects even when he has no belief in their original grounds.

There is a letter, which has long fascinated me, which came about December 1, 1895, to Howells from Frederic Remington. Howells had published a favorable review of Owen Wister's book called Red Men and White, having known Wister for years and shared, like Henry James, substantial admiration for the man and his artistry. Remington, a friend of Wister's own generation, was a writer, painter, and sculptor of cowboy and Indian scenes—the man who rendered horses and Western action so superbly that we have continued to romanticize the West through his eyes. In that character he wrote Howells a sarcastically complimentary note boiling with half-suppressed fury:

I have just got through with reading your “Life and Letters” [Howells's column] on Wister—For one who protests so much ignorance you come more nearly telling just what Wister is doing (“truth”—) than any other fellow who is set in judgment on things of the sort. Wister is a great man and it gives me comfort to know that he will help me by his success to make people see “the thing” which is my soul. When one thinks that when I drew ‘scouts—soldiers—injuns’—it was the worst of form to treat such ‘red eyed’ red covered—unreal stuff—it gives me courage to have you think Wister will finally bring home to such as you—the thing—the truth—however much you may not care for it. I wish that this had happened before Thanksgiving.

The bombast, the irony hardly masking contempt, of Remington's tough talk was competitively warranted by the ongoing victory of the neoromantics. For the public imagination, however, that victory was to become a disaster.

The difference between Howells's truth and Remington's shows up in the central moment of violence in Wister's The Virginian. Here is the locus classicus of the neoromantic, the effectist, portrayal of violence. A minor character in The Virginian is “the lost dog” called Shorty. Improvident and stupid in human relationships, he has only one treasure in life—his horse Pedro. Shorty is cajoled into selling his horse to a man whose name (whether Wister meant anything by it or not) is Balaam. A horse-torturer and killer, Balaam tries out Pedro and mistreats him; and the horse, not used to maltreatment, fights. Balaam kicks and beats him almost to death and finally gouges out one of Pedro's eyes. Between serial and novel publication, because of direct intervention from the President of the United States, his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Wister toned the writing down to make it hard to tell exactly what Balaam did to Pedro. But the significant thing is what happens next:

Then vengeance like a blast struck Balaam. The Virginian hurled him to the ground, lifted and hurled him again, lifted him and beat his face and struck his jaw. The man's strong ox-like fighting availed nothing. He fended his eyes as best he could against these sledge-hammer blows of justice. He felt blindly for his pistol. That arm was caught and wrenched backward, and crushed and doubled. He seemed to hear his own bones, and set up a hideous screaming of hate and pain. Then the pistol at last came out, and together with the hand that grasped it was instantly stamped into the dust. Once again the creature was lifted and slung so that he lay across Pedro's saddle a blurred, dingy, wet pulp.

Nowadays, of course, Wister's has become the classic horse-opera action of the cowboy in the white hat who never, no matter how rough the fight, loses the white hat or gets dirty, who is, in short, a superman. Wister's is the prototypical scene of neoromantic violence: a godlike hero meting justice with irresistible force, irresistible violence without reflex upon him, with no consequence for him. He is superhuman. Somewhere on television, at this moment, that fight is being re-enacted for the nth time; and watchers are learning one nth time more the fatally false lesson that violence does not really matter; that it has no real consequences because the good guy is invulnerable and the bad guy is “a creature.” In the “effectist” world, violence is not real.

III

Stephen Crane started life as an athlete and sports writer. When the secret of his almost instantaneous style is disclosed, some relationship to sports writing will appear, not only to Crane's own sports writing but to the kind of thing everybody was reading in the Nineties. In a famous letter Crane wrote to Lily Brandon on February 29, 1896, he says:

You know, when I left you, I renounced the clever school in literature. It seemed to me that there must be something more in life than to sit and cudgel one's brains for clever and witty expedients. So I developed all alone a little creed of art which I thought was a good one. Later I discovered that my creed was identical with one of Howells and Garland and in this way I became involved in the beautiful war between those who say that art is man's substitute for nature and we are the most successful in art when we approach the nearest to nature and truth, and those who say—well, I don't know what they say. Than that they can't say much but they fight villainously and keep Garland and I out of the big magazines. Howells, of course, is too powerful for them.

If I had kept to my clever Rudyard-Kipling style, the road might have been shorter but, ah, it wouldn't be the true road. The two years of fighting have been well-spent. And now I am almost at the end of it. This winter fixes me firmly. We have proved too formidable for them, confound them. They used to call me “that terrible, young radical,” but now they are beginning to hem and haw and smile—those very old coons who used to adopt a condescending air toward me. There is an irony in the present situation that I enjoy, devil take them for a parcel of old, cringing, conventionalized hens.

Crane's irony directed against the neoromantics sounds wonderfully like Remington's irony directed against Howells.

It is easy to see violence deflated, sold out, in Crane: for instance, in a short story like “Horses—One Dash.” This is the tale of Richardson, a New Yorker who finds himself in a Mexican inn taken over by bandidos. They are real bad men. At any moment they may break in, rob, and kill the gringo. After their carouse, however, the right moment comes. Richardson and his servant slip away, mount their horses, and off they dash to outrun the drunken bandidos and find safety. But at last the interesting thing is that, though Crane has toyed at length with the possibility of terrible violence, it never happened.

The same thing is true of “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” that ultimately reductive Western. The marshal decides that, after all, Yellow Sky has settled down, he can afford to get married. He gets on the train for San Anton, where he knows a waitress. They get married, and he brings her back. When he gets off the train, here is Scratchy Wilson, on a toot and shooting up Yellow Sky. The old conventions of Yellow Sky and its marshal and of being Scratchy Wilson, part-time Bad Man, demand that the marshal and Scratchy have a little shoot-out, after which the marshal will throw Scratchy in the calaboose to sober up. But the marshal has spoiled the game. In the first place he's married. Scratchy is bewildered and distraught. In the second place, the marshal is not armed. What can Scratchy do? Well, there isn't much for him to do. He puts his guns back in the holsters and slouches away into the sunset. Nothing has happened. The central myth of The Police Gazette has been undercut.

Still more explicit is “Five White Mice,” which concerns one sober American kid in charge of two drunken friends in Mexico City. The drunks have insulted and mortally offended four knife-wielding citizens. The sober kid freezes his spine with a vision of their all being stabbed. Then he realizes that he might pull out his pistol and survive. With massive effort he musters the courage and draws. Of course the Mexicans pull back. Crane's last line is, “Nothing had happened.”

IV

The undercutting of violence in Crane's Western tales relates to the applicability of the word “complicity” to “The Blue Hotel,” as the far more complex and subtle treatment of “The Open Boat” necessitates the word “solidarity.” Critics who wish to turn Crane into a symbolist or perhaps a symbolic naturalist incline to conclude “The Blue Hotel” with its penultimate episode. There the Swede, who has forcibly achieved death, lies stabbed in the saloon with glazed eyes fixed on the cashregister and its legend, “This registers the amount of your purchase.” But to stop there is to misrepresent Crane's story. Crane wrote on through the final, intellectually climactic episode which draws the story and its moral structure into focus. Here the Easterner and the cowboy sit out on the prairie, discussing their experience. The Easterner makes it plain that, though the gambler in the saloon actually stabbed the Swede, it was not the gambler who murdered him. The gambler served only as a kind of incident or accident in a moral process. Guilt belonged to the men personally concerned. They had launched the Swede, maddened by conflict at the Blue Hotel, upon the town and the innocent bystander of a gambler in the saloon. The Easterner's gospel is Howells's doctrine of complicity: everyone shares in the guilt of the world. Crane's injection of that doctrine into the last scene of “The Blue Hotel” artfully reverses its moral perspectives.

Against such backgrounds it is easier to understand the violence in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. The bar fight in Maggie is wonderful. Perhaps there is not a better bar fight in literature. Nevertheless, moral rather than physical violence lies at the heart of the book. In the Johnson household, to explain why Maggie went on the street, Crane stages a climactic fight. The mother, that ogre with the ironic name of Mary, having beaten her husband to death and spent most of her years since roaring drunk, has come to the point where Jimmie, her son, is able to beat her up and does:

“Keep yer hands off me,” roared his mother again. “Damn yer ol' hide,” yelled Jimmie, madly. Maggie shrieked and ran into the other room. To her there came the sound of a storm of crashes and curses. There was a great final thump and Jimmie's voice cried: “Dere, damn yeh, stay still.” Maggie opened the door now and went warily out. “Oh, Jimmie!”

He was leaning against the wall and swearing. Blood stood upon bruises on his knotty fore-arms where they had scraped against the floor or the walls in the scuffle. The mother lay screeching on the floor, the tears running down her furrowed face.

Maggie, standing in the middle of the room, gazed about her. The usual upheaval of tables and chairs had taken place. Crockery was strewn broadcast in fragments. The stove had been disturbed on its legs, and now leaned idiotically to one side. A pail had been upset and water spread in all directions.

The door opened and Pete [the “elegant” bartender] appeared. He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, Gawd,” he observed.

He walked over to Maggie and whispered in her ear. “Ah, what d' hell, Mag? Come ahn we'll have a hell of a time.”

The mother in the corner upreared her head and shook her tangled locks.

“T' hell wid him and you,” she said, glowering at her daughter in the gloom. Her eyes seemed to burn balefully. “Yeh've gone t' d' devil, Mag Johnson, yehs knows yehs have gone t' d' devil. Yer a disgrace t' yer people, damn yeh. An' now, git out an' go ahn wid dat doe-faced jude of yours. Go t' hell wid him, damn yeh, an' a good riddance. Go t' hell an' see how yeh likes it.”

In a sense Maggie does what she must: go to hell. In another sense, by the time she goes to the river, what she has done is to vindicate the Mephistophelean observation from Marlowe, “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” while she lives in her world. The whole book leads to the crushing irony of its last scene, when, Maggie dead, the neighbors come in and, with all the tearful sentimentality of the then equivalent of what is now soap opera, say to Mary, “You must forgive her.” And she can't forgive: Maggie's a disgrace, she's ruined the family name—as if there were any family name—and the insufferably immoral daughter cannot be forgiven. But finally Mary screams, “Oh … I'll fergive her! I'll fergive her!”

Part of the point is, first of all, that in Maggie violence never exists independently, for its own sake; the other part is that the violence is (like the determinism) deeply, powerfully undercut.

The same things hold true for The Red Badge of Courage. Criticism too often forgets what the youth's “red badge of courage” actually was. His red badge served as Henry Fleming's forged passport back to his regiment after cowardly desertion under fire. It was a cut on the head taken from the rifle-butt of another deserter who was running so hard from the battlefield that when Henry tried to ask him what was happening the man simply clubbed him and dashed on.

There is no need to quote more from the text of the novel than one significant narrative aside which appears in its most violent section, Chapter 23. It comes when the regiment, after Fleming's return, has bungled assignments but acquired enough combat experience to know that it is regarded with contempt. The men are ordered to charge a fence-corner held by some Confederates and, somewhat to their own surprise, take it. They charge and discover that Confederates can run, too. Fleming, carrying the flag of his own outfit, captures the colors of the riddled Confederates. As they come away from what seemed like the conquest of an empire, the course of their heroic advance turns out to have been a couple of hundred yards of common meadow. And in the end their exploit has made no difference; they retreat.

As Fleming's regiment starts its charge,

The youth kept the bright colors to the front. He was waving his free arm in furious circles, the while shrieking mad calls and appeals, urging on those that did not need to be urged, for it seemed that the mob of blue men hurling themselves on the dangerous group of rifles were again grown suddenly wild with an enthusiasm of unselfishness. [This kind of writing makes it credible that Crane learned about courage on the gridiron, not the battlefield.] From the many firings starting toward them, it looked as if they would merely succeed in making a great sprinkling of corpses on the grass between their former position and the fence. But they were in a frenzy, perhaps because of forgotten vanities. …

The short story called “The Veteran” reveals that the battle of The Red Badge of Courage was Chancellorsville, a series of inchoate fights which nobody won, though for the attacking Union Armies it was no victory. Stephen Crane's soldiers had a lesson to learn that is common to football, war, and human life: in spite of everything one might have done, in spite of sacrifice, wounds, and death, victory and defeat, courage and cowardice may have no final meaning. The universe regards the ego not. “The Veteran” deals with the eventual death of Henry Fleming. An old man, he dashes into the flames of a burning barn because screaming colts are trapped there. He does not need to inquire any longer whether he is courageous. He has already, in the same story, had the objectivity casually to tell local people that at Chancellorsville, his first battle, he had run. He goes into the flames because somebody ought to save the colts—because it's the right thing, in a sense the only thing, to do. The burning roof falls in on him, and the veteran is killed. The applicability of Crane's notion of “forgotten vanities” not only to the short story but to the novel is obvious.

V

The remarkable thing is the parallel in sense of decorum between Howells and Crane. There is of course proportionately more violence in Crane. But both insist upon the same treatment of it, the same sense of limits, bounds, and restraint. They share the sense that violence must never stand alone as if it were an ultimate. They believe that a proper vision of reality cannot permit violence to stand without irony, without comic diminution.

Negatively, in other words, that shared vision functions as a kind of antiromanticism. The realism of Howells and Crane becomes a literature of respect, even reverence, for the comic. Negatively, it attacks superhumanism; it is anti-idealistic, anti-organicist, anti-egoistic. Positively, it stands upon a particular humanistic ground, the ground of a sensibility which is rational, compassionate, and reverential toward life.

Thus realism directs moral judgment against violence following a categorical imperative of decorum. One could lay the mere ideas out in a sort of heurism or paradigm. Realism opposed to neoromanticism suggests a sense of responsibility at war with commerciality—a problem much alive in our own time with its profound questions of what is happening to a population constantly exposed to the technologies of mass media enlisted in the service of a show-biz morality. Realism opposes compassion against the scientistic despair Robinson Jeffers called, elegantly, “inhumanism.” Realism opposes a maturity of irony and self-irony against popular egotism and the indulgence of self.

Finally, it seems to me that some of the things Konrad Lorenz has had to say in On Aggression provide fresh perspective upon this topic. Central to Lorenz's concern is human self-betrayal, the dilemma of instinct betrayed by the mind while in the human condition our sole hope and dependence rest on the power of the mind to rescue itself from its own treachery. Lorenz holds out the crisis hope that man may be able to escape from the trap he has set for himself with mind-directed sublimations of aggression—like William James's “moral equivalent to war”—which are either symbolically violent, ritualistically limited, vicarious, or comic. Lorenz's ideas suggest that it was no mere way of handling literary, intellectual, or entertainment problems in the 1890's that the realists were getting at. They have something important to say to us about violence, about decorum, about reality now.