[In the following essay, Cady surveys Crane's fiction after The Red Badge of Courage and regards “The Open Boat” as one of his best literary achievements.]

That sense of the ambiguous sublimity of courageous life in the face of the common fate, and the Maggie theme of the tragic needs for pity and solidarity, became the centers of all the rest of Crane's great work. Except for a few poems, his future greatness was all to come in the short story. The one possible exception to that generalization would be George's Mother. In length it is a nouvelle, as Henry James called the form, at the most. But then, The Red Badge is hardly more; and one apologizes, if apology is ever needed, for the lack of complexity, of rich social involvement, which is the penalty The Red Badge pays for its superb compression, by noting that it too is perhaps a nouvelle. One does not expect of it what Tom Jones or The Portrait of a Lady offer.

With George's Mother Crane returns to the slums to tell the story of George's mother's losing fight to keep her boy uncorrupted in the Rum Alley neighborhood of Maggie. As she loses George to drink, delinquency, and a sure future as a Bowery bum, the mother loses her grip on life and slides away into death. The accent falls on George's confusion of values between home, mother, and church on one hand and street gang and saloon on the other. A more careful and mature study than Maggie, it lacks the dramatic intensity and compassion of Crane's first slum book. Brief, cold, and disillusioned, it focuses as much on George's cowardice as his bewilderment. It makes an interesting forerunner, Protestant and Old New York in viewpoint, of James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan.

As this and all Crane's subsequent flights at the novel show, he did not live to grow into a mastery of manners which might have permitted the traditional novel, though he showed signs, especially in “The Monster,” of growing that way. There is no surprise, given the circumstances of his last five years, in the fact that his three other efforts at the novel failed. The surprise lies in the greatness of the tales. It is, however, revealing to glance at these three attempts.

I

The Third Violet has by far the most charm. It came from a relatively happy and strong period of Crane's life, written in the midst of his perturbations over the success of The Red Badge and done because he wanted to do it—with some misgivings but con amore. It attempted to make use of Crane's experiences with painters and “Indians,” and its hero, Hawker, was apparently more or less modeled on Linson. Crane had disclosed glimmers of capacity to dramatize manners in moments of Maggie and in incidental writings like “Mr. Binks' Day Off” and “An Experiment in Luxury.” There is no doubt that maturity and adult experience would have ripened his powers to true mastery of the great tradition in the novel. But The Third Violet tends to show why novelists are seldom great before the age of forty. By contrast, it shows how youthful yet unique, how experimental yet inherently brilliant, Crane's best writing is.

The Third Violet, though exploiting autobiography, was a fascinating attempt to imitate W. D. Howells. The first part takes place in a resort like Hartwood, where Hawker has returned to his farm home to paint and where he sees and falls in love with Miss Fanhall at the summer hotel and courts her on the tennis court, on picnics, and on walks, with the help of his friend Hollanden, a cool Craneian writer. Howells, of course, had virtually invented the summer-vacation novel, had turned it into a genre convertible to all sorts of purposes, and had made its exploitation a steady part of his career. The other half of Crane's book was placed among the “Indians” of the Art Students' League Building. Howells, beginning with A Hazard of New Fortunes, was devoting much of his output in the 1890s to the problems of the artist in New York. The World of Chance had barely ceased publication in Harper's Monthly for November, 1892, when The Coast of Bohemia (which dealt in part with the students of the League before they moved out of their old Building) began to run in Bok's Ladies' Home Journal for December.

Crane of course knew and could do things Howells couldn't. Widely acquainted with painters, sculptors, architects of his own day, Howells knew Crane's generation best through his son, John Mead, and his daughter, Mildred. The impecunious “Comanches” of The Third Violet, fine portraits, and the model, Florinda “Splutter” O'Connor, a Maggie competent for survival, were as beyond Howells as the wonderful sketches of “Stanley”—a “large, orange and white setter.” There are many fine touches in The Third Violet to prove that it was written by Stephen Crane: Hawker's perceptively studied farm folks; the Hartwood scenery; the Bohemians at home—“Wrinkle,” “Great Grief” Warwickson, “Penny” Pennoyer, “Purple” Sanderson; and of course Splutter and Stanley. Those characters were all minor, however. It was in the perceptions of the real situations of the major characters and in the clarification of ideas to which those perceptions should have led that Crane fell down.

Probably it did not occur to Crane that Howells had spent thirty years learning how. Of course Howells, disillusioned of egalitarian myth, had discovered the broad drama involved in a situation like Crane's confrontation of poor, farmerish, gifted, artistic, personally superior Hawker with rich, urban, cultivated, sensitive but snobbish Miss Fanhall. It confronted two basic, fascinating American types, as Howells saw early: the “Social” and the common, the “conventional” and “unconventional,” Society's lady and nature's gentleman. Over many years, with deepening perception and disillusion, Howells had studied the implications of all this until it had made an independent, semi-religious and democratic socialist of him. In The Third Violet Crane saw only personal injustice and amatory affront. Similarly, Crane wholly failed to dramatize the point Howells was making about the artist in a world of chance: that the combat conditions of a competitive, acquisitive society stifled art. Having the Bohemians just talk about it was not enough.

It was, however, only expressive immaturity, not seeing far enough, which held Crane back. Intrinsically, the situation he had imagined was far more immediate and dramatic in its potential, far more modern, than any comparable situation in Howells. After having Hawker woo Miss Fanhall in an inconclusive idyll, Crane transports him back to the city and a triangle. “Splutter” O'Connor, a “very honest” Irish girl with “a beautiful figure” frankly carries a torch for Hawker. Crane develops the setting, the dramatis personae, and the conflict in class, character, candor, and personal reality (much in “Splutter's” favor) between the two women—and then abruptly deserts it for a foggy final scene in which Miss Fanhall starts to brush Hawker off, as Hawker had done to “Splutter,” and then incomprehensibly reverses herself and accepts him.

The failure to face and develop the conflicts of class and convention, of sex and of art against society, destroys the novel and strips its deficiencies of all concealment. Its fragmentary brevity, its lack of competence to carry off scenes requiring the full development of conversation, its confusion of ideas and missed opportunities of a dozen sorts, and its ultimate lack of achieved, over-all form protrude like the skeleton of a half-built house. And the key to all this failure may easily be seen on consideration to be Crane's entire inability to comprehend women, especially Miss Fanhall.

It was not necessary to her case that Crane should understand Maggie Johnson personally or even consider viewing her from within. Not explaining her either, he does a good introductory job of communicating the personality of “Splutter” O'Connor. But, as Carl Van Doren said of the women of Active Service, “with young girls [Crane] never outgrew the young man's sense that they are cryptic creatures, whose words never mean what they seem to say and whose silences are deeply mysterious.” They are “incomprehensible.”¹ That is everywhere true but triply so if they are ladies. Crane's ladies are just about what Lowell said of Fenimore Cooper's, “Sappy as maples and flat as his prairies.”

That sappiness had some warrant in Howells, who had made a life-long study and some wonderful comedy of the vagaries of feminine logic, of the irresponsible emotionalities, and of the quixotisms of ladies full of a dangerous pride in the little knowledge they had gleaned from romances. Howells had not in several instances been above the trick, once his real story was told, of sugar-coating it for the hopeless magazine reader with a story-rounding “happy” ending based on such illogic—secure in the faith that perceptive readers would enjoy the joke and others would never feel the irony till they sneezed.

The real trouble with The Third Violet and Active Service is that, in dealing with women in fiction, Crane's irony deserted him. He did not have a clear single view of them, much less a double or triple vision. One of the difficulties, in fact, of accepting the recurrently popular notion that Crane's early “affairs” were more than the passion of the moth for the star, that he was a roistering whore-chaser, an experienced lover before Cora, a trapped exemplar of Freud's case of “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,” is that none of this experience did anything for his imagination. If such experience existed, it was, among Crane's experiences, uniquely unavailable to his creative mind. The main exception, which is post-Cora, may appear in the troubled poem “Intrigue.”

Except for the almost laughably romantic portrait of Nora Black, femme fatale and war correspondent like Cora, who was probably derived from Cora, Crane's women are imagined exactly as they might have been had he been quite innocent, quite normal. Perhaps he was. Marjory Wainwright of Active Service is portrayed no more sophisticatedly than Miss Fanhall. And Nora Black, as Carl Van Doren said, is handled “with a boy's ferocity. Snubs which would batter an ordinary woman into pulp only accelerate her pursuit of the cool hero. She is no less a myth than eager Venus on the trail of young Adonis.”²

For the rest, it seems impossible to improve on Van Doren's criticism of Active Service as far as it goes. Beyond Van Doren, the significance of Active Service and Crane's part of The O'Ruddy lies in their revelation of the late, desperate, and pathetic struggle of Crane's integrity with bestsellerism. In the age of Trilby, Graustark, and When Knighthood Was in Flower, inferior literary talents coined money in such golden floods as had never before been won by authors. Cuban glory, an exasperated consciousness that his superior talent still earned far too little, haste, and that pressure of money for “Brede” which Ford and Liebling believed killed Crane, all tempted him to cash in on the fad. In pieces like “The Private's Story” and “The Clan of No-Name” he gave in occasionally to embarrassingly Kiplingesque ideas and mannerisms.

But his surrender was never for long. It seems that he wrote Active Service only because Harold Frederic insisted he must: it would be the salvation of his career. Frederic knew how to grind them out; Cora must hold Stephen to it. But if neoromanticism were to be his salvation, Crane was not to be saved. He could not resist the realist's game of inflating and then puncturing it. In Active Service he sends Coleman, the correspondent, to rescue Marjory Wainwright at the front. Coleman loves “reflecting upon the odd things which happen to chivalry in the modern age … he made no effort to conceal from himself that the whole thing was romantic” but took “a solemn and knightly joy in this adventure.” As Crane builds it up, Coleman sees himself “dealing with a medieval situation with some show of proper form: that is to say, armed, a-horseback, and in danger, then he could feel that to the Gods of the game he was not laughable.” He “took satisfaction in his sentimental journey. It was a shining affair. He was on active service, an active service of the heart … even as the olden heroes … he had never known that he could be so pleased with that kind of parallel.”

Coleman prospers as Minniver Cheevy, however, no better than Henry Fleming had. At the first real danger he is lost: “He would not have denied that he was squirming on his belly like a worm through black mud,” and yearning to get out. “If his juvenile and uplifting thoughts of other days had reproached him he would simply have repeated and repeated: ‘Adventure be damned.’”

The same feelings motivated the design for, and the large fraction Crane lived to write of, The O'Ruddy. Crane's historical imagination was keen, but he never had confused things either by supposing that he could seriously re-enter the past or by lacking respect for the sense of the past because it was imaginary. Therefore to him the irresponsible historical romance was fair game. In The O'Ruddy he tried to write a sword-clashing, picaresque, true-love-laden, coincidence-packed romance and make fun of the silly, golden genre by burlesquing it with the best sustained humor he had yet achieved. All the life goes out of style and characterization when Robert Barr takes over. Barr's troubles were not, as he supposed, with plot so much as with focus of character, tone, atmosphere, and dialogue. If Crane had lived, The O'Ruddy might have been a brilliant tour de force on themes by the ghostly Stevenson.

II

After The Red Badge, then, Crane's aspiring novels are about what one would expect of a novelist his age: essentially autobiographical, occasionally intense, sporadically gifted, weak in characterization, fragmentary in form. A number of the short stories, on the other hand, are absolutely first-class; some of them are of definitive, classic stature. Bernard Berenson described them as “having almost Dante's or Tolstoi's gift of making one see the people and scenes he describes.”³ I suppose there is not much higher praise left to imagine. It is a measure of the greatness of the best that there can be space to discuss only those few and that the others, so very good, must be let go.

Widely anthologized as a standard representative of the short story and Crane's work, “The Open Boat” has too often been appreciated for biographical or tendentious reasons and too seldom for its authentic artistic power. The tale has repeatedly been called naturalistic, even the one pure American example of naturalism; or impressionistic; or the work of a symbolist, or even of an existentialist. And commentators have been peculiarly tempted to the exercise of the biographic fallacy—the identification of the author himself with the interior substance of the fiction—by the circumstances of the story's provenience. Crane was shipwrecked, spent long hours at sea in a dinghy, was swamped in the surf, and lost Billy Higgins coming ashore. He did write up all but the dinghy voyage for the New York Press, and wise anthologists have found it useful to print the account seriatim with the fiction. Crane (or Scribner's) did subtitle it: “A Tale Intended to be after the Fact. …”

“After the Fact” here may as well be in pursuit of the truth of experience as of the mere exact occurrence, however—and in Crane it is much more likely to be. Actually, “The Open Boat” seems one case in which a grasp of the methods of Crane the visionist, the perspectivist, reconciles difficulties. As most modern critics have seen, and as most undergraduates recognize on comparing the news report and the story, the latter is altogether a work of art. That being true, the biographical events were at best the occasions for the tale; it does not in the least matter that Crane may have made free imaginatively with the wind, weather, or anything else; and to identify Crane himself with “the correspondent” in the fiction is naïve.

The essence of Crane's art and achievement in “The Open Boat” is his control—subtle, complex, and intense—of its internal points of view. The famous opening line announces the centrality of point of view: “None of them knew the color of the sky.” Why not? Their group point of view was concentrated on the never-ending athletic feat of surmounting each gray, snarling, “barbarously abrupt and tall” wave which tried to capsize their dinghy and drown them. That group viewpoint, uniting the men in a brotherhood of danger, is the first, least usual, and most important of three points of view in the story. The other two are that of the neutrally observing narrator, who reports dramatically on the scenes which occur among the men, and that of the intellectual in the boat, the correspondent. It matters immensely to an understanding of the story that one see through which point of view events are conveyed.

Crane's newspaper account has the fact-perspective of his journalism: strong in effects yet told in a flat, technically “objective,” first-person narrator's voice. The significant thing about the fiction is that the major perspectives are those of the characters. They know the human solidarity and the generosity (best shown by Billy the oiler) of men whose eyes are cleared to see that they face death. One of them has shifting fantasies, certainly psychological and perhaps symbolic, as he rows through the darkness. At the end, with Billy in his grave and themselves safely abed—“When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on the shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.”

It may be that the real implications of Cyrus Day's challenging reconstruction of the nice day on which the Commodore sank, and of the ethical problems of Captain Murphy, are that “the facts,” the actualities of his open-boat experience were so ambiguously bathetic that Crane made no attempt to transcribe them. He set to work to imagine it as a trope of man's condition face to face with nature, fate, and death. At any rate, the story certainly is such a trope. This being true, the polarity of points of view in the story is all important. If Stephen Crane can ever be unmistakably shown to be a symbolic naturalist, it is in “The Open Boat.” But to prove him so is to exercise the biographic fallacy and identify him with the correspondent and his thoughts with the correspondent's thoughts. For it is in the correspondent's mind and point of view that the key symbolic perceptions occur in the story. But does the story believe in his symbols?

Rowing all alone in the darkness with the others plunged in exhausted sleep, the correspondent begins to think in Section VI of the story: “If I am going to be drowned … why … was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?” The voice which succeeds is that of the summarizing neutral narrator. But what he summarizes is so placed in the framework of the correspondent's reveries that it is unmistakably the substance of the correspondent's thought. He thinks that to drown him would be “an abominable injustice” and a “crime most unnatural” to a man “who had worked so hard, so hard.” And then it occurs to him that “other people had drowned at sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails,” and he is led to reflect despairingly on the quality of what is natural and where man stands:

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.

Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot, he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying, “Yes, but I love myself.”

A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.

This reflection is, of course, not unrelated to the collective point of view of the men in the boat. They had earlier, upon not quite daring to try the surf on the beach, rejected the idea that the “old ninny-woman, Fate,” might dare to drown them. And the narrator comments that this present content of the correspondent's thought, while discussed by nobody, had no doubt been reflected upon by each man “in silence and according to his mind.” It is nowhere suggested, however, that the correspondent's conclusions are those of the group. On the contrary, when in the morning they head for the beach again and see the white windmill, Crane explicitly gives it to the correspondent to see it symbolically. “It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual—nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.”

“The Open Boat” gains its greatest force, then, from a metaphysical tension between two opposing possibilities of the meaning of the death of Billy the oiler, as these possibilities are registered in the two kinds of character perspective. In the correspondent's point of view naturalism is almost classically presented. Nature is flatly indifferent, man will lose his struggle to survive; nature is therefore implicitly contemptuous and hostile; and man is absurd and the proper object of self- (since none else can feel it) pity. This gives rise to the naturalistic tragedy of pathos and bathos.

The opposing possibility, implicit in the heroism, the generosity, and the death in victory of Billy, implies of course a wholly opposite set of conclusions. The most admirable man in the boat, whose life is laid down for his friends, Billy is certainly no less a Christ-figure than Melville's Billy Budd. His function in the story seems much more obviously Christ-like than Jim Conklin's in The Red Badge. He plays the greatest part in creating the human solidarity, the brotherhood, the capacity for real pity, the disinterested “love of Being in general” which makes man in the story anything but absurd. Billy dies, but he gets his comrades safe to shore. The implication is that man by courage and complicity can rise superior to the pathos of his situation; he can understand it and answer it with the magnificence of his defiance, his acceptance, and perhaps even his use of it to achieve a classically tragic elevation.

The tension between these two polar possibilities is left unresolved in “The Open Boat.” For readers, certainly the complexities raised by that tension make for experience of a far higher order than the merely naturalistic, as may be seen by comparing its effects with those of the ending of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. That remains true even if one ends by declaring for the naturalistic interpretation. I think, however, that Crane in this one of the greatest of his short stories meant the same sort of ambiguity to stand as that which we find in the greatest of Hawthorne's short stories. Tension stands, and courage and negative capability are essential until one finds, as Crane never did, a way to resolve it.

III

The second of Crane's unmistakably great short stories, “The Blue Hotel,” has also stirred a vortex of warring criticism much of which no longer matters. Though some of the symbol-hunting has ranged past the point of the ludicrous, that criticism has not left much of the story unexplored. The comments of Joseph Satterwhite and Stanley B. Greenfield are particularly helpful.⁴ In much of the criticism the most striking feature is the resolute explaining away of portions of the text in order to make the story conform with the critics' predetermination that it shall be a work of naturalism. Actually, however, “The Blue Hotel” is no more purely naturalistic than any of Crane's other major work.

It tells the story of the irruption upon the sleepy little town of Fort Romper, Nebraska, of a hysterical foreigner, a Swede, who turns up at Scully's Palace Hotel in the midst of such a raging blizzard as Crane had seen scourging the farmers on his Western tour. Moody and jittery, announcing that he knows he will be killed, the Swede challenges the hospitable instincts of the hotelkeeper. Scully bucks him up with liquor and good fellowship, whereupon his guest turns insufferably arrogant. There is an uneasy card game which leads to a fist-fight between the Swede and Scully's son. Victorious and more arrogant than ever, the Swede checks out of the hotel, swaggers down the street to a saloon, tries to force the local gambler to drink with him, makes the mistake of manhandling the gambler, and is stabbed to death. In a final scene two of the other erstwhile guests of the blue hotel, the cowboy and the Easterner, talk the tragedy over.

There is no evidence in the story that it is nature or any other deterministic force which kills the Swede. No “force” compelled him to come to Fort Romper, and certainly none compelled him to mistake it for the Wild West. The cowboy's exasperated objections to the delusive quality of the Swede's perceptions are well taken. But it is apparently Crane's donnée that a lifetime of dime-novel romanticism about the West shall be a condition of the Swede's neurosis. Crane neither asserts nor denies that such romanticism may in itself have unhinged the Swede. He merely gives us an unhinged foreigner mad with the conviction of his impending death, his compulsion to find it, and a fixation upon violence which is properly only fictional. As we should now say, the Swede is a perfect example of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the most intriguing factors in the story is the blueness, the shrieking, outrageous saturation of the color of Scully's Palace Hotel. What does that represent? A really satisfactory answer might provide one a key to all Crane's famous use of color and color words. But one of the most interesting things about all the criticism is that nobody appears to have found the key either to the general question or to the specific case. This suggests that perhaps there is no key. Perhaps Crane found color significance where he found it, pluralistically, on an ad hoc basis, without a generalizable or theoretical ground for what he did.

Most obviously, the hotel's business is commercial. Nobody passes the town on the train or enters the town from the train without seeing, remembering, and perhaps entering the blue hotel. Beyond that, one can read all sorts of significances into the defiance of that color. It may be man's “coxcombry” against the blizzard of the universe, that conceit which is “the very engine of life.” It may be for old Scully, the one quite human being in the story, the assertion of his humanness. On the other hand, it may be the Swede's rejection of humanity for that frantic, romantic dream which brings him the “purchase” of his death, or it may be the failure of the other men to join Scully's effort to treat the Swede as a man and brother which makes them complicitly guilty of his death.

For some readers, the story has seemed properly to end at the conclusion of Section VIII, where, “The corpse of the Swede, alone in the saloon, had its eyes fixed upon a dreadful legend that dwelt atop of the cash-machine: ‘This registers the amount of your purchase.’” The final section, IX, has been a scandal and a stumbling block to no few commentators partly because it challenges a simply naturalistic reading of the story, partly because it explicitly introduces a moral idea and militates against the notion that Crane is always a nonideological symbolist in his art. Actually, what the addition of that final page and a half does to the story is greatly to enrich it by deliberately reversing its moral perspectives and restoring them to the same challenging ambiguity between naturalistic and at least humanistic perspectives of “The Open Boat.”

When the silent little Easterner suddenly breaks silence to explain the situation to the cowboy, naturalistic symbols, atmospheres, and ironies are totally missing. The language, the irony, and the symbolic drama are now moralistic; the sanctions behind them are humanistic if not religious. As a matter of fact, the perspective of the Easterner is that of Christianity as interpreted by Tolstoi and no doubt mediated to Crane through Howells. This is the language, just as it is the strategy of presentation, of that doctrine of complicity which Howells had been developing in book after book during the ten years before Crane left New York for Cuba. “We are all in it!” says the Easterner, “… every sin is the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede. Usually there are from a dozen to forty women really involved in every murder, but in this case it seems to be only five men—you, I, Johnnie, old Scully; and that fool of an unfortunate gambler came merely as a culmination, the apex of a human movement, and gets all the punishment.” And the cowboy, to point up the irony, is given the line behind which every one would like to hide from the searching finger of his complicit guilt in the world: “Well, I didn't do anythin', did I?”

If one reflects back—as Crane clearly intended one should—from this point across the whole of the preceding story, he sees that this is not an appendage upon the tale: it provides another point of view. Though it has not been popular to do so, one might have read the story of the Swede as one does the stories of so many of the characters of Stephen Crane's great contemporary, Edwin Arlington Robinson. Perhaps the Swede was a kind of combination of Minniver Cheevy and Richard Cory. Or, of course, as it has been most popular to show, the Swede's story might be one of symbolic naturalism. The final section of “The Blue Hotel” provides a third perspective, one without which the story is far less significant than the great work Crane gave us. It seems hardly necessary to detail all the implications of that multiplicity. No criticism of the story, however, can finally be taken seriously which confines itself to less than the full complexity of its perspectives.

IV

“The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel” are the sort of intense stories of masculine adventure, action, tragedy, and irony which it is generally agreed that Stephen Crane did supremely well. There has been too little tendency to grant him also the power to deal with the homely, domestic, and commonplace tragedies of society and the ironic examination of manners which have characterized American realism at its most typical and best. It was toward this which he must have grown had he matured into an achieved mastery of the novel in its traditional forms and concerns. It was this toward which he must have matured if he were to have matched Robinson or Joyce in his own way. But there has been too easy an assumption that, because the financially desperate and physically dying Crane of his last eighteen months obviously declined in creative power, his genius had actually preceded his body in death, his talent been burned out.

In the premises, of course, no such assumption is necessary. And actually Crane showed in some of the later writings great promise of proceeding toward the perceptions and problems necessary to his maturing. Such development may be seen in “The Monster,” in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and in the best of the Whilomville Stories. In these for the first time in Crane one is moving toward a dense, adult, demonstratedly complicit society. The great vein of the major novelists, the novel of manners, is beginning to open. Crane's is a world not only of young men and children but of grown men and grown, non-chivalric, and comprehensible women. It is not surprising that Crane turned to the exploitation of the genre of the boy book which had been developed by the American realists. But it was less to be expected that he should now take up the theme which Twain and Howells had prepared for Crane's generation—especially Cather, Anderson, and Masters—the theme best labeled by Sinclair Lewis's original title for Main Street, “The Village Virus.” In Whilomville and in Yellow Sky the terror and the beauty of the American small town's security and boredom and vulnerability are as beautifully portrayed as they would be by any of the specialists to come.

If he did not temperamentally suspect it before he went, Stephen Crane spotted the secret of the romantic West the moment he got there. And he told it delightfully in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” The secret which Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington would not let themselves believe was not only that the Wild West of romance did not exist but it never had. Natty Bumppo and all his descendants had been beaux idéals, privileges of the romancer. Romance was always somewhere, sometime else. “This ain't Wyoming, ner none of them places,” says a “deeply scandalized” cowboy in “The Blue Hotel,” “This is Nebrasker.” The best the frontier could offer were the raw, hoodlum tests of courage of “A Man and Some Others” or “Horses—One Dash.” Courage was always splendid—but what tested if might be evil, stupid, or merely absurd. The reality of the West, of the frontier, is the exorcism of chimeras like Scratchy Wilson by the mere advance of social realities like the marriage of the marshal to a commonplace little waitress from San Anton'. The proper mode of dealing with the theme was comic, that of social comedy, and Crane hit it perfectly in his story.

The same sense of social reality dominates the non-mythic stories of initiation which Crane told of the boys in Whilomville. The best of these—“The Stove,” “The Knife,” or “His New Mittens”—throw a good deal of light on “The Monster,” the major work Crane imagined from the same setting. Here Crane begins with what at first looks like a fairly ordinary Stephen Crane concern for the nature, conditions, quality, and fate of heroism. But he proceeds within a uniquely dense web of multiple characters and social reference. The compact descriptions of the substance and quality of the life of the village in its many social levels are brilliantly effective. The accuracy of Crane's sense of all sorts and conditions of men, women, and children is unexpected in the author of the almost abstracted characters of Maggie and The Red Badge. Crane never lets go of this exploration in a new, social context of his themes of courage and heroism; but, by the time one is half way through the story, he has become aware that the title is as essential and as pregnant as that of a poem by George Herbert.

Briefly, the story is that of Dr. Trescott, whose Negro stableman is horribly burned, mutilated, and reduced to idiocy in rescuing Trescott's son from a fire. Whilomville's first reaction to this, when it thinks Henry Johnson is going to die, is a sensational, romantic exaltation of his heroism. Trescott labors, with his own heroic devotion, to save Henry's life. But he cannot save his mind or his face. Gradually the sentiment of the town swings to revulsion against the poor derelict. Trescott, however, will neither forget nor cancel his debt of admiration and gratitude. Hysteria mounts. By the end of the tale, Trescott is suffering professional boycott and social ostracism for sheltering a monster.

The question becomes, Who is the Monster? And by the time one is done pondering the elements and implications of scene and action, he comes to a chilling conclusion. Everybody is. This is true in some sense for every individual character, at every social level, in the village. And it is true for the village as a whole. In fact, by the end the village itself, especially in its most respectable and dominant society, is most particularly the monster. Crane has never had to editorialize, but the indictment is colder, more furiously returned than in any comparable work. “The Monster” cries out for a more adequate criticism than it has received. But Berenson thought “The Monster” was “finer even than Ibsen's Enemy of the People, because here the people do their best to ruin a man who, out of loyalty and humanity, refuses to discard a person whom they cannot abide in their midst—well written as well as thought out.”⁵

V

Like pluralistic views of Crane's approaches to life and literature, appreciation of this latter development of his imagination spoils the harmony of a simple, unitary view of what he was and could do. It also challenges the notion of a burned out Crane whose death was no real loss to American letters. On the contrary, one remains convinced that the loss of Stephen Crane was a real tragedy to the development of our literature, our culture. A. J. Liebling put it well: “I think, myself, that Crane might have written long novels of an originality as hard to imagine, in retrospect, as Maggie and The Red Badge would have been to anticipate.”⁶ Among the men, Crane's death and then that of Frank Norris left his generation of novelists reduced essentially to Theodore Dreiser. Whatever one thinks of Dreiser's genius, it is clear that it could have profited immensely from the context of real contemporaries as gifted as Norris and Crane. And I, for one, think that Crane's gifts ranged widely beyond and above those of Dreiser. The tragedy of Crane's early silencing, quite apart from any element in it personal to Crane, is that of the death of any gifted young person. It is the tragedy of the unperformed, the unrealized, the never to be known.

In the end the real power of Stephen Crane is in awareness, the power to register and to make the reader see what he saw. Regardless of qualifiers, of what the vision saw, he is supremely a visionist. The one greatest unfairness dealt him has been the repeated implication that it was romantically himself he was trying to make the reader see. On the contrary, the essence of his art was to give, in his characters, persons with eyes and to set them in turn within perspectives which would let readers see both very sharply and complexly around them and so to feel life as Crane felt it. That is true of every great artist. It is equally true of them all that, having felt their power, one must decide for himself how far to accept it. Crane's vision was preternaturally “modern” in its progression to irony. Accept it or not, no honestly hospitable reader can deny either the power of its artistic transmission or, therefore, the youthful yet permanent greatness of Stephen Crane.

Notes

1. Work, IV, p. xii.

2. Work, IV, p. xi.

3. Berenson, p. 23.

4. Stanley B. Greenfield, “The Unmistakable Stephen Crane,” PMLA LXXIII (December 1958): 562 - 72, and Joseph Satterwhite, “Stephen Crane's ‘The Blue Hotel’: The Failure of Understanding,” Modern Fiction Studies II (Winter 1956 - 1957): 238 - 41.

5. Berenson, p. 19.

6. A. J. Liebling, “The Dollars Damned Him,” New Yorker, August 5, 1961, pp. 48 - 72.